Something You Should Know - Where Conspiracy Theories Come From & Which Do Humans Prefer – Strict or Loose Rules?

Episode Date: September 27, 2018

You probably just assume food grown organically is healthier – and maybe it is. But you also probably think that organic food tastes better. You may not think you think that – but you do. We start this episode with an explanation as to why. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2302835/Organic-food-labels-trick-thinking-food-healthier-tastier.html Conspiracy theories abound! I’m sure you’ve heard that some people believe the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks or the Holocaust never happened or that the mafia really killed President Kennedy – or was it Castro? Where do these theories come from? Why do people believe them? And how do you have a conversation with someone if you think what they believe is crazy? Mick West, author of the book, Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories using Facts, Logic, and Respect (https://amzn.to/2R1HyXI) has researched conspiracy theories and the people who believe them and he has some great insight and advice for the next time you find yourself talking to someone who believes the world is really flat! Over half the population has foot problems that hamper their daily lives. So I reveal some proven strategies to help alleviate and/or prevent those problems so your feet stay happy. http://www.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-footpain-ess.html Every culture is governed by rules – whether it is a nation, an organization, group or a family. Some cultures have very tight and strict rules while others take a more laid back approach. But which is better? Do you humans excel under strict regulations or is loose and easy a better way? Well, it all depends, according to cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand author of the book, Rule Makers Rule Breakers : How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World (https://amzn.to/2xRrRcE). She joins me to explain the fascinating reasons why different cultures adopt tight or loose controls and how those rules impact the lives of people they affect. This Week's Sponsors Robinhood. To open your free account and get your FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build your portfolio! Sign up at something.robinhood.com Ancestry. To get 20% off your Ancestry DNA Kit go to www.ancestry.com/something Glip. To open your free, full-featured GLIP account go to www.glip.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, does organic food actually taste better? Probably, but not for the reason you might think. Then, a fascinating look at conspiracy theories. Why do people believe them? With some of the less extreme conspiracy theories, like the JFK assassination or 9-11 controlled demolition theory, from their perspective, they're actually making perfect sense in terms of logic. Also, half the population has foot trouble. I'll have some good ways to prevent that from happening. And do humans do better with tight and strict rules,

or is loose and easy a better way for us? And it boils down to really two words, order versus openness. So for example, tight groups, whether they're nations or states or households, they have more order. But on the flip side, loose groups have the market on openness. They're more creative. They have more patents per capita, more artists. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily.

Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit,

the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. I don't know if it's because summer's over and people are getting back into their routines or I can't really tell why, but for some reason, since Labor Day, we've had in the last few episodes a really nice spike in the number of new listeners. And if you are one of those new listeners, welcome. And if you sent one of those new listeners our way, thanks for doing that. First up today, do organic cookies taste better than regular plain old cookies? Well, apparently they do, even if they don't. A study found that people perceive food as tastier when they're told that it's organic, or if the ingredients are organic.

Most of the people said they'd even pay more for the exact same thing without even knowing it's the exact same thing without even knowing it's the exact same thing. The same trick works for other descriptive words like farm-raised, locally grown, and all-natural. Experts call it the health halo effect. People tend to assume food is better for them, more pure and tastier, when it has those fancy adjectives in front of it.

And that is something you should know. Have you ever found yourself talking with someone who believes in a conspiracy theory? For example, a lot of people believe the U.S. government was responsible for the 9-11 attacks, or that the Holocaust never happened, or that men never landed on the moon, or that President Kennedy was assassinated by any number of people other than Lee Harvey Oswald. Some people even believe the world is flat, and this idea that we live on a globe, it's all a conspiracy. When you talk with someone like this, what are you supposed to say? How do you refute their arguments? Should you even bother?

