Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 62 | Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Societies and People

Episode Date: September 2, 2019

Physicists study systems that are sufficiently simple that it's possible to find deep unifying principles applicable to all situations. In psychology or sociology that's a lot harder. But as I say at the end of this episode, Mindscape is a safe space for grand theories of everything. Psychologist Michele Gelfand claims that there's a single dimension that captures a lot about how cultures differ: a spectrum between "tight" and "loose," referring to the extent to which social norms are automatically respected. Oregon is loose; Alabama is tight. Italy is loose; Singapore is tight. It's a provocative thesis, back up by copious amounts of data, that could shed light on human behavior not only in different parts of the world, but in different settings at work or at school. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Michele Gelfand received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Illinois. She is currently Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and affiliate of the RH Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management. Among her numerous awards are the Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology, the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association. Web site University of Maryland web page Google Scholar Wikipedia TEDx talk on the secret life of social norms Rule Makers, Rule Breakers Twitter

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Find it using the Shell app. Formulation unique to Shell. Compared to minimum detergent gasoline with continuous use of Shell v. Power Nitro Plus and gasoline direct injection engines. Actual effects and benefits may vary. See shell.us slash more dash protection for more information. 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're very, very different kinds of cities, you may have noticed that different cities have different attitudes towards things like jaywalking, right? Like you need to get across the street. Are you at the corner? Do you have the light, et cetera? In some cities, who cares what the stoplight 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 stoplight says so. So why is that? How should we understand these differences in behavior? My guest today is Michelle 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. 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, Michelle 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. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA fan festival at the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Watch matches live on Giant Scream.

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Michelle Gelfand, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Great to be here. So you have 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? Sure. You know, 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 oftentimes 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's 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 they're 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 tradeoffs 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. I'm sure, then we'll get into about this. Lots of details.

I bet, I mean, 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? Yeah, so when we first set out to study this, we want to see, can we measure this construct? because that's really key to any scientific endeavor. And so we studied over 30 nations around the world with 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 personalities, still kind of understand what the general trends are. And sure enough, we found that people around the world agreed on the strictness or the permissiveness of the norms in their cultures, cultures like Japan and Singapore, Germany and Austria tend 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 our 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 kind of 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? 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. Well, you know, it's really interesting because 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 cultures all around us. It's like the story about two fish. We're swimming along and one fish says to the other, hey, how is the water? And they say, wait a second, what's water? And so fish, you know, the simple idea here is that often in this time, it's the things that are around us constantly that we have a hard time recognize.

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 Titan Luce gives us as humans. And how do we, 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, you know, 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-loosness distinction is one of the most important ones in distinguishing between different cultures. Yeah, that's a really good question.

I want to 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. But 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. So, for example, we know that in my data, and this is across different levels, tightness tends to be possibly correlated with collectivism. But there's lots of contexts where you can find off-diagnals of tight cultures that are very individualistic,

emphasize privacy. These are places like Switzerland, Austria, Germany. And there's lots of collectivistic 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 unconfound these differences because that way we can understand a broader cultural toolkit to really understand and predict cultural differences much better.

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? Like 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. Well, I think that, you know, these are kind of patterns you start to look, discover as you're studying 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 sort of 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 analyses, 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 because we could correlate. That was great. Yeah, you could go to a looser context.

I was in Italy, actually, last year, with my kids and husband. And, you know, 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. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But also, tight cultures have order when it comes to self-control. So the social orders mirrored in really self-control and order within the individual. We find that there's less debt, less alcoholism, even less obesity in context 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, 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. 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 are they treated in city streets. They

look 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 competitive title cultures, where looking different is kind of dangerous. It really enters a lot of uncertainty. Also, loose cultures are more creative, according to a lot of different studies, and they're more open to change. And so, again, that just speaks to this kind of order versus openness tradeoff. 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 strengths is the other's liabilities.

