November 22, 2011

Why East Asians are so unconscientious and disagreeable: Is it agriculture?

Big thanks to commenter Miguel Madeira who linked to an article on global differences in personality by Schmitt et al. (2007). These kinds of papers pop up now and again, and it doesn't conflict with the gist that I got from earlier ones. This paper has much better graphs and tables, though.

There's a lot that could be covered, but I'll stick to clearing up a major misconception about East Asian personalities. Westerners think the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have a far stronger work ethic than we do, and are so much more agreeable -- they certainly don't seem as violent and confrontational as we are. Let's go straight to the data.

You can browse the free PDF linked above to see a clearer picture, but here is the Cliff's Notes version. The top graph shows Agreeableness scores by global region, with East Asia on the far right, and the bottom is Conscientiousness. For now don't try reading the other regions, just focus on how East Asia is in a league of its own.


Those are 95% confidence intervals, so there is almost no overlap between the East Asian distribution and the others for Agreeableness. For Conscientiousness, it is not even close -- they might as well come from Mars.

The countries in East Asia include Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Just about all countries are represented by college students. Given that college admissions is a proxy for IQ, and given that East Asians have the highest national IQs, the college student respondents there are closer to the average person, whereas in Africa they are totally unrepresentative (many of the African surveys weren't even given in the local language, suggesting they show what the educated elite is like). In the paper's Table 5 you can see scores by country rather than region, and all four East Asian countries are extremely low in both traits, so it's not like one of them is ruining it for the rest.

When I first saw results like these I was a bit puzzled too, but then I reflected on my extensive contact with East Asians over the years, and it didn't seem so odd. They aren't violent and don't get in your face, so we assume they're agreeable. In reality, they are autistic or misanthropic, they just don't let it show. But they have trouble making lots of friends in school, and the males either cannot relate to girls or have a bitter hatred of them, so that they remain virgins for life. I can't think of another group who showed such autism and misanthropy, and the graph above tells me I shouldn't bother looking.

As for their abysmal levels of conscientiousness, again we look at them and see them getting good grades and decent jobs, which you can't do without hard work. But that doesn't mean they have a solid work ethic or have learned the value of hard work. Those are values that you have internalized and that allow you to work independently toward achievement -- when tempted to cheat the rules or give up when the going gets tough, you feel compelled to play fair or keep slogging through it.

East Asians have evolved the opposite system -- they have outsourced all of that behavioral monitoring to some authority, such as their Tiger Mother parents, a council of elders, a bureaucracy, an emperor, or whatever. When they feel tempted to cheat or give up, they are not very capable of correcting themselves -- that authority monitor has to swoop in, shout in their face to play fair or persevere, and they do as they're told. They can still get things done, but not on their own, only by total deference to an authority with their interests in mind.

Here are some colorful real-world reminders of how lazy East Asians are when left to themselves:

There are millions of young Chinese boys that love video games and play them so much that the Chinese government enacted strict rules that limited playing time.

These rules impose penalties on players who spend more than three hours a day by reducing the abilities of their characters and any players that spend more than five hours simply are forced to take a five-hour break before they can return to a game.

Video gaming got so out of hand that the Chinese government opened video game addiction clinics and while it sounds extreme to me, these clinics used electro-shock treatments to zap players out of their addiction.

And

Asian countries, such as South Korea, are recognizing video game addiction as an urgent public health matter, with several deaths having occurred in internet cafes, apparently as a result of blood clots occurring during prolonged sitting at computers.

And

The IMRC found evidence that more than 27% of youth ages 12-18 in Japan were experiencing such medical problems as periodic headaches and fatigue, blurred vision, loss in appetite, and even clinical depression, all directly linked to extensive use of video games.

And

A South Korean couple who let their baby starve to death while raising a "virtual child" on the internet were given prison sentences on Friday.

The 41-year-old husband and his wife, 25, were arrested in March for leaving their daughter to die while they spent hours at internet cafes.

Not that Americans are immune to screwing around in pointless activities (like keeping a blog). Still, the total lack of personal drive in East Asians means they'll get sucked into zombifying activities to a far worse degree. Westerners will get restless sooner and feel like doing something more fun and productive.

It isn't just the lower tiers of Asian society that are like that. In his book Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray details and discusses how small of an impact East Asians have had in the arts, sciences, and applied fields like technology and medicine, compared to Western Eurasia. And remember they've got higher average IQs than other regions, so it is clearly more of a personality or temperament difference.

And not just openness or curiosity -- although that's bad enough there (see the paper, which shows East Asia in a league of its own in scoring low for Openness to Experience). To achieve something impressive, you can't rely on some external monitor to constantly browbeat you into thinking up new things, getting the small tasks done, and so on. You need an internal stick-to-it-iveness to blaze a trail.

All of this I see as an adaptation to intensive agriculture, the only thing that so strongly sets them apart from the rest of the world. According to the paper, the Ukraine actually resembles East Asia in personality. They were the breadbasket of Eastern Europe and had a heightened sense of themselves as agriculturalists, in stark contrast to the nomadic pastoralists from the Steppe who have regularly overrun their region.

Agriculture always leads to a hierarchical state, sometimes even a gigantic empire as in China. Part of this change is that there's now a stable class of bureaucrats who can monitor and enforce social norms. So people outsource morality -- that is, the regulation of social interactions -- to parents, experts, or whoever. This move toward amorality shows up in lowered Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. It doesn't mean they'll turn into violent hotheads, just that they've selected the moral lobe of their brain to shrink, since someone else will make them behave properly, not they themselves. That selects for an enlarged obedience lobe in the brain.

