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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And if you’ve ever spent time in different cities throughout the United States or anywhere in the world, as long as they are very, very different kinds of cities, you may have noticed that different cities have different attitudes towards things like jaywalking, right? You need to get across the street. Are you at the corner? Do you have the light? Etcetera. In some cities, who cares what the stop light is saying? Who cares where you are? You just cross the street when the road is clear. In other cities, people will wait there very, very politely, not even imagining that it’s the right thing to do to cross before the stop light says so. So why is that? How should we understand these differences in behavior? My guest today is Michele Gelfand. She’s a cultural psychologist, distinguished university Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and she’s thinking about not just individual people, but how entire cultures differ in their attitudes toward cultural norms. She’s written a book called Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. And the claim is that you can classify different cultures into whether they are tight, that is to say everyone observes the norms very, very carefully, or whether they are loose, there are norms but eh, we break them a little bit.

0:01:17 SC: And of course there’s many different ways you can classify different cultures, but the idea is that this particular dimension is especially informative, that this tightness-looseness axis spectrum, if you like, really tells us a lot about different cultures and how they behave. So Michele and I talk about why this is true, why there are tight cultures, why there are loose cultures, what kinds of places have different ones? And in the real world, which cultures are tight and are loose? And she gives her opinion that, in fact, the best place to be is in between. Both tightness and looseness have their purposes. Remember that we have a website for the podcast, preposterousuniverse.com/podcast. There’s a Patreon that you can support us, where you get monthly Ask Me Anything episodes as well as ad-free versions of every episode. So, with that, let’s go.

[music]

0:02:24 SC: Michele Gelfand, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:27 Michele Gelfand: Great to be here.

0:02:28 SC: So you had this wonderful new book out that I have to say it struck me… Even though you’re a psychologist, it struck me as something a physicist would want to write. It’s kind of like a grand unified theory of certain aspects of people and culture. So why don’t you just give us the subway pitch for what you’re trying to say in that book.

0:02:48 MG: Sure. I’m a cross-cultural psychologist, so I’m interested in understanding how people around the world vary through, like you said, sort of parsimonious principles. And oftentime, we think about culture in terms of rather superficial characteristics like red versus blue or east versus west or rich versus poor. And I wanted to know is there a deeper code driving our behavior that can help us understand not just modern nations and states, but also cultures that existed thousands of years ago. And so, as a cross-cultural psychologist, I set out to try to understand these cultural codes, and what I discovered is that there is a pretty simple principle that explains a lot of variation around the world, and that’s what I call tight versus loose cultures, and it all has to do with how strictly groups adhere to social norms. Some groups are really tight, they have very strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, and other groups are much more lax and are much more permissive. And I set out over the last 20 years to understand why did these differences evolve, is there any rationale for why groups evolved to be tight and loose? And what are the trade-offs that they confer to human groups? What are the positives? What are the liabilities? And what are the conflicts that arise when people from tight and loose cultures tend to meet? And how can they be mitigated? So that’s the kind of gist and I can get into lots of details about this.

0:04:03 SC: I’m sure that we’ll get into lots of details. I bet… It’s such a wonderfully evocative language, tight and loose. As soon as you say those, not only can people guess what you mean by that, but they can probably even do a pretty good job of guessing which cultures fit which categorization, but nevertheless, why don’t you tell us what you mean, what are the characteristics of a tight culture versus a loose one?

0:04:25 MG: Yeah. So when we first set out to study this, we wanted to see can we measure this construct ’cause that’s really key to any scientific endeavor. And so, we studied over 30 nations around the world, but the idea that we can place cultures on a continuum from tight to loose, and of course, recognizing that each culture has tight and loose elements, that we still, like we can do with personality, still kind of understand what the general trends are. And clearly… And sure enough, we found that people around the world agreed on the strictness or the permissive-ness of the norms in their cultures. Cultures like Japan and Singapore Germany and Austria tended to veer tight, and cultures like New Zealand and Brazil and Greece and the Netherlands tend to veer loose. And we can also see that this construct, tight and loose, actually can help us understand variation across the 50 states, rather than red versus blue. We have a new map of what states are tight and loose. We can also see it can help us understand organizations through the same lens, as well as even our own households, and even our own selves in terms of the pension for rules and punishments when we violate them. So it’s a pretty broad construct. And we started at the national level, but then, as I said, we kinda zoomed in to different levels of analysis to see is there any homology that we can see, any similarity in terms of this construct, and how it operates at different levels.

0:05:44 SC: And it’s interesting that you mentioned that people recognize it in themselves, it’s not that they’re in denial about this, but they go, “Oh, yeah, no, we’re a pretty rule-obeying culture.”

0:05:54 MG: Well, you know, it’s really interesting, ’cause one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about studying culture is that it’s really a puzzle, because it’s omnipresent, it’s around us all the time. We’re following rules all the time, from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep, but it’s rather invisible, we don’t recognize that culture’s all around us. It’s like the story about two fish who were swimming along and one fish says to the other, “Hey, how is the water?” And they say, “Wait a second, what’s water?” [laughter] And so, fish… The simple idea here is that often it’s time… It’s these things that are around us constantly that we have a hard time recognizing, and culture is exactly that puzzle. We don’t think about culture. So if you can ask people about it… But they don’t tend to think about it, and they certainly judge other cultures for being really different than them, without understanding the strengths and the liabilities that tight and loose gives us as humans.

0:06:44 SC: And how do we… I mean, I’m sure there’s a lot of different directions or axes on which we can judge different cultures, the amount of individuality or just the economic situation in different countries. So, how do you disentangle all these various effects? You’re really making a non-trivial claim that this tightness-looseness distinction is one of the most important ones in distinguishing between different cultures.

0:07:08 MG: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I wanna back up and say, actually, there’s lots of ways that cultures vary, tight and loose is not the only one. Like you mentioned, how collectivistic or group-oriented we are, family-oriented versus individualistic is another key metric on which we can place countries and groups. And in fact, I worked a lot on that construct with Harry Triandis, who’s one of the founders of cross-cultural psychology. There’s other dimensions also of culture in terms of hierarchy or egalitarianism. And, like you said, there’s also economic wealth and differences on other structural variables.

0:07:41 MG: But in what we wanted to do in the Science paper, that was looking at this at the national level, is to see can we see that it’s related to but distinct from these constructs? And sure enough, it is. And so, for example, tight-loose has no direct relationship, as in linear relationship, with GDP. There are cultures that are very rich and that are tight, and very poor that are tight, and vice versa on looseness. And same with individual collectivism. For many years, in my field, including me, I’m pretty guilty of this, we kind of thought that collectivism-individualism is the only way to really think about cultural differences. And that’s because we were only comparing East and West, which happened to be confounded on individualism, collectivism, and tightness.

0:08:23 MG: So, for example, we know that, in my data, and this is across different levels, tightness tends to be positively correlated with collectivism, but there’s lots of context where they’re actually… You can find off diagonals of tight cultures that are very individualistic, emphasize privacy, these are places like Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and there’s lots of collectivist group-oriented cultures that are rather loose. For example, Brazil is one of the cultures that values family quite a bit, same with Spain, but they tend to have looser norms. So, in fact, we’re trying to un-confound these differences, because that way we can understand, in broader cultural toolkit, to really understand and predict cultural differences much better.

0:09:07 SC: And maybe, I guess I have the advantage of having looked at your book, and so forth. So, for the listeners out there, what would they anticipate if they visited a tight or loose culture? What are some of the characteristics you would notice right away, or is it things that you wouldn’t notice right away, you would have to discover through interactions?

