In some parts of the world. people are likely to plan for the future, while in others people are more likely to live in the moment. In some societies people prefer more personal space; in others they are comfortable being in close quarters in public.
There are a number of theories about where cultural differences between societies come from. In a growing number of cases, researchers have found that human culture an be shaped by key features of the environments in which people live.
Ecology includes basic physical and social characteristics of the environment—such factors as how rich a place is in resources, how common infectious(传染性的) diseases are, how heavily populated a place is, and how much threat there is to human safety. Variables like temperature and the availability of water can be key ecological features.
For over 200 societies, our lab at Arizona State University gathered comprehensive data on nine key features of ecology--such as rainfall, temperature, infectious disease and natural resources —and dozens of aspects of
human cultural variation--including values, strength of social norms(社会规范), personality, motivation and institutional characteristics. With this information, we created the Eco Cultural Dataset.
Using this dataset, we were able to generate a range of estimates for just how mach of human cultural variation can explained by ecology.
We ran a series of statistical models looking at the relationship between our ecological variables and each of the 66 cultural outcomes we tracked. For each of the cultural outcomes, we calculated the average amount of the cultural diversity across societies that was explained by this combination of nine different ecological factors. We found that nearly 20% of cultural variation was explained by the combination of these ecological features.
Importantly, our statistical estimates take into account common issues in cross-cultural research. There will likely be unmeasured similarities between societies with shared historical roots and traditions.
Ecology isn't the only reason people around the world think and behave differently. But our work suggests that, at least in part, our environments shape our cultures.