Conspiracy theories are really fascinating. It turns out they're not new. They've been around forever. And the fact is, it's human nature for people to create them. And the people who believe in them are not necessarily kooks. Mick West is a guy who is fascinated by conspiracy theories. He's investigated why people believe them, where they come from, why they happen, and how to refute them. Mick is the author

of a new book called Escaping the Rabbit Hole, How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. Hey Mick, welcome. Glad to be here, Mike. So I think the question most people would want the answer to is, where do conspiracy theories come from? Who starts them? And why do they start them? And is this some sort of recent phenomenon? Well, conspiracy theories have been around since the dawn of recorded civilization. It's just something that people, I think, naturally fall into. Even back in Roman times, there were conspiracy theories and there were people trying to debunk conspiracy theories. So I think it's actually really just a part of human nature

and it's something that's very difficult to get away from. But I think for many of us, the term conspiracy theory has a kookiness applied to it. Because objectively, just because something is a conspiracy theory doesn't necessarily mean it isn't true, but we have come to define conspiracy theory as something that pretty much isn't true, or at least most people don't believe it.

Yeah, and that's a little bit of a problem. But the term has come to mean that, true, or at least most people don't believe it. Yeah, and that's a little bit of a problem. But the term has come to mean that, and so I generally use it as that. A conspiracy theory for me is a claim about a conspiracy that is not backed up by the facts, and often is contradicted by the facts. So I think it's actually quite a reasonable term to use because it actually describes what's going on. If people want to believe in conspiracy theories and cling to them in spite of the evidence, they want to believe that a missile shot down that TWA flight over Long Island or that the Holocaust never happened, what could possibly be the benefit or the purpose of even arguing with them?

I mean, if they want to believe what they want to believe, let them go believe it. Well, when people believe things that are not true, they're generally doing it based on what they know, based on their knowledge set. It's what they call a crippled epistemology, a crippled set of knowledge about the world and information and structures of knowledge. So you can actually supply them with the knowledge that they are missing. It's tricky to do, but it's something that we see again and again. When you actually give people the information that they're missing, they do actually change their minds. But have you ever had the experience where you talk with someone who is an ardent believer in

some conspiracy theory and explain to them exactly why they're wrong, and at the end of the conversation they go, oh, oh, now I see, oh, I didn't realize, I'm wrong and you're right. Yeah, well, that doesn't generally happen because these things take a lot of time. And that's the key thing that you've really got to remember when you go into a discussion like this. You're probably not going to change somebody's mind in one conversation. What you might be able to do is show them some piece of information that they were missing or something that they had assumed was correct that is in fact incorrect. Like, for example, in the JFK assassination, people think that the magic bullet, the bullet that went through Kennedy's back, emerged in pristine shape. And they will show you a picture of it where it looks perfect.

But then you can show them a picture from a different angle which shows that the bullet is actually badly deformed and if they've not seen that before that's something that can just kind of open a little doorway and start them on the road out oh so so it's not about dropping the big bomb and aha you're wrong it's like well now wait a second let's take a look at it's more of a step-by-step process yeah that's right you can look at individual things in depth things like the magic bullet for example and even if you completely explain the magic bullet theory as being something that did actually happen it was just a single bullet then it's not going to change their mind because they've got all this other

evidence but it's uh it starts them thinking you know, if I got this thing wrong, then what else might I have got wrong? And they might become more willing to listen to you. That is if you do the initial opening debunking correctly. You don't want them to turn against you. So how do you do that? Well, you've got to really understand where they're coming from. You've got to listen to what they're saying and try to figure out, you know, why do they believe what they believe and figure out what information they are missing and treat them as a regular person.