0:09:26 MG: Well, I think that these are kind of patterns you start to discover as you’re studying many, many, many different countries and see these kinds of regularities. That doesn’t mean that there’s a one-to-one relationship with these, but what we found is a very predictable trade-off between order and openness. And that is to say that tight cultures have a lot of order. They have more monitoring, they have less crime, they have more uniformity and more synchrony. So, for example, they have, according to our own analysis, people who wear more similar clothing, who drive more similar cars. Even in some of our analyses, these are kind of strange, unobtrusive indicators. But if you go to a country and you see that the city clocks have pretty much the same time on them, you’re very likely to be in a tighter context. And we know this, ’cause we can correlate…

0:10:13 SC: Yeah, I love that example. That was great.

0:10:15 MG: Yeah. You could go to a looser context. I was in Italy, actually, last year with my kids and husband, and a lot of the city clocks they say something completely different. You’re not entirely sure what time it is. And so, this is another example of synchrony, like uniformity, and it turns out that’s really important in tight cultures. I’ll talk about that a little bit later.

0:10:33 MG: But also, tight cultures have order when it comes to self-control. So the social order is mirrored in, really, self-control and order within the individual. We find that there’s less debt, less alcoholism, even less obesity in contexts that are tighter because people are following rules a lot more, and they’re used to actually controlling their impulses much more in a wider range of context. And that’s all to say that loose cultures have a disadvantage on order, they have more crime, they have less synchrony and uniformity, and they have a host of self-regulation failures. But loose cultures, as I mentioned, they corner the market on openness. So we could see, from our data, that they have more tolerance for people who are different, whether it’s people from different races, religions, creeds.

0:11:16 MG: In my own data, I sent research assistants around the world wearing fake warts, I bought them on the Internet for them, or they were wearing tattoos on their face, or they were just wearing their plain face, and I sent them around to their home countries in 20 countries and simply wanted to see how were they treated in city streets. They looked kind of deviant, these individuals. And sure enough, in the looser cultures, they were much more likely to be helped when they asked for directions, or asked for help in city stores, as compared to tighter cultures, where looking different is dangerous. It really enters a lot of uncertainty.

0:11:47 MG: Also, loose cultures are more creative, according to a lot of different studies, and they are more open to change. And so, again, that just speaks to this order versus openness trade-off, and tight cultures suffer on these indicators. They’re much more ethnocentric, they have much more cultural inertia, and they also have less creativity. But again, each context’s strengths is the other’s liabilities, and so there’s no… When people say, “Which is better?” it really depends on the criteria that you’re interested in.

0:12:19 SC: Yeah, I mean, putting aside which is better, it does sound like there’s gonna be a connection here between political orientation, at least in the standard dictionary definitions of liberal and conservative. Is it fair to associate liberalness with loose cultures and tightness with more conservative ones?

0:12:36 MG: I think that it’s really good question. These labels make sense a lot in the US, particularly ’cause they change meetings in different countries, but they’re really operating at different levels of analysis. So you could think about that there might be liberals living in tighter states, like in Kansas or in North Carolina which tends to veer tighter, or Texas, and there’s also conservatives that live in looser states like New York or California. But nevertheless, they kinda make each other up in the sense that liberals tend to like to have weaker norms and are more… Support norms that are looser, and likewise with conservative, so they really kind of operate at different levels of analysis. One is at the social level, at social norms, the other is at the individual level. Another way to think about it also is that we constantly, as individuals, navigate tight and loose contexts all the time, and we wouldn’t call those contexts conservative or liberal. For example, in a library, what would you say? Is that tight or loose?

0:13:37 SC: I would say libraries are pretty tight.

0:13:39 MG: Yeah. [chuckle] Exactly. So I’ve often wanted to go into libraries and start singing or dancing, or when I’m giving a colloquium, I always wanna do this, giving a talk at a major university. Let’s say I came out to your university, and I’m giving a talk and I start singing and dancing and breaking out some bourbon, people will think that’s really weird because that’s a really tight situation. There’s more restriction of range on what’s permissible, and people give feedback if you’re doing weird things. In weaker situations, weaker cultures, there’s a wider range of behaviors that are tolerated. So like in a public park, and so forth, or a party. These are contexts that are looser, that the sociologist Goffman identified years ago. And so those are contexts where we, again, we as humans, we ought… We navigate them constantly. We’re effortlessly are able to switch between tight and loose contexts, like a job interview or a funeral will be veering tight, versus other situations, with great ease. We don’t even recognize it. But, of course, around the world, situations vary tremendously. The same situation, as what we found in a Science paper, even a public park in Pakistan is much tighter, for example, it has a more restricted range of behavior than in the United States.

0:14:51 MG: And so it’s really fascinating that it’s a universal dimension that we deal with everyday, but we also… They vary a lot across cultures. And that’s where we start to realize that we can have a lot of conflict when we travel abroad, and use our own lens to see the world cultures. As I said, it’s invisible. And even the ancient philosopher Herodes said, we’re all pretty ethnocentric, he noticed this in his travels in the book histories, and so we don’t expect that things will vary that much. And when we start seeing these differences, especially on tight and loose, we could be pretty judgmental. So that’s why it’s really helpful to understand the construct. And I give one example that I found really strange when I was traveling to Singapore. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there before?

0:15:39 SC: Only to the airport. Yeah. Gorgeous.

0:15:40 MG: But it’s… Yeah, the airport’s beautiful, right? It’s just gorgeous. But Singapore’s called The Fine Country because you can get punished for so many different things, including not flushing the toilet in public settings, chewing gum is also illegal, bringing large quantities of gum into the country is illegal unless you’re using it for medicinal purposes. Even walking in front of your curtains naked is actually something you could be fined for. [laughter] Actually, I checked that on the statute to make sure that’s not fake news. And, you know, all these things seem so ridiculous, but actually, what I discovered in terms of why these differences might make sense is that tight and loose cultures tend to evolve for good reasons. And one of the most important reasons they vary on is how much threat that they’ve had throughout their histories.

0:16:27 MG: And that threat could be either from mother nature, think chronic natural disasters, like Japan has had, or it could be population density, how many people per square mile around you, which could cause a lot of chaos, that’s… Singapore’s a rare example of 20,000 people per square mile, compared to New Zealand that has 30 people per square mile, and more sheep per capita than people. And also, invasions is another thing we thought about, human-made threats. So countries, over the last 100 years, we measured this, that have had to face potential invasions on their territory also tend to veer tight. And the logic is pretty simple. When you have a lot of collective threat, you need strong rules to coordinate, to survive. And in contexts where you’ve less threat, you can afford to have much more permissiveness because you don’t need to coordinate as much.

0:17:14 SC: Right.

0:17:14 MG: And that principle turns out to help explain, for example, this gum ban in Singapore, which, from American point of view, sounds pretty ridiculous, but apparently, people were chewing a lot of gum in this very tight space, where people feel like they’re living in an elevator a lot of their life, this is so crowded, and people were basically throwing their gum on the ground and it was causing a total mess in Singapore, this was in the late 80s, and it was causing trains to malfunction ’cause the gum was getting caught in sensors and elevators. And Lee Kuan knew, at the time, just said, “Hey guys, we’re just gonna have to ban this tasty treat,” in a place where there’s so many mouths per capita. And so it makes sense that that works in certain contexts. Not all cultural differences, of course, make sense, but there’s a really important principle that relates to tightness and looseness that relates to threat that I found across nations, across states, across social class, organizations that helps us to make sense of these differences with a little bit more empathy.

0:18:13 SC: And maybe also just different situations within the same culture. I can imagine that the threat level is a lot higher if you’re in the military than if you’re an undergraduate at university. [chuckle] And there’s probably a corresponding tightness-looseness distinction there too.