Pastoralists are the opposite, and indeed the Middle East and Balkans all score very highly on Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. It's not as crazy as it sounds, once we remember that Agreeableness and non-violence aren't the same thing. Persians do not have a free-floating level of misanthropy -- in fact, they are very hospitable, people-loving people. But if you get on their bad side, they feel the need to settle the score. It is the Culture of Honor, not the Culture of Autism and Misanthropy.

Lacking large, stable, hierarchical states, pastoralists have to rely on the Culture of Honor to settle disputes and the Culture of Hospitality to provide mutual aid. It also prevents them from outsourcing morality to bureaucrats -- animal herders are the prototypical rugged individualists, although they also rely on the hospitality of strangers when they get stranded. They have to monitor and motivate themselves. It is no accident that the major moral systems that have spread across the globe came from pastoralists -- those of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their off-shoots (pagan Europe, Zoroastrianism, and Vedic Hinduism), and later and more successfully Christianity and Islam. Agriculturalists, whether the Northeast Asians, Ancient Egyptians, or Aztecs, never came close to exporting a moral system that broadly.

To wrap up with a thought from Nassim Taleb, I think this underscores how fragile a super-specialized system is, particularly one that involves so much outsourcing. It looks more stable and efficient in the short term, but it is much less robust to shocks. Again just look at video games -- people in the Balkans and Middle East have access to video games, internet cafes, and so on, just as the Chinese do, and the wealthier ones have at least as good access as the Koreans and Japanese do. Yet they aren't dropping like flies from video game addiction, porn addiction, etc.

Video games are like a new infectious disease that tests how truly robust the Asian system of behavioral monitoring is. If the Tiger Mother method were just as good as the self-motivating and self-monitoring method, then it should have resisted the infiltration of video games much better than it has. Instead it has unmasked the deplorable laziness of Asians when the Tiger Mother can't be breathing down their necks, or cut off their internet connection, etc. They sink into a mire of joyless addictions, whose depths the rest of the world cannot fathom.

52 comments:

  1. Being married to a woman from Hong Kong, I can tell you first had that this study is true. Outwardly, Chinese women seem very agreeable; behind-closed-doors, they are totally different. Drama to the highest degree; total lack of trying to expand their horizons; an outstanding lack of intellectual curiosity; rigid style of thinking; controlling, etc. They make great worker drones, however.

    The whole thing of being overtaken by China is a paper tiger. Yes, they are smart. When you get to really know them, they have the quality of biting on tinfoil.

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  2. "To wrap up with a thought from Nassim Taleb, I think this underscores how fragile a super-specialized system is, particularly one that involves so much outsourcing. It looks more stable and efficient in the short term, but it is much less robust to shocks."

    How can you say this with a straight face about a civilization with the longest continuous history of any on Earth? A civilization into which even (pastoralist) conquerors readily assimilated?

    And yes, there have been video game related deaths, but Asians don't have a monopoly on that.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_addiction#Notable_deaths

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  3. This relies a lot on personality profiles of extreme gamers. It's tough to conjecture on what the personality profiles of gamers who spend a lot of time gaming is.

    Like I said in my comment to your earlier post, videogames may simply be very addictive to conscientious (read organized and self controlled) and introverted people by rewarding that type of behaviour massively in ways that are out of touch with real life. Videogames are not like very spontaneous activity like partying or getting drunk, which conscientious people would hate, which is why partying is a better test for low conscientiousness (although, yes, extraversion confuses matters). The Chinese Gold Farmer is a funny stereotype, and is not a positive one towards Chinese as immigrants or in making a great society, but not one that seems to indicate low Conscientiousness.

    Even playing so long on videogames that you pass out or whatever is not necessarily a sign of low conscientiousness - obsessive compulsive disorder has positive correlations with conscientiousness. TV's Mr Monk is a recognisable continuation of what we would think of as conscientiousness. If people can end up having to touch every rail as a pathological extension of conscientiousness, I wouldn't be too surprised if they felt like they *had* to have the gold super armour or high score or collect every fucking Xbox Live (ironically named) "achievement" or whatever. Videogame obsession may be more like obsessive overexercising until you pass out or anorexia than it is like excessive partying.

    It's very tempting to fall into the lame Conservative (speaking as a self identified Conservative) bias of going "Well, if anyone fails, they're just slack and not good", but failing can actually very easily be the result of being too conscientious, just conscientious about the wrong things, things that don't matter, not simplifying. It's better to be conscientious, but you have to pick the right targets for your conscientiousness.

    As for data:

    http://mact.jesskilby.com/kilby_whatyouplay_salford0607.pdf

    This is the quickest "study" I could find that includes personality profiles based around the Big 5 (with a bemusing rebranding) and breakdowns of hours spent gaming. But it frankly is hardly a peer reviewed paper and the sample size is 61.

    The 30 hour per week gamers in this one self rated as having a higher frequency of organized and conscientious personalities than the 1 hour per week gamers, and appear more sociable, but do show highly neurotic egocentric and disagreeable personalities. But the significance of that I don't know.

    Shame there is not a general and large survey that asks how many hours per week people spend playing videogames and has a set of Big 5 variables. The GSS has some data on gaming, but does not disaggregate computer games from other casual computer activities and doesn't have any reliable personality data.

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  4. Outwardly, Chinese women seem very agreeable; behind-closed-doors, they are totally different. Drama to the highest degree; total lack of trying to expand their horizons;

    "Translation: My Asian wife isn't "open" to trying my weird sexual fetishes"?

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  5. In anime, we frequently see a caucasian character paired up with an east asian character, as, for example, Yuri and Kei in Dirty Pair, and similarly in Project A-ko

    The animators fearlessly have each of them act out their well known racial stereotypes, whereupon we see East Asians depicted not as being less conscientious and agreeable than Caucasians, but rather conscientious and agreeable in very different ways.

