Readers of a certain age may remember an old Goodyear tire commercial with the tag line, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.”

The applications go way beyond auto repair. That’s what Shaomin Li, professor of international business at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, discovered on a business trip to Taiwan.

As he was being chauffeured from one venue to the next, Professor Li noticed that his host always backed into parking lot spaces, opting for often tricky and laborious maneuvering over the simpler method of pulling in straight forward.

Detecting a wider pattern of behavior, Professor Li conducted his own experiment. He discovered that 88% of Chinese drivers back in when they park, in contrast to 6% of American drivers.

“All of a sudden,” recounts Professor Li, “I said, gee – isn’t this delayed gratification?”

We shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on a single study, but this observation does not appear in a vacuum. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell investigates the popular stereotype that transplanted Asians excel academically and professionally compared with homegrown Americans.

Mr. Gladwell discovered that the stereotype is much more accurate among southern Chinese than among northern Chinese, and he identifies a single reason for the difference:

Rice paddies.

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