0:18:28 MG: Yeah, exactly. It’s funny because when organizations like the military or airlines or nuclear power plants or hospitals… These are places that need rules ’cause they need to coordinate a lot as compared to startups or design. And when the whole fiasco came out about United, which arguably people were following rules too much in this context, but nevertheless, and I wrote about this, United is a context, and airlines, in general, that you want a lot of rules. You don’t want people just making all sorts of weird decisions. You know what I’m saying?

0:19:00 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:19:00 MG: But, nevertheless, and I’ll talk about this a little later, because there’s no question that cultures can get exceedingly tight or exceedingly loose, and that has a lot of problems. And then we have to start negotiating culture, which is an exciting idea because we invented norms and we adapted as a species in terms of the strength of norms in a lot of ways, remarkably well to our ecologies, but sometimes we can get out of whack, and become too tight or too loose, and that’s where we have a lot of problems. And I spend a lot of time in the book toward the end talking about how we can harness the power of social norms to have a better planet when that kind of miscalibration happens.

0:19:39 SC: Yeah, before I forget, there is something that zoomed by that I wanna home in on. New York is an example of a relatively loose culture, as far as states in the United States are concerned, right? And a place like North Carolina is tighter. So, are you gonna tell me, maybe this is true, that the clocks out in public spaces in New York City are more likely to agree with each other and with the right universal time than the clocks in Charlotte, North Carolina?

0:20:09 MG: Well, no, so New York is loose, so clocks tends to be…

0:20:12 SC: Sorry, less likely. I just said that wrong. Yeah.

0:20:15 MG: Yeah, that’s right, although I haven’t studied clocks within the context of the US, this was internationally, but that’d be really exciting to do that kind of work. What’s interesting…

0:20:23 SC: Yeah, and you’re making a prediction, right? So that’s a testable thing.

0:20:26 MG: That’s right. That’s right, it’s testable. And we can also make a prediction by looking at what people wear and what they drive. Do they tend to be more similar? There’s more synchrony in these contexts. Are there more security cameras? Is there more monitoring per capita that helps to keep people behaving themselves? I could tell you that I’ve had my end of one experience in the South as a New Yorker, I’m from New York originally, and in our data analysis, we could see that loose states tend to be much more rude than tight states, which are more polite.

[chuckle]

0:20:57 SC: Yeah.

0:20:58 MG: Tight states tend to be, in our data, a little more boring and loose states tend to be more interesting according to the data, in terms of recreational options. So there is this trade-off, again, at the state level. But I remember driving down to South Carolina, and was with my then boyfriend, now husband, and someone cut us off, maybe accidentally, but we basically flipped them off, which, in New York, is almost like a friendly gesture. [chuckle] And this actually turned… This was such an insult. I mean, the South is an honor culture, in general, as my colleague Dov Cohen and [0:21:26] ____ would say, and honor cultures tend to be pretty tight. Not all tight cultures are honor cultures, but honor cultures have a lot of regulations around social etiquette and around norms for politeness and behavior. And so that even tiny little signal of flipping someone off the bird turned into a car chase on the highway that was really very aggravating, and really… I was terrified, to say the least. So obviously, I’m not gonna recommend to study that behavior.

[laughter]

0:21:55 MG: But what’s fascinating about New York, and I wanna point this out as an exception, is that people might say, “Well, New York is really highly densely populated.” You just said that that would veer… Kind of foster tightness, and there’s factors that, of course, override this general principle, and one of them has to do with diversity. So when you have a lot of diversity, like New York has and has for decades, and we’ve actually tracked the level of diversity in the US 50 states over the last 200 years. When you have a lot of diversity, it’s harder to agree on norms for behavior, you have to have more tolerance for multiple ways of doing things. And also, when you have a context where there’s a lot of anonymity, where people are not really watching what people are doing… In New York, there’s a lot of anonymity, a lot of mobility, where people coming and going, that makes it harder to have a gossip mill, like you might find in the South, in small towns, and so forth, that would kinda make people feel more like they have to be on their best behavior. And so, those things like anonymity and mobility and diversity are really also… They really are levers toward looseness. So I think it’s important any time we try to analyze a context is to kinda look at it generally, its ecology, its structure, and then try to make predictions based on multiple factors, because that way, we can be more accurate in our estimations.

0:23:15 SC: That actually clears something up, because I was going to ask about, rather than a state-by-state analysis, is there an urban versus rural kind of divide? And I might have guessed, on the basis of the Singapore example, that urban environments would be tighter, but they also would tend to be more diverse. So there’s an obvious difference between New York or Los Angeles versus a place like Singapore, which I don’t know the demographics perfectly, but I’m betting it’s less diverse.

0:23:40 MG: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, these are really important questions, ’cause, again, we can analyze Singapore and look at it. It’s a place that is entirely urban, there’s nowhere to go in Singapore, [chuckle] it’s a city. There’s also three different ethnic groups there. And so, when you’re… If you’re really in a context where you can’t go anywhere, it’s hugely densely populated, it makes a lot of sense to have strict rules to help people coordinate. That’s what Lee Kuan knew said in his autobiography, he looked at their ecology in terms of lack of arable land, in terms of high density, in terms of… You can’t escape this place, so we’d better have rules that help us coordinate and to get along. There’s other things that you can look at to predict tightness in urban areas, because, again, I think, in general, urban areas should be looser, ’cause they tend to be more diverse and they tend to have more mobility, but not always. For example, in a recent paper in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was mapping the 30-plus provinces in China on tight-loose using our measures, they found some super interesting findings, where the urban areas were way tighter than the rural areas in China.

0:24:46 MG: And that’s because they’re, again, really densely populated, they’re having incredible influxes of people from the countryside, and the government was saying, “Look, we gotta have rules here, we have security cameras everywhere, we have ways to track people’s social credit score to make sure they behave themselves,” because it could be completely chaotic. When you have… When you’re away from Beijing, you are far away from the kinda big brother’s eyes upon you, you can be looser in China, and so there’s lots of different factors that predict tight-loose within a nation. This work is really just starting up, that in 10, 20 years, we’ll have even more fine-grained predictions around context based on all these multitude of factors.

0:25:28 SC: A lot of this distinction between tight and loose relates to how closely we follow social norms, as you’ve said, which is, by definition, a social collective kind of phenomenon, but the traits that you’re mentioning do seem like they might have reflections in just individual psychology, right? Are there tight and loose people? Is that a personality type?

0:25:50 MG: That’s such a good question, and I’ve been kind of wary of using the same labels to talk about individuals as you do about cultures. We did this with collectivism, and it caused a lot of levels of analysis problems that… How do you think about collectivist individuals and whole collectivist nations? So I think about it as what individual level attributes are needed or cultivated to fit into and support the strength of norms, ’cause you can’t have strong norms without people who are behaving in ways that support them, or likewise, you can’t have weaker norms, like when you’re out in public parks, without having individual attributes that fit into them and make them up.

0:26:28 MG: And so just… For example, I would say a sort of tight mindset that’s cultivated… And I found this… Evidence for this with certain measures is that, in tighter cultures, you have to socialize your kids to follow rules, to be… Have more self-monitoring to kind of notice rules and monitor your impulses in order to fit into them. In looser cultures, you don’t need to have those skills as much. You could be low self-monitors. We know a lot of these people around us who were doing weird things all the time and don’t even notice it. In loose cultures, you can have less impulse control, because you’re not afraid of punishments, whereas in tight cultures you have to monitor impulses.

