Correction to "People in historically rice-farming areas are less happy and socially compare more than people in wheat-farming areas" by Lee et al. (2023).

Published in

Journal of personality and social psychology. Volume 131. Issue 4. Pages 669.

Abstract

Reports an error in "People in historically rice-farming areas are less happy and socially compare more than people in wheat-farming areas" by Cheol-Sung Lee, Thomas Talhelm and Xiawei Dong (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023[May], Vol 124[5], 935-957; see record 2023-14674-001). In the article (https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000324), the tables report the range of values for urbanization. Tables 5 and 7 report a range of 16-88. The range should be 23-88. The analyses use the correct urbanization variable throughout. In Table 6 and Table S8, the word "log" should appear for the GDP variable. All analyses in the article (including these tables) use log GDP per capita. In the Happiness subsection of Study 3, the original article stated that the Supplemental Materials have the full wordings of the happiness items used in Study 3. However, the full questionnaire is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) rather than in the Supplemental Materials: https://osf.io/7bnjm/?view_only=4211ec8265e84a6a88c9ec9ec6e1fb55. As a point of clarification, Studies 1 and 2 used income and occupational status as key predictor variables. Therefore, the analysis did not include respondents who were missing data for these variables. The article did not state this explicitly. To be clear, analyses in Studies 1 and 2 included respondents with positive income and valid occupational information: In the Samples subsection, 3,780 participants in Study 1 (World Values Survey) and 12,265 participants in Study 2 (China Family Panel Study). (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2023-14674-001.) Using two nationally representative surveys, we find that people in China's historically rice-farming areas are less happy than people in wheat areas. This is a puzzle because the rice area is more interdependent, and relationships are an important predictor of happiness. We explore how the interdependence of historical rice farming may have paradoxically undermined happiness by creating more social comparison than wheat farming. We build a framework in which rice farming leads to social comparison, which makes people unhappy (especially people who are worse off). If people in rice areas socially compare more, then people's happiness in rice areas should be more closely related to markers of social status like income. In two studies, national survey data show that income, self-reported social status, and occupational status predict people's happiness twice as strongly in rice areas than wheat areas. In Study 3, we use a unique natural experiment comparing two nearby state farms that effectively randomly assigned people to farm rice or wheat. The rice farmers socially compare more, and farmers who socially compare more are less happy. If interdependence breeds social comparison and erodes happiness, it could help explain the paradox of why the interdependent cultures of East Asia are less happy than similarly wealthy cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

PMID:
42782724
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 25 Sep 2026.

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