    These differences might well result in European measures of conscientiousness and agreeableness suffering from cultural bias.

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  6. Zero Tolerance Man's blog got hacked, but he has started a new blog at:

    American Woman Bitch by the Zero Tolerance Man

    Zero Tolerance Man has the most powerful anti-feminist blog on the net, because he is directly attacking feminist women and showing what worthless cunts they truly are.

    Here is from his "Why Did I create this website" page:

    Because most American women are worthless toilet bowl turds. They are nothing but parasites feeding off the hard work of men. Are men better than women in the USA? ABSOLUTELY. The only thing American women are good for is nagging, complaining, and spending men’s money. Most are not even worth fucking. They suck in bed and thus, have absolutely no value to the good men of the USA.

    Please send a link to this blog to all your friends.

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  7. I noticed Japanese websites are outwardly more stylish but very insular. It's like the rest of the world barely exists. They're the ultimate introspectivists.

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  8. Agreed, aphron; I cannot picture China as a world power. I can't try to imagine sometime in the distant future, Chinese soldiers occupying territories and dealing with rambunctious, honor-obsessed, "in-your-face" type peoples such as Africans, Arabs, or Persians. (Seriously, just look at East Asian immigrant and African-American relations!) A Chinese occupying force will either give up easily, or, you would get something like the WWII Japanese Empire -- brutality to the extreme, which will result in intense local hatred that will last generations.

    Part of Ancient Roman and British global success was their tendency to allow the conquered nations to keep their traditions & language whilst teaching the locals the new language, allowing military participation, and hiring natives as local lawmakers --- I can't see an East Asian military power doing any of that.

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  9. Hi,

    I have a question.

    What do you think about academic "honor codes" and what they signify about the culture.

    My undergraduate college had what I thought was a strange one. There were no proctors in examinations. The proctors would wait outside the examination hall. Also, no assigned seating.

    This modification was added in the 1920s.

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  10. Do you know which races/cultures are most likely to cheat on tests?

    Or cheat on their husbands/wives?

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  11. «I can't try to imagine sometime in the distant future, Chinese soldiers occupying territories and dealing with rambunctious, honor-obsessed, "in-your-face" type peoples such as Africans, Arabs, or Persians. »

    Xinjiang-Uighur and Inner Mongolia?

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  12. It is no accident that the major moral systems that have spread across the globe came from pastoralists -- those of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their off-shoots (pagan Europe, Zoroastrianism, and Vedic Hinduism), and later and more successfully Christianity and Islam. Agriculturalists, whether the Northeast Asians, Ancient Egyptians, or Aztecs, never came close to exporting a moral system that broadly.

    Pastoralists spread, agriculturalists don't. Pastoral moral-religious systems tend to spread by conquest - e.g. Indo-European and Islam as the chief example. When conquest is lacking, penetration tends to be lacking.

    Exceptions that did not require conquest to spread moral-religious systems were:

    a) the early spread of Christianity in Europe. But that was spread from more agriculturalist types to more pastoralist types - Romans to other Europeans for example - and within an existing agricultural society - within the Roman Empire, comparable to the spread of religious trends within the Han Empire.
    b) Buddhism to East Asia - spread largely by mobile Central Asian nomads to East Asian societies, albeit not by conquest, after they absorbed it from the more agriculturalist Silk Road societies. The pastoralist mobility advantage is in evidence.

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  13. "total lack of trying to expand their horizons;"

    It's striking how Asians never read, other than textbooks to cram for a test. They aren't people people, and they aren't very verbal, so that means novels will be out. But even picture books on architecture or painting or something up their alley -- still no interest. Truly a bizarre race.

    "How can you say this with a straight face about a civilization with the longest continuous history of any on Earth? A civilization into which even (pastoralist) conquerors readily assimilated?"

    I didn't say there would be civilizational collapse, but rather a dystopia where civil society effectively no longer exists, where everyone is an isolated drone feeding their addictions all day long.

    "And yes, there have been video game related deaths, but Asians don't have a monopoly on that."

    This is like the stupid argument that "blacks don't have a monopoly on crime and using welfare." Asians are obviously greatly more predisposed to it -- just look at them.

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  14. "What do you think about academic "honor codes" and what they signify about the culture."

    I don't have a good feel for that off the top of my head. I would guess that a lot changed when the higher ed bubble got going around 1980, radically transforming what the average student was like.

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  15. "Pastoralists spread, agriculturalists don't. Pastoral moral-religious systems tend to spread by conquest - e.g. Indo-European and Islam as the chief example. When conquest is lacking, penetration tends to be lacking."

    I'll accept that for language, where the meaning-sound pairs are arbitrary. So, once an Indo-European language takes hold by sheer conquest, why bother switching "back" or to some other language?

    But moral systems aren't arbitrary like that. Islam spread way beyond areas of pastoralist conquest, like sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia.

    When there is only contact, not conquest, the flow of moral influence almost always goes one way, from herders to farmers. You already mentioned the spread of Buddhism through East Asia, plus the adoption of Christianity by the Romans, or Islam in Indonesia.

    If the pastoralists' systems weren't better in some way, then when they inevitably leave town to roam and pillage somewhere else, the local farmers will slough off the foreign moral code and go back to life as before, maybe preserving some really superficial stuff through syncretism.

    But the big moral systems spread by herders have taken much deeper root than that. It's a useful "technology" that pastoralists are much more likely to invent, but that agriculturalists too have a good use for, and will hang on to it once the nomads leave.

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  16. Dude, the Japanese are some of the biggest readers in the world, way more than Americans (and no, not anime, but real novels and books on every intellectual topic under the sun). The Japanese have also produced some great novelists historically, and Murakami is one of the best novelists writing today, and he is very human and sympathetic in his sensibility.