Don't treat them as if they're some crazy conspiracy loon. Just treat them as someone who has a misunderstanding of the uh of the facts of the matter and you have to do it in a very respectful manner it's two-way conversation when you're talking to a conspiracy theorist you've got to let them talk to you and explain their point of view you've even got to let them try to convert you to their point of view if you don't do that if you're just constantly hammering at them then they're going to throw up all these walls against you and you're not going to get through. But a lot of the time it seems, and maybe I'm wrong,

because I don't argue with conspiracy theorists a lot, but it does seem that a lot of them are a little kooky. And, I mean, it's hard to be respectful. If you're going to talk to someone who really believes that the world is flat, how are you supposed to take that seriously and treat them with respect when clearly the world is not flat? Yeah, no, I hear what you're saying. And certainly with things like the world being flat, it is very difficult to take people seriously. But with some of the less extreme conspiracy theories, like the JFK assassination or 9-11

controlled demolition theories, or even the chemtrails conspiracy theory, from their perspective, from the conspiracy theorist's perspective, they're actually making perfect sense because they're building a case based on what they know and what they think works in terms of logic. And instead of simply rejecting that as being ridiculous,

which it may well be, you've got to actually show them why it's ridiculous by showing them what they are missing. Show them new information from which they can build a new conclusion, because, you know, their conclusion seems very reasonable to them. You mentioned a couple of conspiracies a few minutes ago, and I wanted you to just in a sentence or two explain what they are because not everybody might be familiar with them was the chemtrail one and the 9-11 controlled implosion thing. The chemtrail conspiracy theory is the theory that the long lines of clouds that planes leave behind them are actually being sprayed deliberately by the government to control the weather or to control the climate. And in fact, these clouds that form behind planes in long lines are just contrails, World Trade Center 7, were actually destroyed by controlled demolition with pre-planted explosives being installed throughout the buildings before the planes hit the buildings.

It's quite a bizarre conspiracy theory. It's very difficult to figure out how it would work. But quite a lot of people actually believe it because the actual collapses of the buildings look very strange and they seek explanations for them. They're strange because they almost look like there's an order to it. It doesn't seem like they just blow up into a million pieces. Yeah, and that's because they are very big. The World Trade Center, you know, it's 1,300 feet high.

And the scale of that, when it actually collapses, you're seeing something that your brain can't comprehend. You see the top of the building falling through the rest of the building and the building kind of disintegrating. And it looks like it's exploding on every floor because there is big puffs of air being pushed out. And it pushes out all this debris and there's girders bouncing around. And when you look at it from a distance, you can't see all the millions and millions of individual interactions that are contributing to that. And so your brain just tries to figure out what it might be. And the only thing it can do is say, oh, there must be explosives in there because I see explosions. But the reality is actually a lot more complicated than the conspiracy theory.

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That's something.robinhood.com. And that link is also in the show notes. So, Mick, you mentioned the chemtrail conspiracy theory, and that brings up a question. Is there ever some little grain of truth or some way that somebody logically came to this idea? Or, as in the case of the chemtrails conspiracy theory, was somebody just laying on a grassy hill one day looking up at the sky and they saw a plane and they saw the white stuff coming out the back and thought, hey, hey, wait a minute, I have an idea. I think that could be chemicals trying to control the environment.

I mean, is it that kooky or is there often something there? A lot of conspiracy theories arise from a genuine concern that people have. And the chemtrail conspiracy theory, I think, ties in with concerns that people have about polluting the environment. They look up and they see the contrails, which are just clouds made of water vapor, and they think that it's some kind of aircraft exhaust or it's some kind of spraying going on. And that's obviously concerning to people. Lots of people are concerned about pollution and about the environment. And these concerns kind of latch on to these conspiracy theories and amplify them. So it's very easy to point to a contrail in the sky and say, look, that's pollution. We should do something about it.

And then people ask, well, what is that? And then they say, oh, it's a chemtrail. It's being sprayed by the government. And then it gives legs to the conspiracy theory if there's a real concern behind it. That is a big jump, though, to go from, well, that's pollution to that's a government conspiracy. That is a big jump though, to go from, well, that's pollution to that's a government conspiracy. That's a big jump. Yeah, it is. But if you're already predisposed to believe