And so when people say, which is better, it really depends on, the criterion that you're interested in. Yeah, I mean, putting aside which is better, it does sound like there's going to be a connection here between political orientation, right, at least in the sort of standard dictionary definitions of liberal and conservative. Is it fair to associate liberalness with loose cultures and tightness with more conservative ones? I think that it's a really good question. And, you know, these labels make sense a lot in the U.S., particularly because they change kind of meetings in different countries. But they're really operating at different levels of analysis. So you could think about it.

out 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 kind of 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 conservatives. So they really kind of operate. at different levels of analysis. One is at the social level, it's social norms. The other is at the individual level. Another way to think about it also is that we constantly as individuals navigate it 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? I would say libraries are pretty tight. Yeah. Exactly. So I've often wanted to go in libraries and start singing or dancing. or when I'm giving like a colloquium. Like I always want to do this like giving a talk at a major university. Like let's say I came out to your university and I'm giving a talk and I start like singing and dancing and breaking out some bourbon. Like people think that's really weird because that's a really tight situation. There's a more restriction of range of what's permissible.

And people kind of give feedback if you're doing weird things. In weaker situations, weaker cultures, you know, there's a wider range of behaviors that are tolerated. So like in a public park and so forth. or 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 navigate them constantly. We're effortlessly are able to switch between tight and loose contexts, like a job interview or a funeral 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 is what we found in the 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. And so it's really fascinating that it's a universal dimension that we deal with every day. But we also, they vary a lot across cultures. And that's where we start to realize that, you know, we can have a lot of conflict when we travel abroad and use our own kind of lens to see the world. Cultures, as I said, is invisible. And even the ancient philosopher Herodotus said, you know, we're all pretty ethnocentric. He noticed this in his travels in the book of the histories.

And so we don't expect that things will bury 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, you know, I give one example that, you know, I found really strange. We know when I was traveling to Singapore, I don't know if you've ever been there before. Only to the airport. But it's, yeah. Yeah, the airport's beautiful, right? It's just gorgeous. But, you know, Singapore is 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.

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. And that threat could be either from mother nature, like think chronic natural disasters like Japan has had, or it could be population density, how many people per square mile

around you that could cause a lot of chaos. That's Singapore is a great example. They have 20,000 people per square a mile compared to New Zealand that has like 30 people per square a 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 hundred years, we measured this that have had to face potential invasions on their territory also tend to veer type. And the logic is pretty simple. When you have a lot of collective threat, you need strong rules to coordinate to survive. and in context where you're of less threat, you can afford to have much more permissiveness because

you don't need to coordinate as much. 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 in the late 80s.

and it was causing trains to malfunction because the gun was getting caught in sensors and elevators. And Likwan, you at the time just said, hey, guys, we're just going to have to ban this tasty treat in a place where there's so many miles per capita. And so it makes sense that that works in certain contexts. Not all cultural differences, of course, makes 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 sorts. across social class organizations, that helps us to make sense of these differences with a little bit more empathy. And maybe also just different situations within the same culture, right?

Like, 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. There's probably a corresponding tightness, looseness distinction there, too. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's funny because when organizations like, you know, the military or airlines, or nuclear power plants or hospitals. You know, these are places that need rules because they need to coordinate a lot as compared to startups or design.

And when the whole fiasco came out about United, which, you know, arguably people were following rules too much in this context. But nevertheless, and I wrote about this, United is a context in airlines in general that you want a lot of rules. You don't want people just make it all sorts of weird decisions. 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 with, you know, 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. Yeah, before I forget, there is something that zoomed by that I want to 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 going to 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? Well, no. So New York is loose. So clocks tend to be... Sorry, less likely.

I just said that wrong. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Although I haven't studied clocks within the context of the U.S. This was internationally. But that would be really exciting to do that kind of work. What's interesting... You're making a prediction, right?

So that's a testable thing. 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 a more synchrony in these contexts. Are there more security commerce? There's more monitoring per capita.

That helps to keep people kind of behaving themselves. I could tell you that, you know, I've had my end of one experiences 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. Tight states tend to be our data a little more boring.