    Much of what you say applies most strongly to the Chinese.

    You do realize, of course, that Ancient China was an extremely literary civilization? The focus of the arts for the Chinese, the focus of culture really, were literary and historical texts. I have always found that a bit weird considering their average verbal IQ.

    As for the high IQs of Asians, it is mostly in spatial IQ, so that along is enough to explain their lack of intellectual accomplishment. Plus, there is a lot about creativity we do no understand yet, and there is strong evidence that it is very much an ability and not a personality feature, so it is a bit premature to say Asian lack of creativity is a personality thing.

    All in all, your post is a bit of a hodgepodge. Some of your conclusions too extreme.

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  17. How did you become anti-Asian? I thought you were neutral/slightly positive before? Aren't you part Asian?

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  18. This post had an unusal 'temper-tantrum' feel to it. Not like the normal agnostic...

    Did some Asian guy cut you off? Are ur part-Asian relatives getting on your nerves?

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  19. Are these self-reports? I wouldn't be too surprised if the most conscientious people think they're the least conscientious: 'oh no, I forgot to alphabetize my phone book today, I'm such a slacker!'

    You've probably got some sort of self-esteem variable where the more chaotic cultures have people who think they're great.

    Control: if you have European results, how do, say, Italy and Germany stack up?

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  20. It's striking how Asians never read, other than textbooks to cram for a test. They aren't people people, and they aren't very verbal, so that means novels will be out. But even picture books on architecture or painting or something up their alley -- still no interest. Truly a bizarre race.

    What about their visual intelligence? A lot of the Asian people that I see dress very fashionably. Don't they do well in fashion as well?

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  21. But moral systems aren't arbitrary like that. Islam spread way beyond areas of pastoralist conquest, like sub-Saharan Africa and Indonesia.

    Does it really spread that far beyond the expansion zone? In South East Asia and the areas of Africa that extended beyond conquest, in those areas the affect was through by expansiveness by traders. E.g. from wikpedia's article on "The spread, although at first introduced through Arab Muslim traders, continued to saturate through the Indonesian people as local rulers and royalty began to adopt the religion, subsequently their subjects would mirror their conversion. The spread of Islam continued as Muslim traders married the local women, with some of the wealthier traders marrying into the families of the ruling elite." Islam was a connection into a trade network for the elite that then percolated down through elite power and probably some form of dhimmitude.

    It still seems more like these are the results of pastoralists and semi-pastoralists being expansive and personally adventurous (going forth and trading) and struck by missionary impulses (all rather than working through intermediaries), which is true everywhere and an advantage at least somewhere, rather than being particularly more convincing.

    It also seems like the relatively atheistic (prosaic?) and secular orientation of East Asians (and other agriculturalists?) might be a confound when we think about them spreading religious or moral ideas ideas. That seems like a big difference between them and other relatively proximate populations, at least today, and it seems harder to be persuasive from one end of this spectrum to the other. Relatively weak verbal skills and an introverted orientation would also prevent spreading your ideas, even if you had taken the adventurous step of living amongst foreigners in the first place.

    This is probably a quibble, but where there is not conquest or population and replacement, even if we accept your idea, it seems more like at least as much a picture where pastoralists tend to adopt and disseminate moral and religious systems pioneered by mixed farmer-pastoralists (from India, from the Levantine region). That's a point for more mixed populations (herders and farmers mixing their genes), like I guess Europe and the Middle East and against either herders or farmers in isolation.

    The pure herders seem to have suffered far more attrition of their existing moral systems than the pure farmers, with the flow from pure herders from mixed and more sedentry neighbours being one way. If we compare Chinese before Buddhism, Christianity and Islam to steppe people before Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, we'd see a much bigger extinction of prior moral systems in the latter, although the steppe people do seem to have adopted arguably the most herder of those three religions. Even to the point where the formal religious extinction amongst them is comparable to hunter gatherers. If farming were linearly bad for moral sense, that wouldn't happen (maybe you could explain it with a sort of lame Jared Diamond thing whereby pure herder populations don't spread moral ideas because their small population size somehow prevents them pioneering the technology.

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  22. Your posts on Asians are really interesting because I've only heard the view that Asians are intelligent, hardworking, family oriented, and generally superior people.

    I've always thought that Chinese women could be rude or mean or unfriendly or emotionless, but I thought I was the only one that minded that kind of thing. I thought it had to do with their favorable position on the marriage market.

    I always thought Asian men were more friendly than their women, which I attributed to their being men and to their having an unfavorable position on the marriage market.

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  23. So people outsource morality -- that is, the regulation of social interactions -- to parents, experts, or whoever.

    Also, how do you think arranged marriages fit into this scheme? Are agricultural peoples more likely to have arranged marriages than pastoral peoples?

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  24. Asians aren't more "unconscientious and disagreeable" than others. Rather they are very self-critical, which is why they come out looking bad on personalty surveys.

    IF they had added "are you good at math" asians would have come in last too.

    Further, you are wrong about work ethic as well. The Japanese work the longest hours of any developed nation (USA is #2). Their concientiousness is shown by the fact they make the most reliable electrionic products.

    South Korean students also study in school about 10-11 hours a day every day, including most of the summer.

    Ruthlessness and lack of conscientiousness is more of a Chinese trait, especially among the upper class, but likely more a result of a dysfunctional culture, as I have not seen it in Chinese Americans or poor Chinese immigrants.

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  25. This is like the stupid argument that "blacks don't have a monopoly on crime and using welfare." Asians are obviously greatly more predisposed to it -- just look at them.

