Making Sense with Sam Harris - #248 — Order & Freedom

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Michele Gelfand about the difference between tight and loose cultures. They discuss the primacy of cultural norms in governing human behavior, the trade-offs between order and freedom, conservatism vs liberalism, sensitivity to threat, scarcity, the COVID pandemic, the Jeffrey Toobin affair, political polarization, the problem of extreme stereotypes, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at SamHarris.org to request a free account. And we grant 100% of those requests. No questions asked. Okay, today I'm speaking with Michelle Gelfand. Michelle was a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland for many years. She's now moving to Stanford, and she's done some very interesting research on the power and primacy of cultural norms. All of this has been widely cited, and she has received numerous awards.

On the day after we recorded this conversation, she learned that she's been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, which is a big deal. So congratulations on that, Michelle. And she's the author of the book, Rulemakers, Rulebreakers, How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. And we get into the book, we talk about the power of cultural norms, the difference between tight and loose cultures, the distinction between that and conservative versus liberal cultures. We talk about the implications for U.S. politics, our response to COVID, the way in which tight and loose interact with variables like crime and

resource scarcity, and the perception of threat. We talk about the Jeffrey Toobin affair, and many other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this, and now I bring you Michelle Gelfand. Michelle Gelfand. I am here with Michelle Gelfand. Michelle, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. So you've written a very interesting book. When did this book come out? The book is Rulemakers, Rule Breakers, and we will be discussing a lot of what's in it, although by no means covering every detail. When did the book come out? It came out in 2018, the hard copy, and then the soft copy came out in 2019. Right. Well, the world has only conspired to make it more relevant, I'm afraid, for better and worse and mostly worse.

So I'm eager to talk about all that. But before we jump in, how would you summarize your background intellectually? What kinds of things have you focused on and what are you most focused on now? So I'm a cross-cultural psychologist. So I study human behavior around the world to try to understand some of the deeper-seated values, norms, cultural codes that drive our behavior. And I got into this field pretty serendipitously, like many people. Life happens when you're making other plans. I was actually pre-med at Colgate University, upstate New York. And I'm a New Yorker. I don't know if you could tell by my voice, but I think I lost some of the

accent. And I had the sort of typical New Yorker view of the world, you know, that cartoon where, you know, it's basically New York and then we acknowledge New Jersey and beyond that, there's basically rocks and oceans. And I went abroad for a semester my junior year at Colgate and I sort of, that view of the world shattered when I was there in a very good way. I was really experiencing a lot of culture shock,

even though we spoke the same language. And I remember having this very important call with my dad, Marty from Brooklyn, and just telling him how shocked I was and confiding him all sorts of things, including the idea that people were just going from London to Paris or Amsterdam for just the weekend. And my dad said something really important. He said, well, imagine like it's going from New York to Pennsylvania in his Brooklyn accent. And I thought, wow, Pop, that's a great metaphor. And this is a true story. The next day, I booked a trip to Egypt.

And I thought, well, Dad, it's kind of like going from New York to California. He wasn't too pleased with this. But I had a lot of time on my hands. And I thought, why don't I just go and explore the world? And it's there where I really realized, and beyond working on a kibbutz in Israel and around the world that I realized how little I knew about culture. And I thought, you know, if I don't know much about culture, then I probably don't know much about myself.

And I really took that to heart. I came back to Colgate. I had the great fortune of taking a class on cross-cultural human development by Carolyn Keating, who was studying with Marshall Siegel doing work on visual illusions in Africa with the idea that some visual illusions that seem to be Western are really not universal. And I thought, wow. So anyway, I lucked out, found Harry Triandis at the University of Illinois. He's one of the founders of the field of cross-cultural psych and the rest is history. And I'm a generalist by orientation. And I think that's something Harry cultivated, really trying not to have many disciplinary boundaries,

even within psychology, but also beyond. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that approach really resonates with me. I've begun to think of culture more and more as an operating system, and that that analogy is perhaps more literal than most. I just think it's so much of what we mistake for our own psychology, and it's just our being able to function as human beings in so many ways, is a matter of culture more than it's a matter of the individual or any individual brain. I mean, if you're going to look within a person's subjectivity or even scan their brains for evidence of so much of what they notice or are poised to care about, or poised to care about, it's just, it's not there. It's at the level of cultural norms that we're all being ruled by, even if we don't think about norms explicitly. I mean, most people don't

