According to cultural psychology, culture is an important factor affecting thinking, and there
are systematic differences in people's way of thinking under different cultural backgrounds. Tollham
et al. recently put forward the “rice theory”, which holds that the main ecological basis for the cultural
and psychological differences between the East and the West is the difference between rice cultivation
and wheat cultivation, and these two different ways of living are important explanatory factors for
the cultural and psychological differences between the East and the West, including the differences in
ways of thinking. In this paper, we systematically compare the thinking patterns of college students in
rice and wheat growing areas in China by using cognitive tasks such as concept classification, concept
representation, behavioral attribution and belief bias effect, and expandably test the “rice theory”. The
results showed that college students in wheat and rice areas did not show the same difference pattern in
various cognitive tasks of thinking styles, and college students in rice area did not show more obvious
holistic thinking tendency compared with college students in wheat area. The research results did not
support the basic hypothesis of “rice theory”.