    Just count up the deaths on Wikipedia. 6 for all of East Asia. 15 for the US and Canada. In both per capita and absolute terms, North America is the outright leader in video game related deaths.

    You might then try to differentiate the deaths. Asians tend to play themselves to death more often, while non-Asians tend to kill others in rage. Which would you say is more conscientious and disagreeable?

    It's striking how Asians never read, other than textbooks to cram for a test.

    I don't know which Asians you know, but all my Asian friends from college read both for entertainment and to gain knowledge. Sure, I might have a meaninglessly biased sample, but you used the word "never." Why use an absolute when it's blatantly and obviously wrong other than as a debate tactic to distract from an otherwise weak argument?

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  26. So, are the most agreeable and conscientious also the most polite?

    WASPs are very polite, right? Ethnic whites aren't correct? Aren't the Irish supposed to be disagreeable?

    I've always heard that Middle Easterners have very good manners.

    Among Asians, the Japanese are very polite, no? But the Chinese aren't. How does this square with the Japanese scoring high on the psychoticism scale? (Koreans are also polite, I think, or at any rate, they are more polite than the Chinese).

    Pakistanis are also considered polite. North Indians (like Punjabis) are considered more polished than South Indians.

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  27. This post is probably meant for you.

    http://mypostingcareer.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4163-plagiarized-effortpost-on-studyasians/

    "You have that backwards. East Asians underperform at the higher level selections relative to credentials, for the same reason that their absolute performance is higher on the earlier and lower-level metrics (such as SAT, grades, HS graduation rate, college admission results). This is unavoidable no matter whether E.Asians have more or less ability than whites, as long as they tend to "work harder" at any given level of ability."

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  28. The Agricultural system in Europe was vastly different. Far smaller, basically small-holding, disaster if you personally did not bring in enough food, also a lot of individual fishing. That selected for a totally different KIND of agricultural personality. One far more independent, distrusting of elites (who were hostile and only took things from you never helped you out). Productivity aid from the moldboard plow also helped in this regard, unlike China a small holder could not only feed his family but export excess food to someone else for other things.

    This leads to martial arts. Europe USED to have lots of them, based on staff and knife and unarmed fighting. Only Savate really remains, but there were a whole host of them along with formal sword and pike and bow schools. Europe got a lot safer quicker (basically after Napoleon's era) and so they died out everywhere but France. In Asia they continued, as inter-personal violence escalated.

    Read Stilwell in China by Tuchman. The portrait is of huge amounts of interpersonal violence on a daily level, far more than any described by American frontier writers.

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  29. Related?


    Throughout my twenties, I proudly turned away from one institution of American life after another (for instance, a steady job), though they had already long since turned away from me. Academe seemed another kind of death�but then again, I had a transcript marred by as many F’s as A’s. I had come from a culture that was the middle path incarnate. And yet for some people, there can be no middle path, only transcendence or descent into the abyss.



    I was descending into the abyss.



    All this was well deserved. No one had any reason to think I was anything or anyone. And yet I felt entitled to demand this recognition. I knew this was wrong and impermissible; therefore I had to double down on it. The world brings low such people. It brought me low. I haven’t had health insurance in ten years. I didn’t earn more than $12,000 for eight consecutive years. I went three years in the prime of my adulthood without touching a woman. I did not produce a masterpiece.

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  30. How do you compare rates of getting depressed and dropping out?

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  31. Part of Ancient Roman and British global success was their tendency to allow the conquered nations to keep their traditions & language whilst teaching the locals the new language, allowing military participation, and hiring natives as local lawmakers --- I can't see an East Asian military power doing any of that.

    Never heard of the Mongols? Not exactly the poster boys for east Asians, but they fit the model you describe to a "t." They're the historical model for an empire that doesn't give a damn what the subjects do as long as they get their cut, in fact.

    They were so non-interfering that they left no real mark on the world, in fact.

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  32. This leads to martial arts. Europe USED to have lots of them, based on staff and knife and unarmed fighting. Only Savate really remains, but there were a whole host of them along with formal sword and pike and bow schools. Europe got a lot safer quicker (basically after Napoleon's era) and so they died out everywhere but France. In Asia they continued, as inter-personal violence escalated.

    I see this totally differently. Asians kept their MA traditions because they're into that kind of sempai-cohai crapola. You know, you must grind for 20 years before I teach you bla-bla technique. And, "I know bla-bla tecnique." Credentialism: "oh, you know bla-bla technique?" *quivers and bows in submission without a fight*.

    Meanwhile, westerners moved on from old techniques and left them dead. Who needs to worry so much about H2H fighting when everyone has a sword? Who needs to worry so much about sword-fighting when everyone has a gun? Innovation and adaptation vs. credentialism and book-learnin'.

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  33. One point of confusion is, how does Tiger Parenting fit into all this? Doesn't Tiger Parenting require conscientiousness on the part of the Tiger Parent?

    I get what you're saying that if the Tiger Cub or whatever needs a Tiger Parent to stay on task, then that's a sign of low conscientiousness.

    Related, via Steve Sailer:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2099860/Father-Chinese-boy-He-Tide-pictured-running-nearly-naked-New-York-gives-extraordinary-interview.html

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  34. This is laughable, and mere opinion, nothing biological anyway. China has contributed more for civilization than anyone else during their prime, than the Europeans continued on. Asians are conscientious, but many are very logical, hence it may seem they are cold, I guess we should call Republicans in the United States unconscientious for wanting to deport illegal immigrants from the country right?? As for curiosity, that depends on the individual.

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  35. I believe the author is quite correct with traits of the Chinese.

