Thomas Talhelm is an Assistant Professor of Behavior Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he studies how culture affects the way we behave. He is studying how rice and wheat agriculture have given northern and southern China two very different cultures, including whether people move chairs in Starbucks.
That all started in 2007, when Princeton in Asia sent Talhelm to teach high school in Guangzhou. Since then, he's lived in China for four years, most recently on a 2012-2013 Fulbright scholarship and as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow.
Also studied is how liberal culture in the United States is more individualistic, and how making people think more analytically increases support for liberal social policies, whereas thinking holistically increases support for conservative policies.
Talhelm has worked as a freelance journalist based in Beijing, and founded Smart Air, a social enterprise to help people in China breathe clean air without shelling out thousands of dollars for expensive purifiers. Read more in the Atlantic article "One Low-Cost Safeguard While Living In 'Toxic' China."
