I Didn't Expect to See This in Beijing

In preparing to travel to China, there were a few things I expected. When traveling to a city of 23 million people, you expect to see crowds, traffic, and pollution. While the pollution was bad on some days, I never experienced crowds, and the traffic was only bad once or twice.

But there was one thing I did not expect to see. Yet seeing it demonstrated some important social science principles.

No matter where you live, you are bombarded by stereotypes of other countries. While many stereotypes are exaggerations, caricatures, or outright lies, there are some that survive because they are based on a shadow of truth.

I’m sure that abroad the American stereotypes are about our diets or our weight. I grew up in California, and here in China that has been received as if it’s the coolest thing they’ve heard in the year of the rabbit. And that’s because they have some stereotypes about California and the people from there that they’re happy to finally probe (the rest of America also has stereotypes about California, but I imagine it’s a completely different picture).

The stereotypes we hear in the US about China are the crazy hard pressure they have on studying and succeeding. Steven He has built a whole internet personality on this. (His best video is on another stereotype—Asians playing the piano.) And in many ways, this stereotype has been confirmed on this trip. Talking to a friend, she described the immense pressure she felt as a kid to succeed in school and how every free moment was focused on studying.

But sometimes on this trip that was challenged.

We were fortunate to be here during the first snow of the year. When we walked onto campus, the students were having a blast. They were throwing snowballs, building snowmen, and filming TikTok dances in the freshly fallen snow. Their actions reminded me at 18, a freshman from California going to school in Utah, enjoying my first snowy winter.

In the social sciences, there’s a big theory about how groups interact. Groups form stereotypes about other groups, and those stereotypes influence interactions. Group A thinks Group B is lazy, Group B thinks Group A is willing to hurt them. Members of the groups then act differently and may even support policies that treat the other group unfairly.

But there’s one intervention that seems to help break down barriers between groups. If members of the different groups spend time around each other, they start to see past the stereotypes, and they begin to experience more favorable feelings towards them. This is called the contact hypothesis.

I didn’t have unfavorable feelings towards the Chinese. But as I watched them play in the snow, I couldn’t help but think, “We’re all the same.” I had the same thought when on a nicer day I saw some students playing ultimate frisbee, and I had it again when I was lecturing and a group of students in the back just talked to each other and ignored the entire lecture.

It was like I never left my Utah campus!

Links I liked

I haven’t had a bunch of time to curate links over here. But there were a few things that popped up.

Market reveals rivals

• Michigan State University has a surplus store where they resell goods from the community. One of the items they sell is vinyl signs for sporting events that say “Beat X”. The prices seem to reveal something about rivalries. The cheapest sign is $13.13 while the most expensive is $122.50. Which signs get the most money might surprise

  Jadrian Wooten
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El Salvador’s Fee on Migration

• Speaking of the contact hypothesis, the US is trying to limit migration through the Mexican border. But the problem is that there is a very convenient path from Central America made popular by social media (I’ve seen some of the videos targeted to Haitians). And plane tickets to these Central American countries are pretty cheap. So now the US is pressuring El Salvador to police its borders. El Salvador responded by putting a $1,130 fee on trips from 57 countries.