that there are conspiracies, then it's not that big of a jump. If you believe in one conspiracy theory, it's actually very easy to get sucked into a different conspiracy theory. And that there are levels of conspiracy theories. There are very low level ones, like, for example, various JFK assassination theories. And then there's very, very complex and extreme ones like the flat earth, and things like the 9-11 and chemtrails sit in the middle. So if someone say a bit suspicious about you know whether the government was involved in 9-11 then it's quite easy for them to make that shift and say oh well perhaps the government is also spraying things out of planes you know the the the fluoride conspiracy theory has been around for over a hundred years which is uh the the fluoride has

been added to the drinking water in order to subdue the population to poison the population various forms of that have been around for a really long time and vaccination conspiracy theories have been around for a very long time so if people believe that vaccines are poison it's not that much of a stretch for them to think that the exhaust of planes is poison well that's what i was going to ask you too, is do people who believe in a conspiracy theory usually believe in a lot of them, or is it that everything else is fine, but this one thing's gotten me bugged? Well, I arrange things on a spectrum, and someone who believes a certain conspiracy theory on the spectrum will almost always believe every single conspiracy theory that's below that on the spectrum.

If someone believes in chemtrails, they will absolutely believe that 9-11 was a controlled demolition. If someone believes that the Sandy Hook shootings were staged, they will believe that 9-11 was a controlled demolition, and they will probably believe in the chemtrail conspiracy theory as well. There definitely is this correlation between belief in one and belief in others. But they always have one that is their favorite conspiracy theory, and that's the one that they talk about the most. And it's generally the one that's the most extreme on the spectrum. One of the reasons I might suspect that conspiracy theories were somewhat of a recent phenomenon is the role of the media and movies and television

and do they play a role in perpetuating these? Well actually if you look at the movies about conspiracy theories like including the movie that's called Conspiracy Theory and all the X-Files shows and things like that, the conspiracy theorists are almost invariably correct. So there's this kind of misconception that Hollywood is portraying conspiracy theorists as being these kooks. Obviously, they seem like they're kooks in the movie, but at the end of the movie, it's revealed that they were in fact correct. So you can almost argue that there's some kind of conspiracy to make conspiracy theorists look good.

Well, but that brings up the question, has that ever happened? Has there ever been a case where there was a conspiracy theory and everybody thought the people talking about it were nuts, and it turns out that they were right? There are, but you get these lists of conspiracy theories that turn out to be true. But for a conspiracy theory to be a theory, people have to have been talking about it beforehand. Most of the things on the list that turn out to be true were things that people had no idea about before

they happened. Really? Like what? Can you give me just a quick example? Well, for example uh the manhattan project uh is one of the biggest things that's often cited you know the project to build the atomic bomb there were not conspiracy theories in the popular press about atomic bombs being built there were not conspiracy there were people weren't going around you know waving placards saying you know there's there's an atomic bomb being built out in the desert. We only found out about it afterwards when the bomb was dropped and the government explained what had been going on. So even though that's given us an example of a conspiracy theory, it essentially was a conspiracy, but it wasn't a conspiracy theory because no one really had any idea about it. It's really interesting to me what you said about Hollywood and movies and television, how the conspiracy theorists usually turn out to be right at the end, when in fact, in real life,

they're virtually always wrong at the end. Probably doesn't help the issue because the media is essentially validating people. It's making them think that they are probably correct because they identify with the people on the X-Files. They think they themselves are discovering these deep conspiracies. Well, not only are they correct in a lot of cases in the movies, they're heroes. That by discovering this, they've saved the world or some part of it. Yeah, in the movie Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson's character starts out looking like a kook and ends up being the hero of the movie. One of the arguments against conspiracy theories that has always made sense to me is that if there was a conspiracy about the JFK assassination

or the World Trade Center or Sandy Hook or whatever, somebody would have said something. That not that many people can keep their mouth shut and not say something. Yeah, and that's definitely true. The way they normally get around that objection is by saying that it would have been a very, very small number of people and that they would compartmentalize the operation. But if you think of something like rigging the World Trade Center with explosives without anybody noticing it while it's going on and without anybody finding out about it afterwards, it's just completely ludicrous. You had the entire FBI investigating 9-11 after it happened. And then they were coming through the rubble, they were on site,

they were investigating everything. You would have to have every single FBI agent in on the conspiracy. And people are not going to keep quiet. So one is going to say, oh, I found this detonator, or I found this deck cord, or I found evidence that a column had been cut. No one did. No one found anything. Well, every conspiracy theory has evidence that they use to support their conclusion, and it makes me wonder, and you're a good person to ask this question to, how easy is it to reverse engineer the evidence for the conclusion you want to draw in these things?

