Arctic Instincts? The Late Pleistocene Arctic Origins of East Asian Psychology

This article explores the hypothesis that modern East Asian populations inherited andmaintained extensive psycho-social adaptations to arctic environments from ancestralAncient Northern East Asian populations, which inhabited arctic and subarcticNortheast 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 paleolithicArctic populations. The comparison reveals that both East Asians and the Inuit exhibitnotably high emotional control/suppression, ingroup harmony/cohesion and subdomainunassertiveness, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion,cautiousness, and perseverance/endurance. The same traits have been identified bydecades of research in polar psychology (i.e., psychological research on workers,expeditioners, and military personnel living and working in the Arctic and Antarctic) asbeing adaptive for, or byproducts of, life in polar environments. I interpret this asindirect evidence supporting my hypothesis that the proposed Arcticist traits in modernEast Asian and Inuit populations, primarily represent adaptations to arctic climates,specifically for the adaptive challenges of highly interdependent survival in anextremely dangerous, unpredictable, and isolated environment, with frequentprolonged close-quarters group confinement, and exacerbated consequences forsocial devaluation/exclusion/expulsion. The paper concludes with a re-examination ofprevious theories on the roots of East Asian psychology, mainly that of rice farming andConfucianism, in the light of my Arcticism theory.