0:27:03 MG: So in China and Japan and other tighter cultures, you’re taught from a very young age that you should be monitoring your impulses and being aware of how you’re fitting in to the norms. On the flip side, in loose cultures, you need to have a lot of tolerance for ambiguity, because you’re gonna enter a lot of weird situations where people are doing some strange stuff, so you have to be tolerant of those differences. So we’ve measured these kinds of things, things like self-monitoring or impulse control, how much you’re trying to prevent making mistakes, how much do you like structure or do you like ambiguity, and all these things, at the individual level, through what we call multi-level analysis are connected to the larger cultural context in general, even though all cultures have people that have variation on these attributes.

0:27:47 MG: Clearly, there’s a connection with how we’re training our kids to be good cultural citizens in terms of those psychological attributes, so I will say that I have a tight… One last thing on this, I have a tight-loose mindset quiz that you could take on my website, that, again, kind of… It’s measuring these attributes, of self-monitoring, impulse control, prevention-focused, need for order. Actually, just one metaphor that comes from The Muppets. Dahlia Lithwick had used this term order versus chaos Muppets. So there’s like Ernie, and Bert, and Cookie Monster, and Animal, and they vary really predictably on how much they like rules versus how much they’re doing crazy things, and that’s one way to think about it at the individual level, is that, yes, each of us do have a default setting. We can… As I mentioned, we adapt to situations very easily when they change in the strength of norms, but you can imagine the conflicts that happen.

0:28:38 MG: I veer sort of looser. My husband’s a lawyer, he veers tighter, and we have to negotiate this a lot, even with our kids, so that’s a whole other story, but that’s kind of a long answer to your question, that it’s… I would say, yes, at the individual level, we can find differences, but I would say that they’re more about mindsets than about some personality, one personality difference.

0:29:00 SC: Well, and there must be a sort of nature versus nurture question here as well. I mean, how much does just having to be… Happening to be born in a tight or loose culture affect your personality traits that are relevant here as you’re growing up?

0:29:13 MG: It’s such a good question. I mean… And we don’t really have data on this. We have some genetic evidence about what kinds of genes might be more likely to be found in contexts that have a lot of ecological threat in terms of disasters and invasions, and things like that, it’s called the short allele. But it’s correlational data, and now we’re kind of starting to work with some people looking at culture-gene co-evolution, to see how do these things reinforce each other, because, particularly in some contexts that have had threat over centuries, you would imagine that certain traits might be selected for because they’re more adaptable in certain context. At the same time, I wanna mention that tight and loose are really dynamic constructs, and I was mentioning that threat is a big predictor of tightness, and we’ve measured that chronically over 100 years, but I can activate threat in my laboratory, whether it’s about population density or pathogens or invasions, and people instantly tighten up, even if it’s fake threat.

[chuckle]

0:30:13 MG: I mean, it’s… These are the silly experiments that psychologists do. I mean, they don’t last very long, but we see this very clearly, the same principle. You could see that very quickly, and people can tighten up when they feel threat, whether real or imagined, and what’s fascinating, we found this in some of our computational models, is that when you reduce threat, it takes much longer for people to loosen up. There’s kind of this asymmetry that we see in multiple models, that when we try to model this with artificial people, we could see that it takes much longer to go from tight to loose than from loose to tight.

0:30:49 SC: Interesting. So like we can…

0:30:50 MG: So, I think that…

0:30:50 SC: We can… Our tightness can be activated very easily, but then it takes time to calm down once again?

0:30:55 MG: Exactly. I think there’s something about human nature around being kind of prevention-focused or risk-avoidant when you’re… But it’s a really interesting question. Now we’re trying to design experiments to figure out how do you loosen up a context that’s getting too tight, because… And too tight artificially, because, as I mentioned, we know the trade-off of tight-loose is order-openness, in general, and we know that when cultures are pretty tight, they’re really synchronized, they have a lot of order, but they start becoming more ethnocentric, and they lose out on innovation and creativity and on adaptability, so we don’t wanna be artificially tight, and that’s where I think some of the more recent work we’re trying to do is how to really kind of help facilitate that in a world where, while objective threat seem to be decreasing, of course, we have to be vigilant, but compared to hundreds of years ago, as Steven Pinker would argue, we seem to be feeling more threatened just based on social media and based on threat rhetoric that we see propagated through our leaders, through the internet.

0:32:03 MG: By the way, we just recently created a new computational dictionary to assess threat in social media, to then track what’s happening when we see a lot of threat in presidential speeches or in Facebook or otherwise, how is that predicting, in real-time, changes in creativity or openness, and other things, because we think that there’s a lot of that big data that can be harnessed to kinda understand the psychology of threat and tightness out there in the cyber world.

0:32:33 SC: Am I remembering correctly? There were some experiments done with kids… I forget whether it was you who were doing them, or just quoting them, that sort of illuminated, even at a very early age, these differences between openness and closeness?

0:32:47 MG: Yeah, that’s a… This is our first experiment with young children, which are 3-year-olds. I’m a generalist, so I’ll study anything if it… If the method helps us to understand the phenomenon.

0:33:00 SC: Yeah.

0:33:00 MG: And we were actually… In this case, we’re interested in cultural differences, and tight-loose across different social classes. And the argument that we made… And we were building on Melvin Kohn, a famous sociologist, who wrote a book, Class and Conformity, in the late 60s. We were arguing that the working class should be tighter because they’re worried about falling into poverty, and they have a lot of more threats when it comes to occupations, in terms of danger, or neighborhoods, or much… Need… Require rules to help kids stay safe. But we hadn’t ever systematically looked at this across the working and upper class. Upper class, the argument is that they can afford to break rules. The whole country tends to be organized around, “Break the rules.” And I even have these crazy children’s books that are all like, “Anarchy… Create anarchy for kids.” [chuckle]

0:33:46 SC: Yeah, yeah.

0:33:46 MG: And, actually, that’s good advice for people who have a cushion, who have a safety net…

0:33:52 SC: Privileged things, yeah.

0:33:52 MG: Where you can make mistakes. With the working class, you don’t have that, because you could be really super poor, living in chaos, which is actually normless, in many ways, as Durkheim would say. So we started to look at this in the working class and middle class. And first, we started asking adults, “What do you think about rules?” We just asked people. So think about following the rules, what comes to mind? Breaking the rules, what comes to mind? And we found this really interesting pattern, that it’s the working class that thought rules are good, they provide structure, they are safe. And whereas the upper class, middle and upper class were like, “Oh, it’s a nuisance. Goody two-shoes was associated with rules.” What you think about when you think about kind of middle and upper class America, and we wanted to see how early these differences arise. So we brought 3-year-olds into the lab. And you can’t exactly ask 3-year-olds, “So, what do you think of rules?”

[laughter]

0:34:40 MG: They’re 3. [chuckle]

0:34:41 SC: How norm-governed are you? Yeah.

0:34:44 MG: They just look at us like, “What? I mean, even my teenagers might say that.” But we can use this paradigm that was actually developed by Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist. And it’s fascinating. You basically just have kids play with a puppet. So they’re playing with a puppet, Max the puppet, and they’re befriending the puppet. They’re playing new games, with new rules, and all of a sudden, Max does something kind of weird, he starts violating the rules. And I would say, “He’s playing the game right.” But he’s clearly like Max the norm violator suddenly. And you can [0:35:12] ____ these kids, and see how do they react. And that’s exactly what myself and Jesse Harrington did. We found really interesting differences. It was the working class kids that got more upset with Max the puppet when he violated the rules. They told him to stop. They were upset about this. Again, in general, the upper class kids, they were more likely to laugh. They would let Max off the hook, even by age 3. And again, when we measure parental attitudes about rules, we see that it’s the working class parents who think rules are really important. Their implicit theories around rules are that they’re good, they’re needed, they’re functional.