And Blue States had to be more interesting, according to the data, in terms of recreational options. So there's this tradeoff again to 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, you know, we basically flipped them off, you know, which in New York is almost like a friendly gesture. And this actually turned, this was such an insult. I mean, the South is an honor culture in general, as my colleague Dove Cohen and Dick Bismet would say. And honor cultures tend to be pretty tight.

not all tight cultures or 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 like a flipping someone off the bird turned into a car chase on the highway that, you know, was really very aggravating and really, I was terrified to say the least. So obviously I'm not going to recommend to study that behavior. But what's fascinating about New York, and I want to point that's out as an exception, is that, you know, people might say, look, New York is really highly densely populated. You just said that, you know, that would be, you know, 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 U.S. 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, you know, there's, there's a lot of anonymity, a lot of mobility where people coming and going that makes it harder to have like a gossip mill

like you might find in the South in small towns and so forth that would kind of 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 anytime we try to analyze a context, is to kind of 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. Let me pause just a second to talk about the Great Courses Plus. This is an online streaming service that brings you courses from the Great Courses.

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We have an offer for Mindscape listeners, a full free month of unlimited access. If you sign up today using this special URL, the greatcoursesplus.com slash Mindscape. That's the Great Courses Plus. Don't forget theplus.com slash mindscape. Start your intellectual journey today. 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 that demographics perfect.

but I'm betting it's less diverse. Yeah, that's right. I mean, these are really important questions because, again, we can analyze Singapore and look at it. It's a place that is entirely urban. There's nowhere to go in Singapore. It's a city. There's also three different ethnic groups there. And so 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 Quinn you said in his autobiography. He looked at their ecology in terms of lack of arable land. terms of high density in terms of you can't escape this place. So we 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 because 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 for the National Academy 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. 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 got to have rules here. We have security cameras everywhere. We have ways to track people's social credit store to make sure they're behaving themselves because it could be completely chaotic, when you have, when you're away from Beijing, you're far away from the kind of 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

will have even more fine-grained predictions around context based on all of these multitude of factors. A lot of what, 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 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 they tight and loose people? Is that a personality type? That's such a good question. And, you know, 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 nation? So I think about it as what individual level attributes are needed or cultivated to fit into and support the strength of norms, because 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. 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 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-moniters. We know a lot of these people around us. You're 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. 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, loose cultures, you need to have a lot of tolerance for ambiguity because you're going to enter a lot of weird situations where people are doing this 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. 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, one last thing on this, I have a, I have a,

tight loose mindset quiz that you could take on my website, that again, it's measuring these attributes of self-monitoring, impulse control, prevention-focused, need for order. Actually, just one metaphor that comes from the Muppets, Dali Littwick had used this term,

order versus chaos Muppets. So there's like, you know, Ernie and Bert and Cookie Monster and Animal. And, you know, 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 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 know, you can imagine the conflict that happened. 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. 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. 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 tighter-loose culture affect your personality traits that are relevant here as you're growing up? 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 context that have a lot of ecological threat in terms of disasters and invasions and things like that. It's called the short or leal. 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, you know, how do these things reinforce each other? Because particularly in some contexts that have had threat over centuries, you'd imagine that certain traits might be selected for because they're more adaptable in certain contexts. At the same time, I want to mention that, you know, tight and loose are really dynamic constructs. And I was mentioning that, you know, 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, or invasions. And people instantly tighten up, even if it's fake threat. You know, I mean,

it's, it's, these are these 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, you could see that. very quickly, and people can tighten up when they feel threat, whether real or imagined. And what's fascinating, we find this in some of our computational models is that when you reduce threat, it takes much longer for people to loosen up. This kind of this asymmetry that we see in multiple models that when we try to model this with sort of artificial people, we could see that it takes much longer to go from tight to loose than from loose to tight. Interesting. So like we can our tightness can be activated very easily, but then it

takes time to calm down once again. Exactly. I think there's something about, you know, human nature around being kind of prevention focus 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 tradeoff 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 want to 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 threats seem to be decreasing, of course we have to be vigilant, but compared to hundreds of years ago, as Stephen Pinker would argue, we seem to be. feeling more threatened, you know, just based on social media and based on threat rhetoric that we see propagated through our leaders, through the Internet. By the way, we just recently created a new computational dictionary to assess threat in social media to then track what's happening when you 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 kind of understand the psychology of threat and tightness out there in the cyber world. Am I remembering correctly that there was 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. Yeah, this is our first experiment with young children, which are three-year-olds. I'm a generalist, so I'll study anything if the method helps us to understand the phenomenon.

