Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology

Sun, D. (2025). Arctic instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic origins of East Asian psychology. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000373

Abstract

This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited and maintained extensive psychosocial adaptations to arctic environments from ancestral Ancient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarctic Northeast Eurasia around the Last Glacial Maximum period of the Late Pleistocene, prior to back migrating southwards into East Asia in the Holocene. I present the first cross-psychology comparison between modern East Asian and Inuit populations, using the latter as a model for paleolithic Arctic populations. The comparison reveals that both East Asians and the Inuit exhibit notably high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion and subdomain unassertiveness, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/endurance. The same traits have been identified by decades of research in polar psychology (i.e., psychological research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel living and working in the Arctic and Antarctic) as being adaptive for, or byproducts of, life in polar environments. I interpret this as indirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits in modern East Asian and Inuit populations primarily represent adaptations to arctic climates, specifically for the adaptive challenges of highly interdependent survival in an extremely dangerous, unpredictable, and isolated environment, with frequent prolonged close-quarters group confinement, and exacerbated consequences for social devaluation/exclusion/expulsion. The article concludes with a reexamination of previous theories on the roots of East Asian psychology, mainly that of rice farming and Confucianism, in the light of my Arcticism theory.

Public Significance Statement

A new model of ecological origins of local culture and psychology includes all overlooked ecological environments inhabited by a specific modern population’s Out-of-Africa migration path, expanding inquiries beyond typical Holocene-only models. In exploring arctic adaptation, relevant to ancestral Late Pleistocene East Asian populations and contemporary Inuit populations, substantial shared intensified psychological traits and cultural practices were discovered. These psychological traits were found to be adaptive in multinational modern polar personnel and expeditioners, making a strong case for paleolithic arctic causation of certain idiosyncratic aspects of East Asian cultures and psychology, which repositions Confucianism as evoked culture influenced by preceding arctic adaptation rather than spontaneous cause of East Asian culture and psychology, and Holocene rice farming as an additive effect exacerbating preexisting collectivistic tendencies in the rice farming regions of East Asia.

H/t Tyler Cowen.