spend a lot of time thinking about norms, and perhaps we should just start off by defining what we mean by that term. But it's just so much of us is a simple example that is adjacent to what we're talking about. Just that if you listen to the two of us have a conversation, we're following the rules of English usage and grammar to some considerable degree, one hopes, and yet you would not find the rules of the English language in us or in our conscious experience. I mean, this is just something that is governing us from the outside, and we have learned it, virtually all of it, implicitly. And so much of what we care about and what we are outraged by and all of our collisions with other human beings, it's just all governed by stuff that's outside of us that we

have, that, you know, we are, or our ancestors have tacitly agreed is important or, you know, rules worth following or are taboo to break. So anyway, to set that context. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. One of the things that fascinates me about culture is that it's this great puzzle. It's omnipresent. It's allinates me about culture is that it's this great puzzle. It's omnipresent. It's all around us like 24 seven, but it's totally invisible. Like we really take it for granted. We're not thinking about it. It's really an unbelievable thing that I think you've talked about it even indirectly. I'm a big fan of your app waking up. Actually, when I hear your voice now, it's a little conflicting because I'm like, well, should I be meditating right now? I'm talking to Sam. But there's this people kind of walking around in a spell without realizing that they have been socialized to follow certain

values and norms. And in my work and in Harry's tradition of cultural research, some of these norms and values have an important function. they've been evolving to help groups adapt to certain ecological and historical contingencies, and they make sense to some extent. And so I think the most important part of, you know, the goal of cross-cultural psychology is to try to make those codes more visible and to help people understand where they come from and also how we might negotiate them. So that's the only thing I would sort of differ with your perspective. I think we can, once we understand these codes, I think we can try to change them when needed. We can try to pivot. I'm not saying it's easy, but- I didn't mean to imply that we couldn't do that. Yeah. I'm all about changing the culture when it seems non-optimal. Before we get into all of the trade-offs here, what are norms? How do you think about norms? Yes. So social norms are these unwritten rules for behavior. Sometimes they get more formalized in terms of codes and laws.

We follow them constantly. For example, most of us wear clothes when we leave the house. We don't steal food from people's plates at restaurants. We don't sing loudly or dance in libraries, most of us. And we do these things because they help our society function. And in a lot of ways, social norms are this incredible human invention because they help us to predict each other's behavior. They help us to coordinate. In fact, if you just do a thought experiment and think about a world without social norms, it quickly becomes obvious that we couldn't function. Societies, organizations, families, we'd all collapse. And my work has been focused on a distinction that actually was first discussed

indirectly by Herodotus in his book, The Histories, later picked up by Pietro Pelto, an anthropologist in the late 60s. And the gist is that although all cultures, at least we think all cultures, have social norms, some cultures abide by social norms much more strictly. They're what we call tight cultures. Other groups are much more loose. They have more relaxed attitude toward rules. They have much more permissiveness. And so I've been trying to understand this distinction of tight and loose, not just across societies, but also within nations, even within households and across history and why they evolve and what consequences they have,

what trade-offs they confer to human groups. So that's the kind of gist of what we've been looking at. Yeah, well, there's a basic trade-off here that certainly covers most, and it's one you discuss toward the end of your book, which is this trade-off between order and freedom, personally and collectively. And I think we'll want to talk about how we imagine kind of an optimal strategy or disposition here. But whatever is optimal, there's no question that there is just a stark fact of trade-off, right? Where there are cases where you really want more freedom, but then there are situations where that freedom is coming at an unacceptable price, and you want to be able to

impose more order. And so there's a sort of a flexibility response here that I think we're going to land on, and you describe this as a kind of ambidexterity with respect to tight and loose. But you sent me a quiz that you have on your website before we started here and I took it. And do you want to guess where I fall or should I just confess where I fall on your continuum? I'll let you tell us. I'm not really sure I could guess totally,

but where did you fall? So I got a 74, which is moderately tight. I'm now told. I was going to guess that. I didn't want to say that, but I was going to guess that. I didn't want to say that, but I was going to guess that. Where are you? What did you get on your own quiz? I'm moderately loose and I'm constantly negotiating with my moderately tight husband, who is an attorney. And we have lots of interesting negotiations around our household

in terms of order and openness and what domains need to be tight and what domains need to be loose. We can get maybe back to that in terms of negotiation of tight-loose. But yeah, were you surprised when you took the quiz? Is that what you anticipated? No, as I was going through the questions, I was kind of anticipating their logic