And we were actually, in this case, we're interested in cultural differences in tight-loose across different social classes. And the argument that we made, and we were building on Melvin Cohen, a famous sociologist who wrote a book class in conformity in the late 60s, we were arguing that, you know, the working class should be tighter because the... 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 require rules to help kids stay safe. But we hadn't ever systematically looked at this across the working in upper class.

Upper class, the argument is that they can afford to break rules. I mean, 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, like create anarchy for kids. And, you know, actually, that's good. advice for people who have a cushion, who have a safety net, where you can make mistakes. With Oregon class, you don't have that because you could be really super poor living in chaos, which is actually normalist 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, you know, what do you think about rules? We just ask people. So think about like 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 where is the upper class?

Middle and upper class. We're like, oh, it's a nuisance. Goody two shoes was associated with rules. You know, 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 three-year-olds into the lab. And you can't exactly ask three-year-olds. So what do you think of rules?

They're three. But we, you know, they just look at us like, what? I mean, even my teenagers might say that. But, you know, we can use this paradigm that was actually developed by Michael Tomasello, 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 he's announcing he's playing the game right. But he's clearly like Max the norm violator suddenly. And you can visually repeat these kids and see, you know, how do they react? And that's exactly what myself and Jesse Harris. 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 them to stop. They were upset

about this. Again, in general, the upper class kids, though, were more like good a laugh. They were letting Max off the hook, even by age three. 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. So, You know, this was kind of something that's super interesting about us 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 are witnessing Max the puppet violating rules. What's happening as early as three years old? Because we know that in later adulthood, people from different tight and loose cultures are processing norm violations differently in the brain.

And we want to see how early can we start seeing those differences? because kids really start learning about norms and rules really, really early. That's what we know from developmental psychology. Even before they have language, infants have been found to, you know, when they're watching puppets doing weird things, they avoid them. And when they watch puppets that are nice, they start reaching for them. So it's crazy, interesting to think about us as a species. You know, 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 would be completely chaotic and unpredictable. And so that's why we could see this happening so early because it's such an important aspect of our human sociality. 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. 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 dissect it. But you think about Victorian, you know, England, like super, super rich, you know, old rich. And these are places that have very strict rules. We never surveyed them, but I'd put the college education funds on that for the kids. You know, and that's a very serious bet because I'm a kid in college now. But, you know, I think that also, like I said, like 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 nonlinear patterns.

But we haven't been able to detect that yet because we don't have access to some of these samples. But that's what I would sort of speculate on. Well, you mentioned several times, you know, the research that you've done, the papers that you publish and so forth. So just methodologically, what does that involve? Like, how do you study the amount of openness, closeness, looseness, tightness in different cultures through space and time? Yeah, this is a great question. And, you know, I think that in any science, using multiple methods, is really important to be able to see if you have converging patterns,

particularly do cross-cultural 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, you know, it was funded in Hong Kong versus it was funded in mainland China, it changed people's responses. Like there's just very subtle ways that you can change.

responses in the laboratory and surveys and on obtrusive observations across cultures. I wrote a whole paper on, like, just how many rival hypotheses you have to rule out during cross-cultural research? And I think the editor said that no one's going to want to do cross-culture research if they read this paper. And I said, that's fine. Like, it's just, it's such an, and, you know, I also make so many mistakes doing cross-culture research.

And now I'll get to the answer about just one funny story. You think that I'm not such a schmock. I've been doing this for 25 years. but I still fail to anticipate how cultural will kind of manifest itself in the method. And so in that study where I sent students around the world with these facial wards 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 in their faces. But what I didn't anticipate was that as people get back to their countries, even after they were standardized, they just, one by one, the tithest of the cultures, the students, they wrote me and said, I just can't do this. I can't bring myself to do this. Like, it's just too embarrassing and too,

just too worried to do this. And that's exactly what I'm studying. Like, how I didn't anticipate that is just ridiculous. So that's just to say that I make, I wrote a paper about all the mistakes I've made, the schmuck moves I've made as a cross-cultural psychologists because I want other younger scholars to realize, like, it's really not easy.

