In this episode, I speak with psychologist Michelle Gelfand, who was a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland for many years. She s now moving to Stanford, and she s done some very interesting research on the power and primacy of cultural norms. On the day after we recorded this conversation, she learned that she has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She s the author of the book, Rulemakers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World, and we talk about the difference between tight and loose cultures, the distinction between conservative and liberal cultures, and the implications for U.S. politics, crime, the response to COID, the way in which tight-and-loose cultures interact with variables like crime and resource scarcity, the perception of threat, and many other topics. We talk about how the world has only conspired to make it more relevant, for better and worse, and mostly worse. And now I m eager to talk to Michelle about all that. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for joining me, Michelle! Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcast is a podcast by Sam Harris, produced in partnership with The New York Times bestselling author and bestselling author of The Rulemakers: A Guide to the World's Most Creative Minds. The book is out now, and will be available in hardcover and softcover in November 2019. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by clicking the link below. I never want money, I just want to support what we re doing here, and I want to help you become a supporter. . We don t run ads on the podcast! and I don t want to run ads, but I do want to be a good friend of the show, so you can be a supporter too. - Thank you, no questions asked asked. If you can t afford a free account? - Sam, I really like what you re listening to the podcast, I m making sense of it, and it s made possible by the podcast? Thank you! - and I really enjoy what we're doing here - I really really appreciate what you're doing, so I really appreciate it. -- thank you, Sam Harris and I appreciate you, too much, and so much, I'm making it really much more than that, you re making me a good thing, I can t help it, really appreciate you.
00:12:36.060No, no, I was as I was going through the questions.
00:12:39.700I was kind of anticipating their their logic and we could dissect it as a psychometric instrument.
00:12:46.560But I think I may be an odd use case for some of the logic of that quiz, because there were clearly questions I was answering in a very tight way and others not so much.
00:13:01.240And it's it's more based on, you know, some peculiarities about me, which which actually relate to waking up and meditation and other relationships.
00:13:09.280So you have a bunch of questions there like, you know, I can control my emotions when I need to or something like that.
00:13:15.520Right. Like and yeah, obviously, that's that is, in fact, very true of me, but it's very true of me based on my fairly idiosyncratic focus on meditation and mindfulness and etc.
00:13:26.780So I don't know if I deranged your your instrument there by having my weird background.
00:13:32.120But but anyway, it does. I do feel like I'm someone who is fairly attuned to norm violations.
00:13:40.580And it's not to say that I don't violate other people's norms, too.
00:13:45.000It's like there are norms that I think should be rewritten and do a fair amount of that attempted work in that direction on this podcast.
00:13:53.040But where there's a norm that either seems obviously good or it's just I haven't examined it.
00:13:59.420So I'm presuming it to be good by default.
00:14:01.540I think I am. I'm on the tight side of thinking, OK, that's not something you should violate.
00:14:08.180And, you know, whether it's somebody cutting in line in front of you or whatever, it's just is something that I I feel like I I notice the the downside risk of I think the stakes for maintaining norms are quite a bit higher than than most people realize.
00:14:28.540And this is something you get into when you talk about how tight societies and and honor cultures view their norms.
00:14:36.080Like perhaps you want to say something about the way that the American South views politeness, say, I mean, that's that's something that actually kind of resonates with me more than you would expect, given that I'm I've spent about five minutes in the South.
00:14:49.280I want to just back up, make a couple of points, you know, so the tight was mindset quiz, which any of your audience can take online is actually based on the paper we published in science.
00:15:01.560And I I want to just emphasize that there's not one I don't like to call people tight or loose individuals because that's kind of a levels of analysis problem that's kind of plagued the literature on culture.
00:15:12.420What I the way I study tight loose is that certain ecological and historical factors create the need for order and predictability.
00:15:19.780And that's what norms and strict norms provide in those contexts.
00:15:23.220So if you have, you know, a lot of threat in a society or in an organization or in a household or even as an individual, then abiding by norms is actually a good strategy.
