I have been working in an industry with high percentage of Asian employees (architecture & design). They enjoy almost constant employment; when a manager faces necessity to lay off people on the same position (say, intermediate architectural designers), he’d rather lay off everybody else and keep the Asian. Because they have reputation of being quiet, not-objectionable, working as many hours as requested, even through weekends, eating up verbal abuse silently and being good with graphic programs. But that is a mask put on for survival. They do talk — among themselves. And shockingly, among themselves they happen to be more racist, more openly unapologetically brown-nosing and more ruthless in their climb up than anybody else in typical multi-ethnic environment of an architectural firm.

I know several Asians, including those of mixed ethnicity, who are not only vocal, but downright chatterboxes, those who adopted the mask of sociable charming people. That helps them, on low rungs of the ladder, but at certain point it doesn’t work.

Because it is a mask. It’s not a nature, it’s nurture, like that artificial smile that Chia in the article above adopted to get along with people.

See The 10,000 Year Explosion by Cochran and Harpending.

Humans in some parts of the world have probably been ‘tamed’ (to different degrees, according to number of generations and severity of selection pressure) by many years of living in stable, centralized, peaceful agricultural societies in which hard work, odedience and intelligence led to more surviving children, and where spontaneous aggression and impulsiveness were capital offenses.