Modern East Asian populations plausibly retained extensive psychological adaptations in general personality traits and social dynamics to arctic environments, from ancestral Northeast Asian populations' late Pleistocene habitation of arctic and subarctic North Eurasia, prior to migrating southwards into East Asia in the Holocene. The first cross-cultural study between modern East Asian and Inuit populations is conducted, as an epistemically sound ethnographic analogy for paleolithic Arctic populations, and a shared set of arctic adapted personality traits is proposed- a higher than average tendency of emotional control/suppression, harmony/cohesion, indirectness, self and social consciousness, reserve/introversion, cautiousness, and perseverance/stoic endurance. The proposed candidate Arcticist traits are tested for environmental causation in modern polar personnel psychology, using decades of personality research on workers, expeditioners, and military personnel who adapt to Arctic and Antarctic environments. Consistently replicated results support causation of polar climates in necessitating the proposed Arcticist traits for adaptive success, and such traits are generalizable and predictive of adaptive success even across modern European populations that temporarily live in polar climates. A theoretical framework for the universal principles of arctic psychological adaptation is introduced, a novel methodology for testing causation and formation of psychological adaptation to post-OoA environments is proposed, and previous popular theories on the roots of Eastern psychology are reexamined in the light of Arcticism theory.
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We have just sent out a manuscript for review, "Arctic Instincts? The universal principles of Arctic psychological adaptation and the origins of East Asian psychology", that may be of interest to some in the LessWrong community so I wanted to see if anyone would be interested in joining us as a gardener and providing feedback on the article. As noted above, this is an opportunity to have your comment recorded in the scientific literature (comments can be made with real name or pseudonym).
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