0:35:46 MG: So this was kind of something that’s super interesting for us, is to start looking at this kind of developmental perspective on this. We started to, now, design some work on neuroscience and development, to peer into the brain and to see what’s happening as people were witnessing Max the puppet violating rules. What’s happening as early as 3 years old? ‘Cause we know that, in later adulthood, people from different tight and loose cultures are processing norm violations differently in the brain, and we wanna see how far… How early can we start seeing those differences? ‘Cause kids really start learning about norms and rules really, really early, that’s what we know from developmental psychology, is even before they have language, infants have been found to… When they’re watching puppets doing weird things, they avoid them, and when they watch puppets that are nice, they start reaching for them. [chuckle] So it’s crazy interesting to think about us, as a species, rules are just so important, but they’re not… Haven’t been really studied, but they’re really super important. All countries need rules. You can imagine a context where there’s… No one’s following any rules, it’ll be completely chaotic, and unpredictable. And so that’s why we could see this happening so early, ’cause it’s such an important aspect of our human sociality.

0:36:58 SC: So you’re telling me that all of the Hollywood stereotypes about rich kids who think that the rules don’t apply to them are just the truth?

[laughter]

0:37:06 MG: Well, you know, it’s interesting, I think that it’s probably curvilinear. I think, actually, everything’s curvilinear, but we just don’t have the power to detect it.

0:37:13 SC: Sure.

0:37:13 MG: But you think about Victorian England, like super, super rich, old rich, and these are places that had very strict rules. We never surveyed them, but I’d put the college education funds on that for the kids.

[laughter]

0:37:28 MG: And that’s a very serious bet, because I have a kid in college now.

0:37:31 SC: Yeah? Well, yes.

0:37:31 MG: But I think that also, like I said, super poor, we think, are really loose to the extent that there’s normlessness, and that’s what the working class are trying to avoid. So there’s probably some non-linear patterns. But we haven’t been able to detect that yet, ’cause we don’t have access to some of these samples, but that’s what I would sort of speculate on.

0:37:51 SC: Well, you’ve mentioned several times the research that you’ve done, the papers that you publish, and so forth. So, just methodologically, what does that involve? How do you study the amount of openness, closeness, looseness, tightness in different cultures through space and time?

0:38:07 MG: Yeah, this is a great question. And I think that, in any science, using multiple methods is really important to be able to see if you have converging patterns, particularly when you do cross-culture research, there’s so many kind of rival hypotheses. Even the way you word a question, or translations, or the person that’s giving you the survey might elicit a different response. There was some interesting data that showed that if in China… In Hong Kong, if a study was being told as it was funded in Hong Kong, versus it was funded in mainland China, it changed people’s responses. There’s just very subtle ways that you can change responses in the laboratory, in surveys, on obtrusive observations across cultures. I wrote a whole paper on just how many rival hypotheses you have to rule out during cross-culture research.

[laughter]

0:38:54 MG: And I think if the editors said that, no one’s gonna wanna do cross-culture research if they read this paper.

[chuckle]

0:39:00 SC: There you go.

0:39:00 MG: And I said, “That’s fine.” It’s just… It’s such a… And I also make so many mistakes doing cross-culture research. And now, I’ll get to the answer, but just one funny story, you’d think that I’m not such a schmuck, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, but I still fail to anticipate how culture will kind of manifest itself in the method. And so, in that study where I sent students around the world with these facial warts or with the tattoos, this was through a Humboldt grant, and we trained them in Bremen, in Germany, to go back to their home countries. And it was legal, it was ethical, it was totally kosher to do these kinds of interventions, wearing these crazy things on their faces. But what I didn’t anticipate was that as people get back to their countries, even if they were standardized, they just, one by one, the tightness of the cultures… The students, they wrote me, they said, “I just can’t do this. I can’t bring myself to do this. It’s just too embarrassing and I’m just too worried to do this.” And that’s exactly what I’m studying. How I didn’t anticipate that is just ridiculous. [chuckle] So, that’s just to say that… I wrote a paper about all the mistakes I’ve made, the schmuck moves I’ve made as a cross-cultural psychologist, ’cause I want other younger scholars to realize it’s really not easy. You don’t even realize it, how easy culture becomes part of the method.

0:40:14 MG: So, anyway, back to your main question was I try to use lots of different methods. Sometimes I use surveys and I ask people to directly answer questions about the construct and about what they perceive to be the strength or weakness of situations in the environment, what’s permissible. For example, we might ask how permissible is it to sing or to dance or to burp or to eat in an elevator or in a party or in a library? And we can then assess across countries the range of behavior that seems permissible. We could see reliably that tighter cultures, they tend to say no, they’re much less permissible. Or we can… In more recent work, we coded ethnographies. So, these are now hundreds of pages of documents in the standard sample, it’s called. These are pre-industrial societies. We can’t ask people questions in these contexts, we can’t observe them. But luckily, anthropologists have detailed these societies to incredible amount of depth, and we can then code… I’m not… I don’t wanna say this gave me a lot of gray hair, but this took several years of work to train people to actually code ethnographies. We can code them in different domains of life, ’cause they have lots of details on socialization, how are kids socialized.

0:41:28 MG: They have lots of details on funerals, on sexuality, on gender, on legal systems, and we can code those for the strength of norms and we can then see, do they… Through a factor analysis, is there any kind of coherence? And that’s exactly what we showed. And remarkably, other people assessed how threatened these contexts are in terms of natural resources, in terms of invasions, and we see very similar patterns in the ethnographic record. And I say this within a minute and a half, but this took, as I mentioned, five years, this project, [chuckle] and that was finally under review. Or, like I mentioned, we can go out and have people interact with people in public settings, or we can measure the degree of monitoring by police, as another indicator. So, we try to use many methods, including, more recently, I mentioned computational modeling, because we wanna test predictions about the evolution of this construct, and that’s hard to do with laboratory experiments or with single-study, one-time, cross-sectional types of data. Even more recently, we started developing dictionaries of tight-loose with people in linguistics, where we can track over time the language people use in newspapers and in books.

0:42:37 MG: And we could see, for example, the US, over the last 200 years, in a paper we just published in Nature Human Behaviour, is actually loosened up quite a bit, it’s starting to tighten up in our data, but it has had a trend of being much looser in terms of the words people use in common vernacular. Anyway, that’s a long-winded answer to just say that we’ve never met a method we don’t like, and I’d love to partner with some physicists at some point. And we work with biologists, we work with now mathematicians and computer scientists and neuroscientists. But I have to say, sadly, we’ve never met a physicist we collaborated with, but it’s not out of the range of possibilities.

0:43:15 SC: No, not at all. But it also makes me wonder are there differences between academic disciplines in the amount of tightness or looseness…

0:43:21 MG: Definitely.

0:43:21 SC: Either faculty or students?

0:43:23 MG: Yeah, definitely. My colleague Ben Schneider would say that people make the place in organizations. And no doubt, we see that people who are attracted to certain disciplines have already different values, different personality differences. People attracted to economics are very different than psychology. And so, I think that that’s something we haven’t studied systematically. We started to do some, again, factor analysis, that’s just a fancy way of saying simplified patterns with data with the Department of Labor’s O*NET database, which tracks occupation. Every single occupation they have on this O*NET website, the knowledge, skills and abilities that you need for that occupation, and also the kind of work context you have in terms of what we’re interested, threat, coordination versus experimentation. And we’re starting to dig into that database to show patterns of which occupations tend to be tighter or looser. And it makes a lot of sense; the same principles can apply to understanding occupations as well. And it’s important, because you might not realize your own mindset might not fit with that occupation.

