Do the lives of our ancestors still determine how we act today? That’s the question at hand in a new study by U.S. and Chinese researchers, and they come up with an interesting means of testing the question.
To test whether individualistic and cooperative tendencies learned centuries ago live on in descendants of Chinese farmers today, the scientists looked to a common denominator of modern life today: Starbucks. And they set up a situation that anyone who’s visited a crowded coffee shop is familiar with — navigating through a maze of tightly packed chairs to find a seat. What they were looking for was simple: Would Starbucks customers move the chairs aside to clear a path, or would they try to contort their bodies to fit through a narrow space without disturbing the environment?