Like, you don't even realize it. how easy culture becomes part of the method. So anyway, back to your main question was I try to use very, you know, lots of different methods. So, you know, sometimes I use surveys and I ask people to directly answer questions about the construct and about, you know, what they perceive to be the strength or weakness of situations in their environment. What's permissible? Like, for example, we might ask how permissible is it to, you know, 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, like the range of behavior that seem as permissible.

We could see reliably that tighter cultures, they tend to say, no, there's much less permissible. Or we can, in more recent work, we coded ethnographies. So these are now like 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 observe them. But luckily, anthropologists have detailed these societies to an incredible amount of depth, and we can then code, I mean, I want to 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 because they have lots of details on socialization,

how are kids socialized. 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 like a minute and a half, but this took, as I mentioned, like five years, this project, and that was filing

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 want to 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. And we could see, for example, the U.S. over the last 200 years, and a paper we just published in nature, human behavior

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. So 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, you know, at some point. And, you know, we work with biologists, we work with now mathematicians and computer scientists and neuroscientists and neuroscientists, but, you know, I have to say sadly, we've never met a physicist we've collaborated with, but it's not off the, you know, out of the range of possibilities. No, not at all.

But it also makes me wonder, are there differences between academic disciplines the amount of tightness or looseness, either faculty or students? Yeah, definitely. I mean, my colleague, Ben Schneider, would say that people make the place and organizations. And no doubt, you know, we see the people who are attracted to certain disciplines have already like 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, kind of factor analysis that's just a fancy way of saying to simplify patterns with data with the Department of Labor's own net database, which tracks every single occupation they have on this own net website, the knowledge, skills, and abilities that you need for that occupation and also the kind of work context you'll have in terms of what We're into like threat coordination versus experimentation. And we're starting to dig into that database to sort of show patterns of which occupations tend to be tighter or looser. And, you know, it makes a lot of sense.

The same principles can kind of apply to understanding occupations as well. And it's important because, you know, might not realize, you know, your own mindset might not fit with that occupation. I mentioned my husband is a lawyer, like 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. I'm in a context where there's much less accountability per se. I mean, I feel personally accountable, but there's very big differences in who's going to fit those occupations.

And I think I navigated to the right balance in terms of order and openness with academia that is not found in other contexts. Well, but it's interesting because there are these multiple factors that come into it. I think, you know, me living my whole life in academic. settings, it's just a natural thing if you think about, but if I'm thinking of a 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, right? I mean, maybe they don't have as much social cachet or funding or whatever. So I'm not sure that my intuition is pointing in the right direction.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we haven't actually studied those contexts, but, you know, 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 sort of toolbox in order to succeed in academia. And we need to feel, 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, you know, to actually be, 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 degrade at creativity. But then they suffer when they try to like implement things. Like think Tesla, you know, like they, I wrote an op recently, like, that is a great loose place and he's brilliant, but like they need some tightness to scale up production. And I'm sure I'm not getting a lot of fans out there, Tesla fans. But on the flip side, you know, you can imagine that some... By the way, I can say that as a matter of data, the, I visited Tesla. I've been on the factory floor. No, I'm sorry, I'm making this up. I visited SpaceX. So I presume it's a similar command

and control structure, but it is the cleanest factory I've ever seen. And maybe Space SpaceX is different than Tesla in this way. But it's not very loosey-goosey there at this SpaceX factory. Yeah, I mean, a lot of manufacturing contexts veer tighter because they need to be tighter to coordinate and have more efficiency. And, you know, again, the companies are the most innovative. But what am I 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 kind of 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 startupers. They call themselves serial startupers because once they start scaling up or get bought out, they don't like the rules. They're like, oh, I got to get out of here. Like, 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 tightless trade-up comes into play, like to be really super innovative, being both mindsets. And we could see at the national level, that it's really that balance of having some balance of tight and loose that can help countries be innovative. Well, that's definitely seems to be a message of your book, that there's some Aristotelian mean here, right, between being too tight and too loose. On the one hand, a looser culture might be more creative and open, but on another hand, they will also have more crime. And so presumably there's some intermediate stage where everything is the best compromise.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I would say, yeah, I would say that, you know, groups need to veer tighter loose for good ecological reasons. That's where we see variation with social class, with organizations, like comparing United versus Tesla or nations. But it's the groups that get too extreme into the direction that start having really big problems. And we show this in a 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. behavior and they become very chaotic. Whereas groups that are really tight are very repressive. Durkheim called this sort of animic 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 dynamic. dynamics is, you know, it's analyzing the dynamics happening in Egypt, because often systems go between