and we could dissect it as a psychometric instrument. But I think I may be an odd use case for some of the logic of that quiz, because there were clearly questions I was answering in a very tight way, and others not so much. And it's more based on some peculiarities about me, which actually relate to waking up and meditation and other relations. So you have a bunch of questions there like, I can control my emotions when I need to or something like that, right? And obviously, that is in fact very true of me, but it's very true of me based on my fairly idiosyncratic focus on meditation and mindfulness and et etc. So I don't

know if I deranged your instrument there by having my weird background. But anyway, I do feel like I'm someone who is fairly attuned to norm violations. And it's not to say that I don't violate other people's norms, too. It's like there are norms that I don't violate other people's norms too. It's like there are norms that I think should be rewritten and I do a fair amount of that attempted work in that direction on this podcast. But where there's a norm that either seems obviously good or it's just I haven't examined it so I'm presuming it to be good by default, I think I'm on the tight side of thinking, okay, that's not

something you should violate. And whether it's somebody cutting in line in front of you or whatever, it's just something that I feel like I notice the downside risk of. I think the stakes for maintaining norms are quite a bit higher than most people realize. And this is something you get into when you talk about how tight societies and honor cultures view their norms. Like perhaps you want to say something about the way that the American South views politeness, say. I mean, that's something that actually kind of resonates with me more than you would expect, given that I've spent about five minutes in the South. I want to just back up and just make a couple of points. So the tight-loose mindset quiz, which any of your audience can take online, is actually based on the paper we published in

Science. And I want to just emphasize that there's not one, I don't like to call people tight or loose individuals, because that's kind of a levels of analysis problem. That's kind of plagued the literature on culture. The way I study tight, loose is that certain ecological and historical factors create the need for order and predictability. And that's what norms and strict norms provide in those contexts. So if you have a lot of threat in a society or in an organization or in a household or even as an individual, then abiding by norms is actually a good strategy. It helps to avoid in groups defectors that can cause a lot of chaos. And so big picture is that what we found is that countries and groups that have a lot

of collective threat, whether it's from mother nature, iconic natural disasters, resource scarcity, or human nature, number of invasions on your territory in the last hundred years, for example, from our paper, those countries tend to have stricter rules. Not all of them, not all tight cultures have a lot of threat, and not all those cultures are on easy street. But in general, there seems to be a connection between threat and tightness, both in field data and lab experiments and also in computational models. But at the individual level, the way we study this is to see, okay, what individual differences help people adapt to the strength or weakness of norms in their culture?

And so in that paper, we study things like self-monitoring. We predicted and found that tight cultures have people who tend to be higher on self-monitoring. They also tend to be higher on prevention focus. This comes from Torrey Higgins, people who are worried about not making mistakes. They like more order. And so these are a suite of individual differences that help people to reinforce the norm strength in their environment. And on the flip side,

people that are in contexts that have less threat can afford to not really have as much impulse control. They can be more risk-taking. They could be more tolerant of ambiguity. And so tight-loose is a mindset at the individual level. The metaphor I write about in the book, taking us from Dahlia Ludwig, is the order versus chaos Muppets. So you could think about Burt and Kermit the Frog as kind of order Muppets. And they tend to notice rules and they are managing their impulses and they like a lot of order. That's the tight mindset. On the flip side, you have Ernie and Cookie Monster that are kind of the chaos Muppets. They're less likely to notice

rules and they're more kind of impulsive. But in any event, these are general metaphors. But I just wanted to mention that the quiz itself comes from the scales and the items that you were answering come from that data. And I think the important point here is also that it doesn't mean that we're always at our default. In fact, what's really remarkable is we can tighten or loosen very quickly, depending on the situation. When you're in a library or a funeral, we tighten up. We tend to start following rules and managing impulses to a much greater extent or in movie theater, most of us. When we're in a public park or in a party,

these are looser situation. Goffman actually, the famous sociologist who probably said everything about anything we need to know about. He talked about tight versus loose situations. And I think, so I just wanted to point out that a lot of individual differences, they're not, they're dynamic. They could change based on the situation And we don't even notice it. We don't notice that that's the case. In the science paper, I'll just mention one more thing. We rank ordered situations in terms of how tight or loose they were around the world, asking people how appropriate 15 different behaviors, like arguing or eating or singing, how appropriate are these across 15 different situations? And the rank order of tight, loose in these situations, meaning that tight situations had a more restricted range of

behaviors that were seen as permissible, was identical around the world. There wasn't a single flip of situations. But what we found was that in general, in tight cultures, there were tighter situations. Like what it means to be in a public park is more strict in Pakistan, in tight cultures, there were tighter situations. What it means to be in a public park is more strict in Pakistan, for example, than in the US. So anyway, that's a broad kind of introduction. The only other thing I wanted to say is that I'd love to peer into your brain and see how do you react to norm violations? What's happening when your brain or anyone's brain, what's happening when you're witnessing people doing strange things? Like Michelle's in the library and she's studying is a reasonable thing, but Michelle is in the library and she's shouting is a norm violation.

