How Ice Age Siberia shaped East Asian psychology ~20,000 years ago

What is it about?

The ancestors of East Asians lived in Ice Age Siberia around ~26-19k years ago for thousands of years before they settled back into geographical China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia in the Holocene. To find out if such extreme cold environment shaped their culture and psychology, I carried out the first East Asian and Inuit cross-psychology comparison and found strong similarities of core personality traits- high emotional suppression, in-group harmony, unassertiveness, indirectness, self consciousness, social consciousness, introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance. Is this just coincidence? I reviewed research on modern polar workers and found that polar psychologists deem these specific traits to be adaptive for polar life, and these traits have already been incorporated into personnel selection criteria for picking suitable polar work candidates. A total rethinking of the previous Confucianism and rice farming theories of East Asian personality was done, and implications discussed.

Featured Image

Photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash

Photo by Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Psychologists have totally overlooked the psychological influences of the diverse pre-Holocene environments humans inhabited in the post-Out of Africa migration. This paper challenges the standard view in multiple fields: 1. In evolutionary psychology, which generally believes humans did not face any meaningful local selective pressures on psychology after we migrated out of Africa ~70kya 2. In evolutionary psychiatry, which assumes local adaptation to diverse post-Out of Africa environments is unlikely to be important for psychiatric issues. 3. In cultural psychology, which mainly focuses on local socioecological influences starting 10kya which overlooks the previous 60k yrs since out of Africa 4. In East Asian psychology and cultural studies, which overlooks Siberian arctic adaptation and traditionally focuses on Confucianism, group agriculture, Buddhism, etc 5. In feminist theory, which has no theory of ultimate environmental/evolutionary causes of traits/practices they deem to be "toxic" or "patriarchal". For example, emotional suppression/stoicism is assumed by feminist theorists to be arbitrarily and conspiratorially used by men to maintain patriarchal power and devalue female-coded traits like vulnerability, and is learned via socialization. However, Arcticism shows it forms organically in harsh ecologies or hunter-gatherer survival situations to maintain mental clarity, prevent emotional contagion, upkeep survival competency, and maintain group cohesion/harmony- which is later codified into basic survival values for Inuit society, and perhaps East Asian societies. This implies many traits feminists deem to be toxic masculinity may actually be traits formed as necessary adaptations to harsh ecologies or survival situations, challenging the theoretical foundations and normative direction of feminist theory. This paper advances existing theories in a few fields: 1. In Inuit psychology, which has speculated Inuit general personality and psychology is cold adapted, but has not tried proving it by using corroborating evidence from polar workers and other ancestral Arctic peoples 2. In polar personnel psychology, which has not extended their findings to see if their traits deemed adaptive in polar personnel selection also appear in contemporary indigenous polar peoples or ancestral polar peoples. This paper revolutionizes methodology in a field: 1. Evolutionary psychology is typically methodologically limited in showing adaptiveness and ancestral causation of universal psychological traits, due to the lack of a time machine. However, for locally adapted psychological traits, in this case arctic traits, I discovered personnel psychology data can conveniently show the process of adaptation in real time, by providing control groups (civilians, new arrivals), experimental groups (polar veterans, post-exposure subjects), and measuring psychological change before and after, or documenting success/failure data and refining it into a selection criteria for traits ideal candidates should have- thus creating the method of using modern artificial selection as safe analog to study natural selection.

Perspectives

“

It has taken 15 years from my initial curiosity on the topic to publication of this paper. This was an extremely difficult paper to write, partially because the topic required research into obscure fields not typically taught in university or discussed amongst mainstream psychology, because the implications chafed against the dominant blank slate assumptions and ideologies of Western academia, also because growing up in that environment meant I had many mental and social blocks that prevented me from questioning the aforementioned standard views in these fields and figuring it out faster, and finally because I was rejected by various ideologically rigid PhD programs for proposing research of such topics, which meant I had to go at it alone with no help. The lesson is, anyone anywhere can read, write, research, and discover anything. You can just directly inquire about the world and publish.

”