these extremes. And, you know, Egypt is a good example of a place where it was super tight, very high degree of oppression and control. When Mabarak was ousted, the system went to the exact opposite. It went to, you know, basically it's the other extreme. And people were screaming freedom in the streets at first. But then suddenly it was like, wait, this place is chaotic. Like, we can't do anything and coordinate and predict each other's behavior. And there was a lot of chaos. And, and What we found in our surveys in Egypt at the time is that the people who 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 mezzo-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. Plus, as cross-cultural psychologists, it didn't. Because when there's chaos in this extreme loousness context, whether it's in the Philippines or in Russia or anywhere, or if you just perceive, people want tightness because it's kind of functional in many ways. But often we see people and groups overshooting in that tightness. And then we have problems at the other extreme. So that's not painting a great rosy picture, but at least we can understand dynamics through the lens of norms. And often we don't think about it. We think about other factors, structural factors.

I mean, maybe it should make sense to us. Maybe the U.S. is a little bit atypical in how close we've been to the medium over time. But, you know, 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. Yeah, I think that that's right. I think right now we're trying to do some more work in ancient history looking at the evolution of Titan Luz. I'm working with Peter Churchin, who's at Yukon, who's an evolutionary biologist. And he's developed this great database called Cheshat that's trying to mathematicize history in really incredibly interesting ways. Again, really time-consuming and so forth. But we want to try to look at this more systematically to see, you know, how does Tite Luz 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 want to kind of go even further back to trace exactly what you're talking about. And the U.S., you know, it's an interesting place. We're a baby country. We've been, you know, 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.

Like, we take for granted, of course, there's some pockets of the U.S. that have more natural disasters and more pathogens and more scarcity, and they tend to be tighter in our data. But nevertheless, you know, 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, illegal immigrants. People vastly overestimate the problem. And they also vastly overestimate how much groups who come to this country as just one threat are going to 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 and loose in the U.S. based on objective threat. I mean, this talk about 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 tighter lucic culture is? Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, this is what we studied with the standard sample data, because 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 norms tend 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 not, doesn't mean that some context. I mean, every culture has tight and loose elements. If they don't, then they're going to, like I mentioned, have serious problems. Even Japan, one of the tightest cultures in our data,

has, you know, context where people go crazy in terms of like drinking and weird, you know, 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. And as I said, so far, we've seen a lot of coherence in terms of that domains tend to have tightness, 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, you know, this is really difficult because I'm a feminist, but I'm also a cross-cultural psychologists. And I tend to have some ethical issues around this because, you know, I want to 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, you know, when it comes to physical harm,

I would say, no, that 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. 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 either 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. It's a huge movement going on in that world that it's really norms. You can change attitudes. But if there's strong norms against these practices, you've got to 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. 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 aspect? As I'm asking the question, I think I'm answering it also. Yeah.

I would imagine that looser cultures are also more open to mingling with other cultures. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's definitely a strong connection because those contexts, loose contexts, I think actually loosedness 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, these kind of contexts where in any country that are feeling a lot of threat and that want

to 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. And I, I think what we need to do is understand each other's perspectives. Where do these threats come from? I mean, 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. In the book, I talk about the working class in the United States where a loose individual's 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 in class. There are ways to have a certificate to go back between different companies. There's more of a helping kind of 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 can just let people fend for themselves, it makes it really hard in context where there's increasing economic competition and globalization and so forth. But 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? Yeah. I mean, there's a whole structure in Germany where, you know, 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, you know, I think it's fascinating because we just think in the U.S. I've interviewed some people on this, in manufacturing contexts that want to 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, you know, this is not going to be just easy to just switch suddenly to becoming this creative person, you know, versus, you know, it's like remember how far back it goes to at least three years old. And, you know, it's just people don't realize that it's very difficult to go from tight to lose. And I have some stories about this in the book where, you know, clearly people recognize sometimes, wow, we've got to really tighten up, we've got to 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 to me on Microsoft when he tried to tighten up things because they were kind of chaotic, that he got a lot of pushback. On the flip side, when you try 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.