0:44:30 MG: My husband is a lawyer. Law firms and accounting and other types of fields where there’s a lot of accountability, which is a big driver of tightness, they need to veer tighter. Keep things…

0:44:40 SC: Sure. That means perfect sense.

0:44:41 MG: I’m in a context where there’s much less accountability per se, not… I obviously feel personally accountable, but there’s very big differences in who’s gonna fit those occupations, and I think I’ve navigated to the right balance in terms of order and openness with academia that is not found in other contexts.

0:45:00 SC: Well, but it’s interesting, because there are these multiple factors that come into it. And I think, me, living my whole life in academic settings is just the natural thing for me to think about, but if I’m thinking of an English Literature major, my intuitive feeling is that there’s a looseness associated with that culture. On the other hand, maybe they’re under threat, maybe they don’t have as much social cache or funding, or whatever. So I’m not sure that my intuition is pointing in the right direction.

0:45:27 MG: Yeah, it’s interesting. We haven’t actually studied those contexts, but I do think that we could assess these reliably and try to understand them. I would say academia is an interesting context in terms of what I call the Goldilocks principle of tight-loose, because we need to have both loose elements and tight elements in our toolbox in order to see it in academia, and we need to have looseness in the sense that that helps us to create ideas, but we need to have some tightness because that helps us to implement those ideas and to scale up and to actually get them to actually go to fruition. And so, I think, actually, academic life involves, fundamentally, both tight and loose mindsets. And in fact, in business, the most innovative companies and the most innovative countries, we found, again, have a balance of tight and loose, because some loose cultures and companies can really do great at creativity, but then they suffer when they try to implement things. Think Tesla. They… I wrote an op-ed recently, like, “That is a great, loose place and he’s brilliant, but they need some tightness to scale up production.”

[chuckle]

0:46:39 MG: And I’m sure I’m not getting a lot of fans out there, Tesla fans. But on the flip side, you can imagine…

0:46:46 SC: By the way, I can say that, as a matter of data, I visited Tesla, I’ve been on the factory floor. No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, making this up. I visited SpaceX.

0:46:56 MG: Oh. [chuckle]

0:46:56 SC: So, I presume it’s a similar command and control structure, but it is the cleanest factory I’ve ever seen.

[chuckle]

0:47:03 SC: And maybe Space X is different than Tesla, in this way. But it’s not very loosey goosey there, the SpaceX factory.

0:47:09 MG: Yeah. A lot of manufacturing contexts veer tighter because they need to be tighter to coordinate and have more efficiency. And again, the companies that are most innovative… What I mean by innovative is that you not just have good ideas, but you can actually scale them up, have to do both. They need leaders who can effortlessly switch gears. And it’s hard, because the people who are attracted to startups tend to have loose mindsets. And I’ve talked to some startup-ers, they call themselves serial startup-ers, because once they start scaling up or get bought out, they don’t like the rules, they’re like, “Oh, I gotta get out of here. I can’t stand this regulation that has to come with scaling up,” and vice versa. Tight companies, they are really good at implementing things, but they might not be good at coming up with really cool, creative ideas. And so, this is where the tight-loose trade-off comes into play. To be really super innovative, you need both mindsets. And we could see, at the national level, that it’s really that balance of having some balance of tight-loose that can help countries be innovative.

0:48:10 SC: Well, that definitely seems to be a message of your book, that there’s some Aristotelian mean here, between being too tight and too loose. On the one hand, a looser culture might be more creative and open, but on the other hand, they will also have more crime. And so, presumably there’s some intermediate stage where everything is the best to compromise, but maybe… That’s hard to find maybe.

0:48:30 MG: Hunky dory. [chuckle] Yeah, I think… I would say… Yeah, I would say that groups need to veer tight or loose for good ecological reasons. That’s where we see variation with social class, with organizations, comparing United versus Tesla, or nations. But it’s the groups that get too extreme in any direction that start having really big problems. And we showed this in the paper we published, that the relationship between tight-loose is curvilinear, with a lot of outcomes. And the idea is simple, groups that get extraordinarily loose can’t predict behavior and they become very chaotic. Whereas, groups that are really tight are very repressive. Durkheim called this sort of anomic suicide when it comes to becoming too loose, he didn’t use the term loose, but I would say that’s what he was talking about, or too fatalistic in terms of suicide, if they get so repressive. And we actually show that it’s the extremely loose and extremely tight cultures that have high suicide rates, or have low wealth, or have high degrees of depression and low happiness. And one example of this, in terms of dynamics, is analyzing the dynamics happening in Egypt, ’cause often systems go between these extremes, and Egypt is a good example of a place where it was super-tight, a very high degree of oppression and control.

0:49:44 MG: When Mubarak was ousted, the system went to the exact opposite, went to… Basically to the other extreme, and people were screaming, “freedom” in the streets at first, but then suddenly, it was like, “Wait, this place is chaotic. We can’t do anything and coordinate and predict each other’s behavior.” And there was a lot of chaos. And what we found, in our surveys in Egypt at the time, is that the people perceived that chaos really wanted another autocratic regime in place again. They were wanting to have the Salafis or the Muslim Brotherhood take over, because that extreme looseness, that chaos that ensued after taking out this top-down control without any kind of meso-level institutions picking up the pieces, it produces what I call autocratic recidivism. It produces this exact opposite pattern. And for Americans, it seems so puzzling, but for us, as cross-cultural psychologists, it didn’t, because when there’s chaos in this extreme looseness context, whether it’s in the Philippines or in Russia or anywhere, or if it’s just perceived, people want tightness, because it’s kind of functional in many ways. But often, it’s over… We see people and groups overshooting in that tightness, and then we have problems at the other extreme. [chuckle] So, that’s not painting a great, rosy picture, but at least we can understand dynamics through the lens of norms. And often, we think about other factors, structural factors.

0:51:05 SC: Maybe it should make sense to us. Maybe the US is a little bit atypical in how close we’ve been to the medium over time. But in European history, I think we can certainly see these wild oscillations back and forth, whether it’s the French Revolution or Weimar Germany, where you go from very loose to very tight, and trying to find that middle ground can be harder than it sounds in theory.

0:51:29 MG: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think right now we’re trying to do some more work in ancient history, looking at the evolution of tight and loose. I’m working with Peter Turchin who’s at UConn, who’s an evolutionary biologist, and he’s developed this great database called Seshat that’s trying to mathematize history in really incredibly interesting ways. Again, really time-consuming, and so forth, but we wanna try to look at this more systematically to see how does tight-loose relate to resilience and stability and change over hundreds and thousands of years? I mean, it’s not a new concept. It’s relevant, since we’ve been on earth, that groups develop rules, and the strictness with which we adhere to them varies. So, we wanna go even further back to trace exactly what you’re talking about.

0:52:14 MG: And the US, it’s an interesting place. We’re a baby country. We’ve been separated by two oceans from the rest of the world. We’ve had some conflict, obviously, of course, but… Actually, my younger daughter who’s now 15, some years ago, she asked me if I was worried about Canada and Mexico invading us. And, of course, some people might answer that differently now, but I’m like, I thought it was the funniest thing. We take for granted. Of course, there’s some pockets of the US that have more natural disasters and more pathogens and more scarcity and they tend to be tighter in our data. But nevertheless, I think that we’re struggling now as a nation with how much threat is real and how much it’s perceived, because perceived threat has this very similar impact, and what we are finding in some of our research is that people are vastly overestimating threats even based on actual data, for example, on illegal immigrants.