Is it pretty easy to do? I'm thinking it is, because I remember the Paul McCartney is dead rumor, and people said there were all these clues that Paul McCartney was dead and that the Beatles were sending out these clues. But in fact, it turns out, as I recall, that it was just, if you went and looked for them, you could find them, but they weren't put there. Is the same thing the case in a lot of conspiracy theories? Yeah, there's a thing called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, where somebody shoots at a

barn a whole bunch of times, and then they go over to the barn and they draw a target around where most of the bullets hit. And then they say, I was aiming at that target. People can very easily connect dots. You can go in and you can pick out a bunch of things which are actually facts, and you can join them together. And they achieve a certain significance because you've selected those things. But you really have to step back and look at the entire picture. You can't just look at the dots that someone has pointed out. You have to look at all the other dots and look at the potential connections between those.

Because a lot of conspiracy theories sound pretty compelling. The evidence looks pretty good. Yeah, I like to use the analogy of a court here. If you're on the jury in a court, say in the OJ Simpson trial, and you only listen to the evidence that's presented by the defense, or you only listen to the evidence presented by the prosecution, you'll find that it makes a really, really compelling case. And it's the same thing if you look at any documentary that's trying to push a certain position or a book that's trying to push a certain position. These are basically advocates. They're like the lawyers. They're trying to persuade you that something is a case.

And if you only listen to one side of the argument, you're going to agree with that side. Well, sooner or later, everybody comes face to face with someone who believes in one of these conspiracy theories. And it's good to have some understanding as to where they come from, why people believe in them. And you've done a great job of explaining it. Mick West has been my guest. His book is Escaping the Rabbit Hole, How to Debunk Conspiracy Theories Using Facts, Logic, and Respect. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Mick. Oh, thank you for having me on. It's been very interesting.

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check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. When you think about it, every group, organization, family, culture, every nation has its own set of rules. Sometimes these sets of rules are very strict, but in other places, in other cultures, they're very loose and easy. When things are strict and tightly controlled, you have more order. When things are loose and easy, there's more chaos, but perhaps more creativity. The rules cultures and organizations have and live by are important because they affect what the people in those organizations

will and will not do. Because here's the big so what. Behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat. Think about that. Behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat. Cultural psychologist Michelle Gelfand has been examining the differences between tight and loose controls in cultures and the consequences they produce and why this is really important to understand. She is the author of the book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. Hi Michelle, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So you say that these tight and loose controls really have to do with social norms, what in a culture is considered acceptable behavior. So let's start there and explain what you mean. Social norms are really just unwritten

rules behavior and we follow them constantly. You know, we take them for granted. We wear clothes outside, we drive on the right side of the road or the left, we take them for granted. We wear clothes outside. We drive on the right side of the road or the left, depending on where we live. We don't face the back of an elevator. When we get into an elevator, we refrain from singing loudly in business meetings. You know, we're always following social rules. But what I found is that some groups are tight. They have really strong rules and punishment for people who deviate from the rules. And other groups are loose. They tolerate a wide range of behavior. They're very permissive. And it turns out that this distinction of tight and loose affects a lot of things in our lives, from our parenting to our politics.

So give me some specific examples of what you mean. So, you know, you can study places like Singapore, where there are many rules that people have to abide by. They call Singapore the fine city because you can get so many punishments for things like spitting or littering. And then you could take a quick plane ride over to New Zealand and see great latitude from process to prostitution to even seeing people walk barefoot in banks. And this distinction of how strongly people are abiding by rules is something we can see in our own 50 states.