Did Tochville notice this about us? I've studied American impatience, but you know, these things take time. 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's going to help them become more creative. But then they have all these culture classes 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, you know, they're the new group. missing deadlines and is, you know, just really unpredictable. So it's, it, 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. Yeah. No, I think just being aware of the dimension and how important it is can be very helpful. You know, you mentioned Italy a while back. I was in Italy just a month or so ago and, you know, 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 are like, where is the taxi? We ordered it an hour ago. And everyone's like, eh, who you'll get here? What do you worry 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. Yeah, that's right. Actually, Italy is 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 like food is pretty tight. Like you don't put parmesan cheese on fish and pasta or else you're going to get some really strange looks. And I actually did some experiments on this and I got some really bad looks on when I was trying to do that. Or fashion is pretty tight. And what's interesting, and when 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 valid 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 as in other cultures. Like in New Zealand, it's really pretty loose, but there's certain domains that are really tight. 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 normalized 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. You know, 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. of cultural intelligence, you could speak lots of languages and still be culturally unintelligent. And there's scales and there's measures that you can assess. And, you know, it'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 they're for international types of negotiations. And, you know, we don't anticipate, well, wait, is this person match that culture? You know, are they trained to really go to this culture. We'd sort of promote people based on their technical expertise in the U.S., 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 tighter loose cultures and or, you know, train people to understand these differences because it costs

a lot of money in early return and certainly in stress when people go to cultures and have a lot of shock around these issues that could have been anticipated. 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 going to be pretty loose about things. Like our job is to kind of think of theories of these.

universe, but you've got to get certain things done on time, right? I mean, you're still in an environment where there are rules, and maybe different people respond to that differently. 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, like I just go back on vacation and tight loose, like, rears his ugly head on vacations all the time. You know, it's the kind of like people that love structure, want everything planned, they want to get up at the crack of dawn, and then there's like the loose mindset that's very spontaneous and, you know, 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've got to identify your priorities. Like, what are the domains that, if you're loose, like, what will you, can you, can you not give up on in terms of your looseness? And if you're tight, like, 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're probably like, they actually know a lot about cross-cultural psychology, but you know, 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, you know, 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. You know, he's two years tighter and he drives him crazy. But again, like to the extent. that you can kind of think about what are your priorities and then talk to them through and actively negotiate, renegotiate them, that can actually help. Same with vacations. Like, you know, whether it's on what day you were going to be tired or lose or what context, you know, 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. I'm just getting more and more evidence when I do these podcasts and very different subjects that there really was something to this whole Aristotelian moderation thing. There are extremes that have their virtues and somewhere in between, not even necessarily some algorithmic formula for where in between, but there is a happy medium. Yeah. You know, it's fascinating. I also became really obsessed with this concept because, you know, for years, people are asking what's better, like freedom or constraint, you know, Plato and. and Confucius, you know, they were like, no, we need rules.

And then you have like Hobbs and Hobbs also who thought we need rules. He thought everyone's pretty negative view of the world. And then you had, you know, people like John Stuart Mills or Freud who felt like rules are problematic. And to me it's not about which is better. It's about the balance, you know. And I found a lot of evidence outside of my lab for that principle. Like 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, you know, curve of linear Goldilocks thing that you just refer to.

Or we know that organizations, again, that VIR too tight or two is to start having a lot of problems. And I even stumbled into this phenomena in the brain that, you know, 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. This is great. I think this is of the podcast 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. Oh, I'm glad to hear that.

I don't want to, I know that, you know, 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 will be in the world. And I think that in this globalized world, 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 kind of 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, It's the idea. Yeah. Don't worry. The Mindscape podcast is a safe space for grand theories of everything, so you come to the right place. That's great. Michelle Gelfand, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

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