00:15:32.220It helps to avoid in groups defectors that can cause a lot of chaos.
00:15:37.260And so big picture is that what we found is that countries and groups that have a lot of collective threat, whether it's from mother nature, iconic natural disasters, resource scarcity or human nature, number of invasions on your territory in the last hundred years, for example, from our paper, those countries tend to have stricter rules.
00:15:55.740Not all of them, not all tight cultures have a lot of threat and not all those cultures are on easy street.
00:16:00.100But in general, there seems to be a connection between threat and tightness, both in field data and lab experiments and also in computational models.
00:16:09.640But, you know, at the individual level, the way we study this is to see, OK, what individual differences help people adapt to the strength or weakness of norms in their culture?
00:16:19.100And so in that paper, we study things like self-monitoring, like we we predicted and found that tight cultures have people who tend to be higher on self-monitoring.
00:16:29.580They also tend to be higher on prevention focus.
00:16:31.700This comes from Tori Higgins, you know, people who are worried about not making mistakes.
00:18:31.040We rank ordered situations in terms of how tight or loose they were around the world, asking people how appropriate 15 different behaviors like arguing or eating or singing.
00:18:42.560How appropriate are these across 15 different situations and the rank order of tight, loose in these situations, meaning that tight situations had a more restricted range of behaviors that were seen as permissible, was identical around the world.
00:18:55.520There wasn't a single flip of situations.
00:18:58.400But what we found was that in general, in tight cultures, there were tighter situations like what it means to be in a public park is more strict in Pakistan, for example, than in the U.S.
00:19:08.880So anyway, that's a broad kind of introduction.
00:19:11.220The only other thing I want to say is that I'd love to like peer into your brain and see, you know, how do you react to norm violations?
00:19:17.780What's happening when your brain or anyone's brain, what's happening when, you know, you're witnessing people doing strange things like, you know, Michelle's in the library and she's studying is a reasonable thing, but Michelle is in the library and she's shouting is a norm violation.
00:19:31.700And we develop some new paradigms to try to understand what's happening in the brain as people are witnessing norm violations as compared to like linguistic violations like Michelle's having coffee with dog, which is huge literature on that, you know, kind of in 400, they call it response in neuroscience, this negative deflection 400 seconds after stimulus onset.
00:19:54.480And it's an incongruity, but, you know, in some research that we've done trying to look at neuroscience and tight loose, we can start seeing, you know, that there are big individual differences in how people are reacting in the central parietal area, in the frontal area.
00:20:08.320There are cultural differences in how people react in terms of EEG responses to norm violations.
00:20:17.420What's fascinating to me is that social norms are so important, but there's so little research on neuroscience of social norms.
00:20:24.480There's, of course, work on economic behavior fairness, but not on the kind of norms that we've been talking about.
00:20:29.840Anyway, so I forgot what you were asking me about.
00:20:32.740I'll steer us back to the second half of that question, but actually you mentioned Goffman, who I don't think you discuss in the book, but Goffman has always been fascinating to me because he, for those who haven't read him, he's got some great books, Interaction, Ritual, Asylum.
00:20:50.060I mean, he did a lot of work focusing on the mentally ill and the difference, how we bound sort of the categories of human behavior, in particular face-to-face behavior, around this, the concepts of sanity and insanity.
00:21:05.060And, I mean, one kind of course cut at this that he introduced is, you know, to not have any boundary between how you behave in public and how you behave in private is kind of fairly diagnostic for mental illness.
00:21:21.160I mean, that's what we notice about people who are mentally ill.
00:21:25.300They're often doing things that sane people would do in private, but they're just doing them in context that, you know, where this private behavior is on display and it seems totally inappropriate.
00:21:35.720And there are these kind of rituals of interaction that he described in terms of what necessarily happens when people come into each other's presence and know or should know that they're being observed by others.
