Abstract: This paper believes that the essence of fellow-townsman concept is native and ethnic identify, it is expressed as to miss home after leave the home town, attachment to old folk, native dialect identity, helping behavior between fellow-townsman and even organizational behavior between fellow-townsman. The core of fellow-townsman identity is social identity, but the core of social and cultural identity is language identity, fellow-townsman psychological effects consisted of linguistic identity, cultural identity, emotion recognition, customs identity, geographical identity and other ingredients. Among them, the prerequisite is that the central factors and peripheral factors, central factors including away from home, geographically proximate, cultural convergence and mutual support. Six experiments were conducted to explore whether there is a different effect towards fellow-townsman between college students study in local or non-local university. This research revealed that there was a different effect between participants towards their fellow-townsman when they are in local university and non-local university, they can show a fellow-townsman effect in non-local, while don’t perform such an effect in local. Maybe the strange environment in non-local places induced different effect towards people came from the same hometown, and fellow-townsman became an important other that incorprated in self-concept when they in non-local places. Therefore, the fellow-townsman concept is not only fundamental to create a regional psychological personality, but also an important indicator of the interaction between regional cultural differences and personality differences. Fellow-townsman concept is the psychological basis national identity and national identity, however, within the nation and the state, large-scale population movement of cross-cultural adaptation is an important factor affecting social harmony.

Key words: fellow-townsman reference effect, theoretical exploration, empirical research