    The Han Chinese aren't exactly homogenous, and there is one particular group of Chinese known as the Hakka (the guest people) who exude warmness, openness and agreeableness more so than other group of Chinese, because they were a gypsy and nomadic group, bumbling around the country from one region to another without any established roots. They are believed to be descended from the extinct Xiongnu tribe, another pastorial, nomadic group from the steppes of Northern Asia related to the Huns.

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  36. Asian males have a reputation for having zero personality. It seems to be hard-earned. The MPC thread someone here linked to has some good posts arguing that Asian intelligence is overrated by their striverish behaviors (which do not spring from conscientiousness but from authoritarian pressure--hence the rampant cheating).

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  37. btw none of the Asian cheerleaders (i.e. Asians) commenting here have a plausible excuse for why Asians rate low on conscientiousness or agreeableness. "They're just too hard on themselves!" Yeah, okay, Elliot Rodgers.

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  38. Re-visiting this post, something else stands out about how to tie these "puzzling" results into other well established facts about Asians. They are the most neotenous, or child-like -- short, unmuscular, baby-faced, slow to wrinkle, late to reach sexual maturity, and so on and so forth.

    One of Rushton's main lines of evidence about r-K selection and race differences was detailing the many ways in which whites were quick to mature and Asians slow.

    Well, what personality profile would we expect for a race that is the most childlike? Diligent and agreeable, or lazy and "fuck the outside world"? Able to function on their own, or only with the constant berating of their Tiger Mother?

    We see the same thing among the Millennials, who are like an Asian-ified group of whites. Slow to make friends or go on dates, shackled to gizmos, bratty, grinding, stone-faced, addicted, and awkward. But they're less violent and promiscuous, so we have to overlook all of the rest.

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  39. I've never looked too deeply into the race & IQ lit, on a study-by-study basis. It's an interesting idea, that their supposedly higher IQs may just reflect grinding. I know at least some of those race & IQ studies use tests that are hard to prep for, like the Raven's Matrices.

    But then maybe they're just the extreme form of the "Flynn Effect," which he attributed to Westerners' growing familiarity with the very concept of taking some stupid standardized test, the aspects that are common to all standard tests that make you familiar with and less frazzled during even "novel" tests, feeling motivated to sit through it and give it your best, to prep as much as possible beforehand, and so on.

    As for why, even if they were about on par with whites on average, they still fail to excel at the extremes -- there's the personality traits above (and low Openness to Experience, i.e. curiosity).

    I haven't looked into the studies on their lower variance in IQ, but that wouldn't surprise me. They have lower variance on every trait -- they're so damn similar to one another. They don't come in lighter or darker colors like Europeans do, or like Africans do. Skin, hair, eyes -- all identical (in Northeast Asia). Skull shapes don't vary like the Europeans do, where some have rounded and others elongated heads. Facial features -- little variety from bulbous to narrow, smashed-in to projecting. They're too hard to distinguish one from the other.

    IQ could be the same way too, although I can't cite anything to that effect. Nothing I've read and digested, at any rate.

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  40. "We see the same thing among the Millennials, who are like an Asian-ified group of whites."

    would you say Millenials are more neotenous on average?

    "low on conscientiousness or agreeableness"

    Both those traits seem pretty low in Europeans also. I think maybe what you want to look at is higher neuroticism.

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  41. Aren't you part east asian or something? I'm not one to really throw around accusations of "self-hatred" in these discussions, but it's really kind of strange how you're prattling on about how autistic and misanthropic and alien and bizarre such a sizable portion of your heritage is. To that end, that MPC thread really is for you, since it's noted (correctly) how eurasians are twice as likely to suffer psychological disorders than east asians, so maybe the OP should reconsider using you as a source. You seem to fit in with that greater likelihood pretty well, weirdo.

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  42. There is, by the way, no evidence whatsoever for the idea they have a narrower distribution, this is primarily a folk idea in these circles that stems from IQ fetishism and the belief very high IQ individuals must be accomplished and prolific (along with a fundamental misunderstanding of basic biology in trait variance). Underrepresentation in the highest levels can probably be explained by something like these similar (but not as extreme) as what you harp about. It's strange how you'd seriously consider that for all this time you've been on the HBD scene, and even moreso you'd push home the idea they literally "arr rook same"- koreans, chinese and japanese actually really do like quite different if you've bothered to look (despite your extensive contact with them) and vary much more in skin color than whites do, ranging from white to bronze, whereas whites are much more homogenous. They may be very homogenous in skull shape, hair texture and hair color, but, so are africans. (and most of the rest of the world has black hair.)

    Also, neoteny as broadly applied to humans is a very outdated model and is ironically something heavily inherited from Ashley Montagu.

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  43. Another clueless Asian cheerleader... The curvy chick from Mad Men and the guidos from Jersey Shore are farther apart in skin color than any two Northeast Asians. It doesn't matter if you can squint (heh) and see differences between Koreans and Japanese -- you can just glance at Sicilians and Swedes to see the difference.

    If you can't tell when someone is using "identical" as dramatic emphasis for what they've already stated as "narrower variance," then you are autistic, and probably Asian too, lacking in basic reading comprehension.

    No one cares how "outdated" a model is or who started the outdated trend -- there couldn't be a more airheaded complaint about a set of ideas. However off-base and loony the rest of his thinking was, Karl Marx had a good idea with his concept of the "alienation" of labor when you're reduced to a cog in a machine. Man is debased and degraded, which appeals to our sense of purity and corruption -- a rather conservative idea, compared to his otherwise typically liberal stuff about harm and fairness / inequality.

    Fetishizing what is fashionable also suggests that you're a faggot. Somewhere else I used GSS data to show that Asians are something like twice as likely to be queer -- another aspect of their neoteny, and the "gays as Peter Pans" model that I've developed here over the past several years.