00:21:50.420And that, you know, kind of hall of mirrors effect and the pressure that imposes on, or should impose on normal psychology is something he discusses really beautifully.
00:22:02.840But, yeah, so to come back to culture, there are tighter cultures, and perhaps you can pick an example you want to describe.
00:22:13.160I mean, you mentioned many in the book, but everything from Singapore to ancient Sparta to the American South by comparison with the rest of the U.S.
00:22:23.560And viewed from outside, viewed from a looser point of view, the emphasis on following certain norms, I mean, you're not swearing, say, in the South or being polite, you know, being kind of elaborately polite, even when there's not necessarily all that much goodwill between the parties.
00:22:44.900All of this is viewed as fairly high stakes, and violations there are viewed as, very quickly, provocations to violence.
00:22:55.520And when viewed from loose cultures, the stakes are just non-obvious.
00:23:00.140Like, what's wrong with, you know, swearing or saying something inappropriate or not being polite or trespassing on a person's imagined sense of honor when, you know, you don't view yourself in those terms.
00:23:12.800And I'm certainly American enough to be horrified at the extreme versions of all this.
00:23:19.920I mean, when you find out that in Singapore you can be jailed for even bringing chewing gum into the country, right, and killed for bringing marijuana into the country.
00:23:29.240I mean, this just seems like a Orwellian dystopia.
00:23:32.940But it's the knock-on effects of being that rigid, one of the knock-on effects of being that rigid is to close the door to a lot of unpleasantness that we're trying to figure out how to clean up in our society some other way.
00:23:48.760And so there's an interesting, again, we're just in the domain of trade-offs here.
00:23:54.160But anyway, give us a snapshot of the tight-loose difference at the level of society, perhaps comparing a couple of cultures here.
00:24:03.580So, and as I mentioned earlier, all cultures have tight and loose elements, but we can classify countries in terms of where they veer tight or loose on a continuum.
00:24:13.720And places like Japan, Singapore, Austria, to some extent Germany, tend to veer tighter as compared to places like the U.S. in general, Spain, Brazil, Italy.
00:24:25.920And, you know, like you mentioned, you know, a lot of times people are kind of horrified when they look at practices in cultures that have the opposite or different code without realizing that, you know, they have their own liabilities.
00:24:38.520Often the strength of another culture is our own liability and vice versa.
00:24:42.620And just as an example, we call this the order versus openness trade-off.
00:24:47.480And cultures that are tight tend to, generally speaking, have less crime.
00:24:52.260They have more monitoring by police, by God.
00:24:56.140You know, Ara Narenzayan, my colleague at UPC, would say that people who are monitored are people who are good people.
00:25:02.420They're following rules, at least publicly.
00:25:20.080Whereas clocks in city streets in loose cultures are really off by quite a bit.
00:25:25.020You're not totally sure what time it is in places like Brazil or Greece in general.
00:25:29.460And tight cultures, as another indication of order, have more self-regulation in general.
00:25:34.360They are places where people are monitoring their impulses more.
00:25:37.900At the national level, that translates into less debt, translates into less obesity, controlling for lots of factors, and also alcoholism and recreational drug use.
00:25:48.560And so you could think about tight cultures cornering the market on order, and loose cultures struggle with order.
00:27:13.800So in large-scale crowdsourcing contests of creativity, it's really clear that people from loose cultures are more likely to enter creativity contests.
00:28:04.460So I want to mention also these are generalities.
00:28:08.280Like, clearly there's going to be some differences.
00:28:10.060But we have found this order versus openness tradeoff both at the national level, at the state level in the U.S., rank ordering the 50 states on tight loose.
00:28:19.100Others have found it in China, rank ordering the 30 plus provinces in China in terms of the measures we developed.
00:28:26.120Organizations tend to have the same tradeoff.
00:28:28.180I'm actually, we could talk later, I'm working with the Navy to try to help them become more ambidextrous,
00:28:32.420even though they need to veer tight, et cetera.