0:53:03 MG: People vastly overestimate the problem, and they also vastly overestimate how much groups who come to this country, as just one threat, are gonna be loosening the fabric of this country. In fact, immigrants, it’s found, actually are more likely to pay attention to rules. And so it’s just something now that we’re in very new territory and trying to negotiate tight-loose in the US based on objective threat.

0:53:29 SC: I mean, this talk about how well we adhere to the norms is kind of… Almost puts to the background the question of what the norms are, and maybe is it completely neutral as to what the choice of norms are, whether you obey them or not? I had this podcast conversation with Nicholas Christakis, where he mentioned a tiny culture that was… Somehow, it had developed a norm against romantic love so that you would… You know, there was this norm that you would just sort of have sex with different partners for a couple of weeks and then move on to someone else, and there were always these young rebels who would run away and get married, like Romeo and Juliet. But, I mean, maybe it doesn’t matter what the norms are but is there some relationship with what kind of norms there are versus how tight or loose a culture is?

0:54:22 MG: Yeah. It’s so interesting. I mean, this is what we studied with the standard sample data, ’cause we were analyzing the strength of norms in gender and sexuality and funerals and ethics, and we found that there’s a lot of coherence, that when norm sent to restrict rules and behavior in one domain, like in gender or sexuality, they tend to also restrict them in other domains. There tends to be… That doesn’t mean that some contexts… I mean, every culture has tight and loose elements. If they don’t, then they’re gonna, like I mentioned, have serious problems. Even Japan, one of the tightest cultures in our data has context where people go crazy, in terms of drinking and weird… Not weird, video games and things like that. Iran, a very tight culture, has an underground of looseness. So, we can find pockets of it in any country in any context. But we do tend to find that there tends to be a spillover effect in different domains of life. And now we’re starting to develop scales that try to assess different domains of tightness when it comes to language or to gender or how you treat authorities or public behavior in public settings so that we could start to really map this profiles in different groups.

0:55:31 MG: But as I said, so far, we’ve seen a lot of coherence in terms of that domains tend to have tightness, have a logic in terms of being permissive or strict. Your question really, though, I think, is also about how do we judge other cultures for their norms? And this is really difficult ’cause I’m a feminist but I’m also a cross-cultural psychologist and I tend to have some ethical issues around this because I wanna be open to the fact that different cultures have different rules and that they’ve evolved for different reasons and that we can’t just judge them with our own sort of glasses. At the same time, I think that I believe that when it comes to physical harm, I would say no. I would judge that norm, to say when physical harm is inflicted on women or girls or whatnot, that that’s a problem, and I think that’s where I would draw my line.

0:56:24 MG: But often, I think it’s the case that we have to still understand where these traditions come from and how to negotiate them. That’s happening a lot now in the international development world. It’s fascinating because a lot of times these organizations have gone into Africa and other contexts trying to change behavior, whether it’s genital cutting or whether it’s breastfeeding and early childhood marriage, and they come in and they just try to change people’s attitudes, and they don’t recognize that, they’re starting to recognize now, there’s a huge movement going on in that world, that it’s really norms, that you can change attitudes but if there’s strong norms against these practices, you gotta understand where they came from and how to negotiate those underlying values that support those norms, because in those contexts, you could change attitudes all you want but people still will be worried about being punished for changing them. So, that’s something I also talk about toward the end of the book, in terms of that international development world and tight-loose.

0:57:18 SC: Yeah. Speaking of which, is there a relationship between tight-loose and cosmopolitanism or isolationism? I mean, how welcoming we are not just to what’s happening in our norms in our local environment but to completely other cultures? Is there an openness, I expect? As I’m asking the question, I think I’m answering it also.

0:57:35 MG: Yeah.

0:57:35 SC: I would imagine that looser cultures are also more open to mingling with other cultures.

0:57:41 MG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s definitely a strong connection because those context… The loose context… I think, actually, looseness is really about having a lot of diversity in many contexts and you can’t really agree on one norm that will guide behavior. So, it automatically fosters that kind of openness to other cultures. And I would say that a lot of the conflict we have around the world these days is kind of on the axis of tight-loose, this kind of context where in any country that are feeling a lot of threat and that wanna turn inward, and that are largely feeling the threat of globalization and immigration, as compared to the context in every country where people thrive on diversity and openness.

0:58:23 MG: And I think what we need to do is understand each others’ perspectives, where do these threats come from? A lot of the work that we’ve done showed that people who feel a lot of threat, whether it’s from ISIS or from economics, they tend to think the system is too loose. They’re worried about the permissiveness in the country, and that, in turn, is, in part, explaining their vote for people like Trump or Le Pen or Brexit. And so I think we have to not think about this as some puzzle in history. When people feel threatened, and that’s happening a lot in the manufacturing belt… I just drove through Michigan recently, I was just amazed to see the ghost towns that exist. And I think that we’re not really thinking about how do we actually help people feel less threatened.

0:59:09 MG: In the book, I talk about the working class in the United States where loose individuals… Culture. We don’t tend to actually have structures to help the working class. In Germany, by contrast, which is tighter, there are standardized procedures to help the working class. There are ways to have a certificate to go back between different companies. There’s more of a helping system that is organized to help connect people in local communities to educators to businesses, and that’s really helpful because then we can ward off that threat. But as long as we just kind of think that we could just let people fend for themselves, it makes it really hard in context where there’s increasing economic competition and globalization, and so forth.

0:59:55 SC: But that’s… You mentioned Germany as a tight culture. So, in some sense, that this is a strategy that a tight culture can have to make things easier and alleviate that threat if they make it easier to go back and forth between jobs. Is that the idea?

1:00:10 MG: Yeah, there’s a whole structure in Germany where when you’re tracked into a vocational type of job versus college education, there’s a whole system to help people to actually really thrive in those contexts, is my understanding. And in terms of being able to have these certificates that are standardized, that help you go between different types of companies, and that’s not the case, you have to relearn a lot. And I think it’s fascinating ’cause we just think… In the US, I’ve interviewed some people on this… In manufacturing context that wanna loosen up, be more creative, where they have a lot of people from the working class that have been in these companies, they don’t understand that this is not gonna be just easy to just switch suddenly to becoming this creative person versus…

[chuckle]

1:00:56 MG: It’s like, remember how far back it goes, to at least 3 years old. It’s just… People don’t realize that it’s very difficult to go from tight to loose. And I have some stories about this in the book, where clearly people recognize sometimes, “Wow, we gotta really tighten up, we gotta loosen up.” But there’s real threats that people perceive on either vantage point. When you’re trying to tighten up, groups feel like a real serious threat to autonomy. And I talked to Bob Herbold who talked me out… Microsoft when he tried to tighten up things ’cause they were kind of chaotic, that he got a lot of pushback. Or on the flip side, when you’re trying to loosen up things too quickly, people feel a sense of unpredictability and they feel loss of control. So the best leaders try to help deal with those needs and they’re also patient, Americans are not exactly known for our patience, [1:01:42] ____ noticed this about us, I’m studied in American and patience, but these things take time.

1:01:48 MG: And they also take a lot of patience because, as I’ve noticed with some places I’ve interviewed when they’re trying… Companies like manufacturing trying to loosen up, they tend to bring in a loose unit who is gonna help them become more creative, but then they have all these culture clashes because they can’t really stand each other, they have a lot of problems with each other. The loose group thinks they’re being too controlling, the tight group thinks that the new group is missing deadlines and is just really unpredictable. So it’s… I talk quite a bit about different strategies for that, helping to negotiate these differences but it definitely helps to know the language and to understand the psychology of tight and loose to help do that.