The South and some places in the Midwest have much more rule orientation. They're focused on everyday social rules. And in other contexts, like in California or in New York, where I'm from, you see that people are much more likely to really discard the rules. They're rule breakers.

And the former are rule makers. So how does that happen? How does one culture evolve into a very easy, loosey-goosey kind of situation that seems to work well for them, while another culture like Singapore evolves in a very strict, tightly controlled environment? What I found is that tight groups really evolve because they're responding to a lot of threat in their environment. Threats can be varied. They could be like natural disasters

that we have to experience constantly in some context, whether it's the southern U.S. or it's in Japan. It could also be human-made threats, like things like the number of invasions you've had over the last hundred years varies, for example, when it comes to China versus the United States. And it makes a lot of sense when groups have a lot of threat. They need to coordinate. They need rules to help them survive. And loose groups tend to experience less threat, and so they can afford to be more permissive. But one is not necessarily better than the other, right?

Yeah, that's a great question. I always get asked, well, which is better, tight or loose? And the answer really is neither. What I found is that there's a trade-off that we can see with tight and loose groups, and it boils down to really two words, order versus openness. So for example, tight groups, whether they're nations or states or households, they have more order. They're even more synchronized. When I've studied clocks around the world, in tight cultures, they're more likely to say the right time. And in loose cultures, like in Greece or in Brazil, you're not quite sure what time it is. And, you know, also tight cultures, again, with respect to having order, have people that are more self-regulated. There's less debt.

There's less alcoholism and drugs. Even people are less likely to be obese in tight cultures. So when you're really looking at the benefits of tight cultures, you're looking at how much order there is. But on the flip side, loose groups have the market on openness. While they might be much more disorganized, they have more crime, they have less synchrony, they have a lot of self-regulation problems. But they're also more open to different ideas. They're more creative.

They have more patents per capita, more artists. They have more openness to people who are different, who are stigmatized. And they're also open to change. They're much more likely to embrace change, whereas type cultures struggle with these issues. They're less creative. They're less open-minded, and they're less adaptable. And so I think it's important to think about tight and loose as each of them have different advantages, depending on your vantage point. Well, it almost seems as if striking a balance would be a pretty good strategy.

That's right. I mean, what I found is that the more extreme we get in each direction, the more problems we have. So it's really important to try to strike a balance because those extremes can be really problematic. But it seems in these extremes, when you look at things that are either really loose or really, really tight, that there are certain agendas that play well in those extremes. Like, I mean, just as a wild example, Mussolini, obviously that was a very tightly controlled culture when he was in power, but the trains ran on time. That's right. And actually you can take that same principle and even think about why ISIS was welcomed in certain areas.

I mean, again, we can't quite understand that. How is it possible that people in Mosul during 2014 were really welcoming ISIS? And part of it is because there was so much disorder, and they came in, and at first they provided security, they provided basic services, they provided justice to people who were having so much conflict. And so when you have a cultural vacuum, those kinds of leaders can exploit it. Well, it seems, if I'm getting this right from what you're saying, that the pendulum swings, that when things get too loose, there's a desire for tightness.

When things get too tight, there's a desire for looseness. And so the pendulum goes back and forth. Is that fairly predictable? It is fairly predictable. And you can see that, you know, we can use this principle to try to anticipate these kinds of contacts. We can try to tighten up when we need to loosen. When we're too loose, we can loosen up when we feel being too tight. There's some really interesting examples of this.

You know, for example, the Internet is a prime place where we're living our lives now, but it's really excessively loose. We're just catching up with this new wild, wild west that we didn't anticipate, the kind of lack of monitoring and the lack of social presence is producing a ton of anti-normative behavior, you know, from cyberbullying to cybercrime. And so now we're struggling with the balance of how do you create more constraint in a context that is so permissive. You know, and in other contexts, we need to loosen norms that maybe are maladaptive now.