00:28:35.720So the tight loose tradeoff tends to be something that constitutes kind of a fractal pattern coming from physics, this repeated kind of pattern across levels.
00:28:45.400But again, we have these strong stereotypes around what's good, you know, what's correct, what's objective.
00:28:52.580To us, you know, looking at another culture, you know, really, we get this moral outrage.
00:28:57.800And often, you know, if we step back, I mean, like you said, the extremes are bad anywhere.
00:29:02.980But like, if we look at the gum example that you gave, you know, Americans are kind of horrified that you, why can't you bring a lot of gum into the country of Singapore?
00:29:10.820And, you know, actually, it has some kind of historical basis.
00:29:14.200In the late 80s, people were chewing gum.
00:29:16.240It's a very highly populated dense, high population density context, about 20,000 people per square mile.
00:29:25.660And I guess, as a lot of us do, we throw it on the floor.
00:29:28.460And it was causing this massive problem throughout Singapore with gum and wads of gum, like blocking sensors on trains and elevators.
00:29:38.200And Lee Kuan Yew, who, if you read his autobiography, you know, the dude was really a cross-cultural psychologist at heart.
00:29:44.840You know, he talks about how Singapore has a lot of threat and that, you know, we need to sacrifice some freedom in order to kind of come together and coordinate.
00:29:54.200And he talked about gum as being one of these issues, like, guys, like, we live in a very small place and this gum is causing a big problem.
00:30:00.920And we better just kind of ban this tasty treat because we have so many mouths per capita.
00:30:06.140And I'm sure it was there was some resistance to that, I would guess.
00:30:09.180But, you know, overall, I think when we start looking at these differences with some eye to the ecology of countries, we might have a little bit more empathy.
00:30:18.780Yeah. Actually, there's a distinction that you make in the book, which is a little hard to understand quickly.
00:30:28.220So perhaps you can spell it out because it's easy to see this tight, loose distinction as analogous to or identical to the distinction between being politically conservative and politically liberal.
00:30:43.120But those are not it's not the same axis in your view.
00:30:47.740How do you differentiate liberal and conservative here politically?
00:30:51.880Yeah. Well, I think social norms, you know, are a different level of analysis.
00:30:57.520Individual differences in conservatism, liberal attitudes tend to be individual differences.
00:31:03.880They might be adaptive in certain contexts.
00:31:06.920But clearly, you'll find conservatives living in looser states, you'll find liberals living in conservative states and so forth.
00:31:15.860So I think that we can think about them as separate but interrelated, you know, that clearly conservatives probably like to be in context where there's strict social norms.
00:31:25.680They also have domains in which they're quite loose.
00:31:28.220And likewise, liberals, you know, might find themselves enjoying living in loose states.
00:31:33.500But they also, while have a lot of domains that are, you know, basically loose, also have some domains on which they would fall tight, tightly.
00:31:42.920So I see them as like interrelated at different levels of analysis.
00:31:47.340Actually, COVID is a very good mechanism for dissecting out this difference, because when you look at the conservative bias against mask wearing, say, because they they don't want this new norm of mask wearing imposed on them based on their their underlying beliefs about epidemiology here.
00:32:06.060And we can talk about the problem of information and misinformation, but yeah, that's an example of people who are disproportionately conservative rebelling against a the tightness that's coming to them from the political left in our country.
00:32:23.880Yeah, I mean, this was one of the big evolutionary mismatches, you know, of the century.
00:32:28.740Much of the work in the social sciences has found that conservatives, this is prior to COVID, are much more sensitive to threat.
00:32:38.020I'm sure you've seen some of this work.
00:32:39.500It's both, you know, surveys, it's experiments, it's neuroscience data, you know, so when COVID hit and and we see that conservatives are the ones that are actually resisting the kinds of, you know, that this is the real threat, you know, really makes us realize that, you know, there there's a strong propensity for people.
00:32:58.740Particularly conservatives, particularly conservatives to follow the leader.
