Okay. Weighing in on this.
tldr; Thomas Talhelm (PhD student, University of Virginia) interviewed over 1,000 Chinese college students from the wheat-growing regions in the north versus the rice-growing regions in the south, and found differences in their approaches to answering particular types of questions which could not be attributed to either pathogen prevalence or GDP. There was a correlation between holistic thought and rice agriculture, which requires an extremely high level of coordination, planning, awareness of neighbors' needs, and community involvement because of how the crop grows. The study did not involve cultures outside of China. All of this occurred between different communities of Han Chinese people. It is an analysis of regional differences involving people of the same race.
tldr; The phenomenon might better be described as "rice agriculture versus non-rice agriculture," but even then, there are cultures that score higher on holistic thinking than North Americans and Western Europeans that primarily grow crops with relatively lower community coordination (parts of Africa, South America, Russia, and the Middle East). Beyond this, the cost of crop production/effort to grow is not consistent throughout the world, because local growing conditions vary. The study is limited and needs to dive into other possible variables, but it's not completely without merit.
The author of the NYT opinion piece, T.M. Luhrmann, is a highly respected Jewish anthropology professor from Stanford who primarily studies the way in which different cultures treat psychiatric illnesses, and how the West's lack of compassion leads to poorer outcomes for the mentally ill.
Her opinion piece from the screenshot, which is all of 887 words, summarizes Talhelm's study and then ends with 3 brief paragraphs condemning the individualism of the United States, Congress, and Silicon Valley.
Genuinely everyone on the internet needs to develop better news literacy & research skills and understand that in any publication, there will be some variation in the quality of the reporting based on who your writers / opinion piece guests are. Especially when it comes down to non-scientists having to interpret scientific findings for the general public. But this isn't one of those cases - other than the poorly conceived illustration (which Luhrmann neither created nor approved), her article is absolutely fine. Other people may have run with the study and misattributed its findings, but that's not on her or the NYT.
PLEASE send me any questionable articles by the NYT that allude to race science, and I'd be happy to look into them and dig up the actual scientific papers to determine if / how they've been misinterpreted.