And we developed some new paradigms to try to understand what's happening in the brain as people are witnessing norm violations as compared to linguistic violations, like Michelle is having coffee with dog, which is huge literature on that, you know, kind of in 400, they call it response in neuroscience, this negative deflection 400 seconds after stimulus onset. And it's an incongruity, but you know, in some research that we've done, trying to look at neuroscience and tight loose, we can start seeing, you know, that there are big individual differences in how people are reacting in the central parietal area, in the frontal area. There are cultural differences

in how people react in terms of EEG responses to norm violations. So it's kind of an exciting frontier. What's fascinating to me is that social norms are so important, but there's so little research on neuroscience of social norms. This, of course, work on economic behavior fairness, but not on the kind of norms that we've been talking about. Anyway, so I forgot what you were asking me about. I'll steer us back to the second half of that question. But actually, you mentioned Goffman, who I don't think you discuss in the book, but Goffman has always been fascinating to me because he, for those who haven't read him, he's got some great books, Interaction Ritual, Asylum. He did a lot of work focusing on the mentally ill and the difference, how we bound the categories of human behavior, in particular face-to-face behavior, around the concepts of sanity and insanity. And I mean, one kind of

course cut at this that he introduced is to not have any boundary between how you behave in public and how you behave in private is kind of fairly diagnostic for mental illness. I mean, that's what we notice about people who are mentally ill. They're often doing things that sane people would do in private, but they're just doing them in context where this private behavior is on display and it seems totally inappropriate. And there are these kind of rituals of interaction that he described in terms of what necessarily happens when people come into each other's presence and know or should know that they're being observed by others. And that kind of hall-of-mirrors effect and the pressure that imposes on or should impose on normal psychology is something he discusses really beautifully.

But to come back to culture, there are tighter cultures, and perhaps you can pick an example you want to describe. You mentioned many in the book, but everything from Singapore to ancient Sparta to the American South by comparison with the rest of the U.S. And viewed from outside, viewed from a looser point of view, the emphasis on following certain norms, not swearing, say, in the South or being polite, being kind of elaborately polite, even when there's not necessarily all that much goodwill between the parties. All of this is viewed as fairly high stakes, and violations there are viewed as, very quickly, provocations to violence.

And when viewed from loose cultures, the stakes are just non-obvious. What's wrong with swearing or saying something inappropriate or not being polite or trespassing on a person's imagined sense of honor when you don't view yourself in those terms? And I'm certainly American enough to be horrified at the extreme versions of all this. I mean, when you find out that in Singapore you can be jailed for even bringing chewing gum into the country, right, for even bringing chewing gum into the country, right? And killed for bringing marijuana into the country. I mean, this just seems like a Orwellian dystopia, but it's the knock-on effects of being that rigid. One of the knock-on effects

of being that rigid is to close the door to a lot of unpleasantness that we're trying to figure out how to clean up in our society some other way. And so there's an interesting, again, we're just in the domain of trade-offs here. But anyway, give us a snapshot of the tight, loose difference at the level of society, perhaps comparing a couple of cultures here. Yeah, so, and as I mentioned earlier, all cultures have tight and loose elements, but we can classify countries in terms of where they veer tight or loose on a continuum. And places like Japan, Singapore, Austria, to some extent Germany, tend to veer tighter as

compared to places like the US in general, Spain, Brazil, Italy. And, you know, like you mentioned, you know, a lot of times people are kind of horrified when they look at practices in cultures that have the opposite or different code without realizing that, you know, they have their own liabilities. Often the strength of another culture is our own liability and vice versa. And just as an example, we call this the order versus openness trade-off. And cultures that are tight tend to, generally speaking, have less crime. They have more monitoring by police, by God. You know, Ara Naranzayan, my colleague at UBC, would say that people who are monitored

are people who are good people. They're following rules, at least publicly. And they also have more synchrony. They have more uniformity. Even in clocks and city streets, I talk about it in the book. We actually published this in the science paper. In tight cultures, when you look at clocks around city streets, they pretty much say the same exact thing. They're highly synchronized. Whereas clocks and city streets in loose cultures are really off by quite a bit. You're not totally sure what time it is in places like Brazil or Greece in general. And tight cultures,