1:02:26 SC: Yeah. No, I think just being aware of the dimension and how important it is can be very helpful. You mentioned Italy, a while back. I was in Italy, just a month or so ago, and just trying to get to the restaurant on time, much less trying to get food once we were in the restaurant was a real challenge to we Americans, who were like, “Where is the taxi we ordered an hour ago?”

[laughter]

1:02:47 SC: And everyone’s like, “Eh, it’ll get here. What are you worried about?” And I think that you make the point that maybe if you’re aware of, attuned to these differences, then it could be very helpful, whether you’re a visitor or an immigrant or just someone who is getting to know a different kind of society to not judge them by your standards.

1:03:06 MG: Yeah, that’s right. Actually, Italy’s a really good example because it is… Veers loose in our data, but there are a couple of domains I discovered that are really super tight in Italy, and I wonder if this resonates with your experience. And one of them is… Food is pretty tight. You don’t put parmesan cheese on fish and pasta or else you’re gonna get some really strange looks. And I actually did some experiments on this and I got some really bad looks when I was trying to do that. Or… Fashion is pretty tight. And what’s interesting, and what I’ve discovered… I haven’t proven this scientifically but my guess is that domains that are really, really important in a culture, that are valued really highly, like in Italy, that’s fashion and food, they tend to be pretty regulated and they have a lot of strong norms around them. And the same is in other cultures, like in New Zealand, that’s really pretty loose, but there’s certain domains that are really tight.

1:03:54 MG: And that’s because those domains are really super important, and one of them is egalitarianism. There’s a great phrase called knocking down tall poppies, in Australia and New Zealand, which is really pretty highly regulated. Like if you try to stand out in these contexts, you’ll get some pushback. And so, in general, that’s a loose context, but there’s some domains that get to be highly normatized because they are trying to protect them. But nevertheless, I agree that understanding these differences is really important. We call it, really, trying to increase cultural intelligence in our field. We have this kind of IQ concept, we have EQ, emotional intelligence, but we know from the literature that they’re distinct constructs. You can have all the IQ and EQ and be really bad in terms of cultural intelligence.

1:04:37 MG: You could speak lots of languages and still be culturally unintelligent. And there’s scales and there’s measures that you can assess. And what’s fascinating to me, again, to the point that culture is invisible is that it’s still the case that a lot of times we send people abroad even for big assignments, whether they’re in global management or they’re the State Department or for international types of negotiations. And we don’t anticipate, “Well, wait. Does this person match that culture? Are they trained to really go to this culture?” We sort of promote people based on their technical expertise in the US, and we send them abroad. And we know from our data that it’s harder to adapt to tight cultures, but that people who have the kind of tighter mindset that we talked about tend to do better. We actually just published a paper on that, that you can identify the kind of people that might do better at tight or loose cultures and/or train people to understand these differences, because it costs a lot of money in early return and in… Certainly in stress, when people go to cultures and have a lot of shock around these issues that could have been anticipated.

1:05:38 SC: And just to bring it home, I mean, I think you also mentioned that there could be implications for… Forget about other cultures, just to think about the workplace or your home life or your social circles, where you recognize either different people or different aspects of how you get together that reflect this tightness or looseness. Like I presume that theoretical physicists, overall, are gonna be pretty loose about things, like our job is to think of theories of the universe. But you gotta get certain things done on time, right? You’re still in an environment where there are rules and maybe different people respond to that differently.

1:06:12 MG: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think that when I start analyzing conflicts around me, whether it’s with your spouse or with your kids, your colleagues, or even on vacations… I just got back from vacation and tight-loose like rears its ugly head on vacation all the time. It’s the kind of people that love structure, want everything planned, wanna get up at the crack of dawn, and then there’s like…

1:06:33 SC: Oh yeah.

1:06:33 MG: The loose mindset that’s very spontaneous. And they both have their advantages, but I find that what’s fascinating, whether it’s on vacations or whether it’s your spouse or your kids, that what’s helpful is to negotiate the differences. And we know from the negotiation literature that you gotta identify your priorities. Like what are the domains that… If you’re loose, what can you not give up on, in terms of your looseness? And if you’re tight, what are the domains that are must for you, and then negotiate the rest. And I actually do this with my kids. It sounds kind of crazy and they… They’re probably like… They actually know a lot about cross-cultural psychology. But they… Our household, we sort of think about what are the domains that we have to be strict in. And that turns out to be like schoolwork and health and how they treat each other, but then there’s other domains that we could be a little more lax about, like how messy the house is or their bedtime or their curfew. And there’s a way to kind of think through… I mean, I’m sure my husband thinks the house is a total mess. He’s a tedious tidier. It drives him crazy.

1:07:29 SC: But again, to the extent that you can kinda think about what are your priorities, and then talk them through and actively negotiate, renegotiate them, that can actually help. Same with vacations, like whether it’s on what day you were gonna be tight or loose or what context. If you have the vocabulary, you can start talking about it. And I find that to be pretty exciting because we can harness these differences and be more productive in our daily lives, have less conflict in our relationships.

1:08:02 SC: I’m just getting more and more evidence, when I do these podcasts in very different subjects, that there really was something to this whole Aristotelian…

1:08:10 MG: Yup.

1:08:10 SC: Moderation thing. There are extremes that have their virtues and somewhere in between… It’s not even necessarily some algorithmic formula for where in between, but there is a happy medium.

1:08:22 MG: Yeah, it’s fascinating. I also became really obsessed with this concept, because, for years, people were asking what’s better, freedom or constraint? Plato and…

1:08:32 SC: Exactly.

1:08:33 MG: And Confucius, they were like, “No, we need rules.” And then you have like Hobbes, and Hobbes also who thought we need rules. He thought everyone’s… Pretty negative view of the world. And then you had people like John Stuart Mill or Freud who felt like rules are problematic. And, to me, it’s not about which is better, it’s about the balance. And I found a lot of evidence outside of my lab for that principle. Parenting is a good example, where we know that parents that are too strict or too laissez-faire produce maladaptive kids. So that’s the kind of curvilinear Goldilocks thing that you just referred to. Or we know that organizations, again, if you’re too tight or too loose, you start having a lot of problems. And I even stumbled into this phenomena in the brain that when you have too much synchrony in the brain between regions or too little synchrony, it produces different brain disorders. So there’s a lot to be said about that principle beyond just national cultures. And I explore it in a chapter called The Goldilocks Effect, but I’m sure there’s lots of other examples that we haven’t stumbled into.

1:09:38 SC: This is great. I think this is a… Of the podcasts I’ve done, this is a nice golden mean between being a giant theory of how everything works and actually practical advice for people’s lives. So…

1:09:46 MG: Oh, I’m glad to hear that. I don’t wanna… I know that some people don’t like the grand theories because they feel like it’s simplifying the world. And I guess, for me, I think it’s good to have multiple theories about the world and then use them. Because there’s not one grand theory that will explain culture, but the more we understand these kind of sub-theories, the better off we’ll be in the world. And I think that, in this globalized world, we have… We need more cultural intelligence and we need to move beyond these kind of simple distinctions of red-blue, east-west, to get to those gists of culture. It’s increasingly important, and if we can figure that out, then we’ll be in a better place to build a better world, is the idea.

1:10:28 SC: Yeah. Don’t worry, The Mindscape Podcast is a safe space for grand theories of everything. So you’ve come to the right place.

1:10:36 MG: That’s great.

1:10:36 SC: Michele Gelfand, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

1:10:39 MG: Thank you for having me.

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