You know, there are some contexts in the world where there's extremely strong norms for having large families, but that's becoming something that's unsustainable. And so when we go and try to negotiate these norms, we have to understand why they existed in the first place and how to inject some looseness into tight cultures and maybe inject some tightness into loose ones. But when you look at something like Singapore, the pendulum doesn't seem to swing much.

It's a pretty tight culture. And to some people who look at that and see the public canings and beatings of people, maybe that needs to loosen up a little bit, but it doesn't. Well, that's really interesting. I mean, Singaporeans would beg to differ, I think, because, like I said, there's so many advantages to living in a tight culture. Singapore also has to be a very wealthy culture. So it's, you know, it's a context where there's so many advantages to living in a tight culture. Singapore also has to be a very wealthy culture. So it's a context where there's so much order. You can go there and there's very little crime. You can walk around at night. You can let your kids roam free. I told my own kids,

if they don't behave themselves, we're moving to Singapore. You don't have the same problem with drugs and with alcoholism. So there's a trade-off of liberty and security in these contexts. But once you understand why those norms have evolved to be tight or loose, we can be a little bit less judgmental. Just one example, you know, in Singapore, people also can't believe that you're not allowed to bring gum into the country. Like it's forbid to bring gum into the country. And we say to ourselves, how is that humanly possible?

Like, people should be allowed to chew gum whenever they want to. But, you know, if we accidentally were born in Singapore and we lived around 20,000 people per square mile in a very small place where you can't just escape to go out to the suburbs, then you see that having large quantities of gum is actually kind of problematic. People throw the gum on the ground, they throw it onto the subways and into the elevators,

and it was creating kind of a massive national problem. And so they said, hey guys, you know, maybe we should just ban gum. And in that context, that solution seemed to be reasonable. So I think, you know, in a lot of ways, what we need to do is have more cultural empathy. We tend to view the world as Herodotus, the ancient philosopher said, as being kind of ethnocentric. We don't just see that the world's different. We think our way is the better way. Sure.

But I think that we can kind of have more empathy for why these differences exist, and actually have more cultural acceptance, and we'll go a long way. Well, I think that's really important important because we judge things through our own eyes and we look at Singapore and go, well, that's ghastly that they live like this. But as you say, they don't think so. That's their life. Yeah, and they might look at us and our behavior and say, how do you raise your children in these kinds of cultures? But I think the important thing is also that we shouldn't have these kind of extreme stereotypes.

You know, in our research, we're able to show that, you know, people, when they really have a window into each other's lives, they see far more similarities than differences. They see that there's differences, and they understand them more. But, for example, we gave people in Pakistan and the United States who tend to have extreme stereotypes of each other. You know, Pakistanis think American children are walking around half-naked and calling the police on their parents for not having enough freedom. And we don't tend to associate Pakistanis with singing and playing sports.

We tend to think of them as overly tight and overly constrained. And we challenged those stereotypes in a study we did where we simply assigned people to read people's diaries from their respective cultures, the other cultures, for a week. They were given the actual diaries of their counterparts in other cultures. And it was remarkable to see over a week's time that people in both cultures were able to see they're not as different as they really thought they were. They saw they were different, but they had far more similarities than they anticipated. Like what? Well, you know, they saw that they were, you know, all anxious over their studies, and they were struggling, and they were also doing similar things, like being on the internet, or playing sports, or listening to music. They saw that their daily lives, although they had different levels of constraint and latitude, that in fact they were far more similar than what we see in the media, that

really stereotype cultures. Well, and I'm sure you're right, the media stereotypes cultures in that regard. But I wonder why it is that we don't see the similarities as well as we see the differences. Yeah, I mean, it's a really profound human issue is that we flock to people who are similar to us. We tend to stay in these kind of echo chambers. That's more and more the case. We see this around the world.