as another indication of order, have more self-regulation in general. They are places where people are monitoring their impulses more at the national level. That translates into less debt, translates into less obesity, controlling for lots of factors, and also alcoholism and recreational drug use. And so you could think about tight cultures cornering the market on order, and loose cultures struggle with order. They have higher crime in general, they have less synchrony, less coordinated, less disciplined. So they have a host of self-regulation, let's just call them problems or challenges. But loose cultures on a wide variety of indices are much more open. They have more tolerance, relatively speaking,

in terms of attitudes, both explicit and implicit towards people that are different. In one experiment we did, we even sent our RAs around the world to see whether people react differently to people who look stigmatized. This is actually one of these crazy field experiments. I had my RAs wear fake facial warts on their faces or tattoos and rings in another condition or in another condition, they weren't wearing anything, just the normal face. And they went back to their home countries to ask for help in city streets or in stores. And when people were not wearing anything on their face, there was no difference in how much they were helped around the world. But when they

were wearing these really strange tattoos and facial warts, they were helped far more in loose cultures. There's just more openness to people who are different. There's a whole host of, getting back to Goffman, issues with being stigmatized in tight cultures. And you can talk about that if you'd like, but that's, you know, really where loose cultures corner the market on openness. They also tend to be more creative. So in large scale crowdsourcing contests of creativity, it's really clear that people from loose cultures are more likely to enter creativity contests and they're more likely to win them. So, you know, the big picture is that tight cultures struggle with openness, but they are really disciplined and have a lot

of order. And I think we could talk about this later when it comes to COVID, but, you know, this kind of presents this evolutionary mismatch where, you know, certain traits might be really great in some contexts, but not in other contexts. And this begs the question of how do we kind of pivot when we need to, when the traits that we naturally are evolved to the context that they're useful in, like Lucis is great for creativity and innovation in contexts where there's not much threat in general. How adaptive is that to contexts of collective threat like COVID? Right, right. So I want to mention also,

these are generalities. Clearly, there's going to be some differences, but we have found this order versus openness trade-off both at the national level, at the state level in the US, rank ordering the 50 states on tight loose. Others have found it in China, rank ordering the 30 plus provinces in China in terms of the measures we developed. Organizations tend to have the same trade-off. I'm actually, we could talk later, I'm working with the Navy to try to help them become more ambidextrous, even though they need to veer tight, and et cetera. So the tight loose trade-off tends to be something that constitutes kind of a fractal pattern coming from physics, this repeated kind of pattern across levels.

kind of a fractal pattern coming from physics, this repeated kind of pattern across levels. But again, we have these strong stereotypes around what's good, you know, what's correct, what's objective. To us, you know, looking at another culture, you know, really, we get this moral outrage. And often, you know, if we step back, I mean, like you said, the extremes are bad anywhere. But like, if we look at the gum example that you gave, you know, Americans are kind of horrified that you, why can't you bring a lot of gum into the country of Singapore? And, you know, actually it has some kind of historical basis. In the late eighties, people were chewing gum. It's a very highly populated, dense, high population density context, about 20,000 people per square mile. And people were chewing gum. And I guess, as a lot of us do, we throw it on the floor. And it was causing this massive problem throughout

Singapore with gum and wads of gum, like blocking sensors on trains and elevators. And Lee Kuan Yew, who, if you read his autobiography, the dude was really a cross-cultural psychologist at heart. You know, he talks about how Singapore has a lot of threat and that, you know, we need to sacrifice some freedom in order to kind of come together and coordinate. And he talked about gum as being one of these issues, like guys, like we live in a very small place and this gum is causing a big problem and we better just kind of ban this tasty treat because we have so many mouths per capita. And I'm sure there was some resistance to that, I would guess. But overall, I think when we start looking at these differences with some eye to the ecology of countries, we might have a little bit more empathy. Yeah. Actually, there's a distinction that you make in the book, which is a little hard to understand quickly. So perhaps you can spell it out, because it's easy to see this tight, loose distinction as analogous to or identical to the distinction between being politically conservative and politically liberal.