    Are you Gooky from MPC? You sure sound like it. Then again with so many Asians being identical, you could be his unknown twin.

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  44. I'm one-quarter Japanese -- not a "very sizable portion" of my genes, let alone culture. I'm just as much French on that side, and Celtic hillbilly on the other side. If anything, it has given me special insight into how loose the social ties are among Asians compared to Celts (or any whites, but especially since my mother's side of the family is Appalachian hillbillies).

    Although I did visit my grandmother several times a year as a kid, I've only met the half- or quarter-Japanese members of my family a handful of occasions in my lifetime, and they don't met up often with one another either. Whites hear all kinds of praise for the stronger family bonds of Asians, but it's bogus. They only meet when required, as a formality, and then please let us get back to our regularly scheduled lives apart from them.

    The hillbilly side I've been in close contact with all my life, not just geographically surrounded by them, but staying over at their houses -- sometimes for the better part of the summer at my grandparents' place in the Appalachian sticks -- going to their weddings, funerals, family reunions that draw over 100 people, and on and on.

    I'm more at home listening and singing along to rock music, or dancing to new wave at a night club, than watching cartoons or leveling up a video game character. About the only Asian traits I have are somewhat sparse body hair and an interest in cameras and photography / cinematography, neither of which are so uniquely Asian that someone would "wonder if" upon observation.

    I do have a short temper every now and then, but that's not from my Asian or part-Asian side, since none of that side of my family is like that. When I get hostile and prickly, that's all the Scotch-Irish side showing through, unfortunately.

    Obviously you wouldn't know that, since you're Asian and haven't met those people. But even ordinary white Americans wouldn't know, unless they were from there. Their image of hillbillies is one of slow-moving mouth-breathers and passive / submissive Jesus junkies. In reality, folks from the land of the Hatfields and the McCoys are prone to short tempers, borderline personalities, bipolar swings, and so on.

    At any rate, none of that matters when I'm writing up a post which quotes a series of charts from an academic study of personality differences across races, and translates their results into plain English. Anybody could have done so, in fact the article was suggested to me by a Portuguese commenter.

    What should I have done? Give myself a hard look in the mirror, remind myself in a clipped gritty voice that I have a duty to honor (one-quarter of) my ancestors above all else, and go fire off a triumphalist post about how supremely awesome Asians are compared to whites?

    The primitive morality under your thinking couldn't be any more dishonest and debasing. If you're not genetically Asian, you must be one of their convergently evolved twins from the Millennial generation.

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  45. I've easily devoted more posts and comments to how clueless and poisonous the "new atheist" types are, and how sacrilegiously the mere "non-attending" majority has acted over the last 20-odd years.

    Yet here I am, someone whose practice is not having gone to church regularly since probably 1993, and whose beliefs are agnostic.

    Atheists, non-attenders, etc., aren't being "self-loathing" when they rail against how disrespectfully and corrosively their group has been behaving. It is a secular attempt to burst the vainglory of the new atheist spergs -- guarding against self-righteousness among those in your camp.

    The same duty falls upon students of race differences, who ought to be disgusted by the widespread idolatrous worship of Asians and Jews among the HBD crowd. ("They're smart, so it's all good!") Toppling those ideological golden calves requires more than a limp-wristed push.

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  46. Skeletally, Asians tend to mature as or more rapidly, but stop maturing earlier. Menarche tends to be earlier, for instance. Long bone growth ends earlier.

    I think the lit also describes maturation of the brain generally taking either the same amount of time or longer in East Asians though, with more development. So you wouldn't expect them to simply retain neotenous personality characteristics, as such.

    On kid vs adult personality differences:

    Children generally seem to have much more energy than adults. Most parents I know tend to talk about how their kids run their old arses ragged. Not exactly lazy.
    Kids seem less grinding when it comes to tasks - they only do what they enjoy and don't sweat obsessing about work. I can't imagine anyone ever thinking of kids as grinds.

    I don't know if kids are faster or slower to make friends - I can't say that kids seem to have more or less anxiety about playing with other kids than most adults do about spending time together. It's not exactly a major difference. Kids don't seem less socially confident, except around adults and larger / stronger children (but then adults would be less confident around huge, dangerous, highly intelligent giants with a lot more life experience).

    East Asians probably look more childlike when you define adulthood as being a self determining individual, less so if you look at behavioral control.

    Re: HBD types being cheerleaders from East Asians, if anything there's more specious, threatened and shaky theories about why Asians secretly don't have the moxie Western civilization has, if anything. For all that East Asians are different in personality for sure.

    Actual personality differences between West and East and whether they are genetic are one of the things it is fairly mainstream to study in cultural anthropology, so for me there's not really much of a need to turn to the HBDosphere on it, when much more systematic work is being done already.

    Generally, yeah, as any comment by agnostic zeroes in closer on the virtues of Celtic-Middle Eastern people with "herder" ancestry from Generation X, in America, who are male, straight and just wanna dance! it begins to increasingly eyebrow raisingly dubious, but there's still almost always a kernel of something interesting in there.

    agnostic I've only met the half- or quarter-Japanese members of my family a handful of occasions in my lifetime, and they don't met up often with one another either.

    That's probably cos you're just some random white to them though. The Chinese biographies I've read describe pretty frequent family contact, more or less comparable to the white families I know.

    I'm more at home listening and singing along to rock music

    Sounds like kara oke? (huge in Asia - never understood why people wanna hang around and earnestly sing pop rock in large groups of friends, but there you go) ;)

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  47. Since this exceeded the character limit, I decided to put this on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/AKAkgqz6

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  48. "Since this exceeded the character limit"

    will not read

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  49. "I can't imagine anyone ever thinking of kids as grinds."