00:33:01.800And what we know during times of threat now is that, you know, that threat signal can get hijacked, it can get distorted, it can get manipulated.
00:33:09.880And if it does, then groups don't tighten.
00:33:13.480And I think that's where we see the pandemic, the switch with conservatives, to me makes sense, you know, in a context where it's a germ, it's invisible, it's kind of easier to ignore as compared to warfare or terrorism.
00:33:28.740If you have, combined with the abstract nature of the threat, and you have leaders who are telling you don't worry about it, then conservatives, their kind of normal propensity to be threat sensitive, it just goes, you know, basically out the window.
00:33:41.340So, and that's been the big, you know, kind of story of COVID.
00:33:45.500Actually, there's another piece to it, which is, you know, deeply ironic or depressing, depending on your view, but they're sensitized to the threat around this, but they're disproportionately sensitized to the threat of the vaccine.
00:34:00.320Basically, we have something like 40% of the country, it seems, that is quite sanguine about the prospects of catching COVID, but quite averse to getting vaccinated against COVID.
00:34:15.040They're basically running a head-to-head trial between, you know, the disease and the vaccine for the disease and deciding the disease is better.
00:34:25.720And, you know, there's some interesting new data coming out that a lot of this has to do with signaling that if you hear from Republican leaders that that vaccine is okay and it's good, then you'll see people in the conservative party starting to veer towards their intentionally getting the vaccine.
00:34:42.940When they hear that same message from liberals, of course, it backfires, but I think this is just yet another example of the power of social norms.
00:34:51.900You know, humans are social creatures, and I think that's where, you know, people have been trying to get Republicans to get out there and be role models and say, you know, this is important, because we do know that people are starting to listen to that.
00:35:04.320It's just that we don't see it that often.
00:35:06.060Yeah, well, maybe there's more to say about COVID when we talk about how we want to try to steer the ship in light of what we understand about norms.
00:35:17.360I'm struck by how important norms are and how it's, it's not totally obvious where they get their power from.
00:35:28.000You can think of certain norm violations, but certainly in a religious context, there are norm violations that are absolutely fatal to a person's reputation and or even to their lives in a theocracy.
00:35:42.960But even in the context of a very loose society, there are norm violations, which really are an extraordinarily big deal.
00:35:56.900And it's not totally clear why or what would be optimal here.
00:36:03.460I'm just, I'm thinking, I mean, one example that came to mind was the misadventures of Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker writer.
00:36:12.820I mean, he was on a Zoom, most people probably know this, he was on a Zoom call with his colleagues who are, you know, other famous writers.
00:36:20.120You know, disproportionately, one must think, very liberal.
00:36:23.420And he thought they were taking a 10 minute break, apparently, and started masturbating.
00:36:29.820And, you know, to the uniform horror of the people who are still on the call with him, originally his statement was he thought his camera was off or it sounded like he didn't actually know how to use Zoom very well to his everlasting disadvantage here.
00:36:44.360But basically, he masturbated in front of his colleagues, clearly making a mistake, not he was not some boorish ogre who was imposing this sexual harassment style on his colleagues.
00:36:56.700I mean, he clearly thought he was in private and was wrong about that.
00:37:00.340And yet, it has proved to be a norm violation without any intent, so catastrophic that one wonders if he will ever be heard from again.
00:37:11.920So it's, you know, it was certainly career wrecking and at minimum life deranging.
00:37:18.460And on some basic level, I look at it as he was just very unlucky to be so confused as to have inadvertently violated this norm.
00:37:31.960It's easy to see how CNN and The New Yorker wouldn't be eager at this point to rehire him because, you know, he's done himself and them by association massive brand damage.
00:37:45.300But it's just not clear to me what should be done in situations like this.
00:37:51.480Yeah, well, I mean, it's such a great example.
00:37:54.420I think there's so many examples where you've seen this kind of intentional or unintentional behavior from major leaders.
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