Even though we have this great, you know, internet, we still tend to kind of interact with people who are similar to us. And so we wind up not having information and having any kind of contact meaningful contact with people from other cultures and again the media also contributes to this and you know in our research also you know we've been studying immigrants coming to the United States and we can see that by far the vast majority of these immigrants are so excited to be part of American culture and they they share a love for American society. And they also, like all of us who came here from every country along the world, they also like to maintain some of their own traditions, but they clearly want to integrate.

And, you know, if we stay in our echo chambers, we're going to recognize that that's the case. And I think that this kind of daily diary technique that we use in Pakistan and the U.S. would be really useful, even in our own country, where we have all these kinds of divides and aren't facing the threat that we feel from other people. When you look at it, because we've talked about the extremes and when people get real tight or the cultures get real loose, that that's where there's problems. Are you able to say, you know, there's this one place where it's kind of like right in the middle and it seems perfect you know it's a really good question there's no like a magic spot that we can say yes this is the the spot to be but we can diagnose when we're starting to feel

like there's too much constraint and it's stifling creativity or it's causing um problems um like united airlines is a great example they need to veer tight. You know, this is a context, an organization where they're dealing with so much coordination and so many safety issues. Airlines and nuclear power plants and the military, they need to be tight. But we can also inject some discretion into those systems. We can find domains that maybe are not that important to have so tightly regulated. And we call this flexible tightness, that you can really actively and mindfully, I've talked to some chief learning officers

who are starting to do this, to diagnose the level of tightness and looseness of the organizations and then figure out places they can inject discretion, where maybe rules are not as important. Same with loose organizations that are getting too loose. For example, Tesla or Uber, we're veering in extreme loose directions.

And in this case, maybe they need some more structure in some domains, the production line in Tesla. Then we can think about, okay, in this context, where can we give up some of that autonomy for a little more structure? And it just requires some mindful assessment of where we are in this dimension, in what domains,

and where can we afford to give up some control, and where can we give up, feel that we can give up some autonomy. And I would like, I'd say also this applies even to parenting. I have two teenagers, and, you know, parents feel very threatened when they have teenagers, not surprisingly. There's a lot to be threatened by. But parents that are overly controlling, the kind of helicopter parents, or on the opposite extreme, who are under-controlling controlling who are very laissez-faire both produce problematic kids. And so here's, again, an opportunity to figure out what domains are really important to be

tight in, to be strict in. What domains can we give up a little bit of that control? In my case, you know, first you have to negotiate with your spouse who might have different ideas about this and might be tighter or looser than you because we know that people vary in a tight and loose mindset. But here I could say, well, maybe it's not so important for them to be so neat around the house. I can loosen up in that domain, but their school and their devotion to each other, their siblings, and treating each other with respect has to be tighter. You know, there's a way that we can negotiate these differences, even in our own households. Well, this is something I don't think most people have thought about in this way, but

when you look at cultures and organizations through this lens of tight and loose controls, it helps explain a lot and helps you better maneuver. Michelle Gelfand has been my guest. She is a cultural psychologist, and her book is Rulemakers, Rulebreakers, How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. There is a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Michelle. Over half of the population has foot pain severe enough to hamper their daily functioning, according to the New York Times. So here are some things to consider to keep your feet happy. First, measure your feet. Over 34% of men said they could not remember the last time their feet were measured. 20% of women said that once a week they wore shoes that hurt.

And 8% of women wore painful shoes every day. Feet will flatten and lengthen with age, so if it's been a while since you've had your feet measured, get it done. If you wear high heels, you are almost certain to have foot problems. Try to wear heels that are no more than 2 1⁄2 inches high. Let your feet see the light of day. Fungus grows in a moist, warm environment, so air your feet out to

prevent trouble. And family history is a big indicator of foot trouble. If your parents complain about foot pain, you need to be extra careful. And that is something you should know. As I mentioned in the beginning, we've gotten a lot of new listeners in the past

week or so. If you're one of them, feel free to drop me a line and let me know how you found this podcast. My email address is mike at somethingyoushouldknow.net. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal

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Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,

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