    Yet at the same time kids are more easily dominated and bullied into doing stuff. In a previous post, "Face to Face" argued that neotenous farmers get shafted into doing grinding labor precisely because they are more childlike, less disciplined, and less goal-oriented. In particular, it was pointed out that neotenous individuals are less likely to have a passion or "dream", instead being more subject to social pressure

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  50. "Skeletally, Asians tend to mature as or more rapidly, but stop maturing earlier."

    Hence they more closely resemble children as adolescents and adults, i.e. are more neotenous, i.e. what I said.

    "Children generally seem to have much more energy than adults... Not exactly lazy."

    Hold it, you're not comparing how the races differ in energy / hyperactivity levels from children to adolescents or adults. You're comparing composed Asian adults to rambunctious white children.

    Asian kids *already start off* with zero hyperactivity. You turn them over in their crib so that they can't breath, and all they do is turn their head so their nose is no longer blocked, whereas whites start raising a fuss and getting restless. The 7R variant at the DRD4 site is absent in East Asia, and even their local attempt at that variant, the 2R, hardly raises ADHD levels.

    Do Asian adults continue to be easily distracted by the same kinds of things that distracted them as children -- cartoons, video games, etc.? Yes. Far more so than you see among whites, who mature better out of distractedness and hyperactivity.

    "Kids seem less grinding when it comes to tasks - they only do what they enjoy and don't sweat obsessing about work."

    I.e., exactly how Asians behave when no one is watching / Tiger Mother is away. We've already established that Asians are not intrinsically motivated toward grinding, and that it is only their total deference to authority figures who force them into grinding.

    "I don't know if kids are faster or slower to make friends"

    But then you're a Millennial with no personal experience to draw on, and don't have kids of your own to observe. It's OK to speculate, just say so, like "for whatever my Millennial opinion is worth on this matter."

    Making friends in middle and high school, and then in college, couldn't be simpler -- provided the environment allows them to (no helicopter parents, etc.). The social lobes of your brain are more mature, and it's instinctive how you're supposed to act around others, how to get and stay on their good side, how to make amends if you screwed up, and so on.

    Children don't mind playing with others, including kids they don't know, but it only lasts as long as the joint activity. Playing tag during recess. But actually going over to each other's homes after school, or something simpler like sustained give-and-take conversations during school hours, is more awkward for them. Kids are more attached to the security of the home and their parents, if they want to talk to someone about how their day has been going, need help solving a problem, and so on.

    Kids are also brattier than adolescents or adults, which prevents them from easily forming mutual relationships. It's not uncommon for a childhood "friendship" to be one kid who has more toys than the others, who lords it over them when they come over to play. It's more of a patron-client relationship than good friends.

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  51. "East Asians probably look more childlike when you define adulthood as being a self determining individual, less so if you look at behavioral control."

    You're making the same mistake that's already been pointed out in the post and elsewhere -- you're looking at the low levels of violence and promiscuity among Asians, and concluding "how well controlled they are!" You're assuming that their temptation toward violence or sex is the same as it is among whites, which it certainly is not.

    What kinds of sinful or vice-like things are they attracted to? Now look at how good Asians are at controlling their temptations. Twenty hours a day with their brain plugged into the internet, without even trying to use it actively but just swiping from one distraction to another. Video game addicts in daily marathon sessions, pissing in diapers, dying from blood clots, or neglecting their own children to the point of death. Joyless pachinko parlor junkies crammed in like ants in a hive. A steady diet of tentacle rape porn featuring 10 year-old girls with 20 year-old titties.

    Yep, Asians have so much to teach white people about how to check their temptation toward vices.

    "Re: HBD types being cheerleaders from East Asians, if anything there's more specious, threatened and shaky theories about why Asians secretly don't have the moxie Western civilization has, if anything"

    Utter horseshit. You may just have gotten into the "scene," but HBD nerds have been giving a pass to, or actively cheerleading for Northeast Asians and Jews since the beginning ("high IQs!" "cognitive elite!" "low crime!"). They may not hold Asian civilization as higher than Western, but on a personal and societal level, they think Asians are a goal we should be heading toward.

    Pointing out how the Asian and Jewish emperors are wearing no clothes puts you on the fringes of the HBD crowd.

    "That's probably cos you're just some random white to them though."

    Think it through: why am I not "just some random white" to my mother's side of the family? It's because Asian blood tends to bias people toward wanting to be left alone, including among family members.

    Asian kids resent the constant bullying of their Tiger Mothers, but they acquiesce to their presence and contact in a form of familial Stockholm Syndrome. "Honoring the ancestors" is something they slog through because their Tiger Mother hectored them into it. They could give a shit about their family, and just want to be left alone to go back to playing video games or surfing the web. Actual family ties are shockingly weak.

    That's not just my own experience with part-Asians, but the many close Asian friends I had in high school and college. They tolerate more than love each other in the family.

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  52. Really interesting argument. I think Asians never actually have got chances to develop individual thinking ability because they are so used to adapt themselves into what their society wants without ever questioning themselves. Confucianism well trains them with this process, implementing very self-controlling ethics such as ''losing is the true winning' which obscurely means 'be stoic, follow rules, no questioning'. Extremely collectivist and even adult traits in East Asia is very different from the Western self-determined and independence; reserving your intrinsic desire 'just to think' and following social norms without questioning on behalf of 'social harmony' decides how mature you are. Almost everything in Asian's life is socially guided, living under obligations is like social rituals, so basically you made an really insightful argument. I agree, to my experience, what Far East values is exactly opposite from what Westerner does, and this sometimes can repulse each other indigenously, though I'm not sure if it's driven from biological difference, not social setting difference.

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