But those are not, it's not the same axis in your view. How do you differentiate liberal and conservative here politically? Yeah. Well, I think social norms are a different level of analysis. Individual differences in conservatism and liberal attitudes tend to be individual differences, they might be adaptive in certain contexts. But clearly, you'll find conservatives living in looser states. You'll find liberals living in conservative states and so forth. So I think that we can think about them as separate but interrelated, that clearly conservatives probably like to be in contexts where there's strict social norms. They also have domains in which they're quite loose. And likewise, liberals might find themselves

enjoying living in loose states, but they also, while have a lot of domains that are basically loose, also have some domains on which they would fall tightly. So I see them as interrelated at different levels of analysis. Actually, COVID is a very good mechanism for dissecting out this difference because when you look at the conservative bias against mask wearing, say, because they don't want this new norm of mask wearing imposed on them based on their underlying beliefs

about epidemiology here. And we can talk about the problem of don't want this new norm of mask wearing imposed on them based on their underlying beliefs about epidemiology here. And we can talk about the problem of information and misinformation. But yeah, that's an example of people who are disproportionately conservative rebelling against the tightness that's coming to them from the political left in our country. Yeah. I mean, this was one of the big evolutionary mismatches, you know, of the century. Much of the work in the social sciences has found that conservatives, this is prior to COVID, are much more sensitive to threat. I'm sure you've seen some of this work. It's both, you know, surveys, it's experiments, it's neuroscience data. So when COVID hit and we see that conservatives

are the ones that are actually resisting the kinds of, that this is the real threat, really makes us realize that there's a strong propensity for people, particularly conservatives, to follow the leader. And what we know during times of threat now is that that threat signal can get hijacked. It can get distorted. It can get manipulated. And if it does, then groups don't tighten. And I think that's where we see the pandemic, the switch with conservatives, to me makes sense. In a context where it's a germ, it's invisible, it's kind of easier to ignore as compared to warfare or terrorism. If you have combined with the abstract nature of the threat,

and you have leaders who are telling you don't worry about it, then conservatives, their kind of normal propensity to be threat sensitive, it just goes, you know, basically out the window. And that's been the big kind of story of COVID. Actually, there's another piece to it, which is deeply ironic or depressing, depending on your view, but they're sensitized to the threat around this, but they're disproportionately sensitized to the threat of the vaccine. Basically, we have something like 40% of the country, it seems, that is quite sanguine about the prospects of catching COVID, but quite averse to getting vaccinated against COVID. They're basically running a head-to-head trial between the disease and the vaccine for the

disease and deciding the disease is better. Yeah, it's just remarkable. And, you know, there's some interesting new data coming out that a lot of this has to do with signaling that if you hear from Republican leaders that that vaccine is OK and it's good, then you'll see people in the conservative party starting to veer towards their intentionally getting the vaccine. When they hear that same message from liberals, of course, it backfires. But I think this is just yet another example of the power of social norms. Humans are social creatures. And I think that's where people have been trying to get Republicans to get out there and be role models and say, this is important. Because we

do know that people are starting to listen to that. It's just that we don't see it that often. Yeah. Well, maybe there's more to say about COVID when we talk about how we want to try to steer the ship in light of what we understand about norms. I'm struck by how important norms are and how it's not totally obvious where they get their power from. You can think of certain norm violations, certainly in a religious context, there are norm violations that are absolutely fatal to a person's reputation and or even to to their lives in a theocracy. But even in the context of a very loose society, there are norm violations which really are an extraordinarily big deal,

and it's not totally clear why or what would be optimal here. I'm thinking one example that came to mind was the misadventures of Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker writer. He was on a Zoom call with his colleagues who were other famous writers. you know, disproportionately, one must think, very liberal. And he thought they were taking a 10-minute break, apparently, and started masturbating. And, you know, to the uniform horror of the people who were still on the call with him, originally his statement was he thought his camera was off, or it sounded like he didn't actually know how to use Zoom very well, to his everlasting disadvantage here. But basically, he masturbated in front of his colleagues, clearly making a mistake. He was not some boorish ogre who was imposing this sexual harassment style on his colleagues. I mean, he clearly thought he was in private and was wrong about that.

And yet, it has proved to be a norm violation without any intent, so catastrophic that one wonders if he will ever be heard from again. So it was certainly career-wrecking and, at minimum, life-deranging. And on some basic level, I look at it as he was just very unlucky to be so confused as to have inadvertently violated this norm. It's easy to see how CNN and The New Yorker wouldn't be eager at this point to rehire him because, you know, he's done himself and them by association massive brand damage. But it's just not clear to me what should be done in situations like this. Yeah, well, I mean, it's such a great example. I think there's so many examples where you've seen this kind of intentional or unintentional behavior from major leaders.

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