The Secret Life of Social Norms: Michele Gelfand (Transcript)

And that metaphor gave me so much comfort that the very next day I booked a low budget trip to Egypt. I figured it just like going from New York to California. My dad was not very happy.

But in my travels around Egypt and rest of the world, I started to recognize how powerful this forces of culture. But I knew so little about it. And by extension, I knew so little about myself.

So I ditched my plans to become a medical doctor. And I got a PhD in cross-cultural psychology. I wanted to use the tools of science to understand these deeper cultural codes. Since that time I’ve been traveling the world, trying to understand lots of puzzling differences.

So for example, in Singapore, why are people fined for things like chewing gum or not flushing the toilet, or walking around their homes naked with the curtains open?

Go over to New Zealand in contrast, and you’ll see people walking barefoot in banks. You’ll see them decorating their fences with large quantities of bras. New Zealand is also the only place that I know that has its own national wizard. This guy here is actually a fired professor who went to the streets of New Zealand and was lecturing on everything from rugby to religion.

[read more]

And rather being punished as a deviant, the prime minister asked him to be the official wizard of New Zealand, and he was charged with keeping the country entertained, which he did. He’s found building large nests on libraries and hatching himself from eggs in art museums.

Other puzzling trends can be seen all around the world. Why do Germans wait very patiently at street corners when there’s no cars in sight, when in New York or New Jersey, you see people jaywalking with great frequency, even with kids in tow.

In Germany, they’re also inventing other incentives to keep people staying put. It’s called street punk, and you might not be able to see it right away, but you see this guy here is playing a game of electric Ping-Pong on the street corner with the dude across the street. And actually this game tells them when the light is going to change.

On other serious notes, why is it that in the Netherlands, you can smoke pot openly whereas in Indonesia, you can get the death penalty for that same behaviour?

Or closer to home, there’s other trends that elude us. Why are we giving our kids more and more unique names? As an aside, one of my colleagues was in a supermarket and asked where the candy was and they said she doesn’t work there anymore.

And why are we getting fatter and fatter in our country? Is there anything that can help us explain these kinds of diverse patterns. These examples, and many more reflect something very fundamental: How strictly groups abide by social norms.

All groups have social norms or rules or behaviour. We follow them constantly. And actually we rarely stop and think about how much we need social norms. I’d like to do a thought experiment with you right now.

Imagine you live in a world where people drive on either side of the street as they wish, or they ignore traffic lights. In this world, you’re in your favourite restaurant and people are chewing with their mouth wide open. They’re burping really loudly, and they’re stealing food from each other’s plate.

Or imagine you board an elevator and people are facing the back and they’re shaking their own blinders on each other. Or in this world imagine that sex is not reserved for private places. People do it on airplanes, on buses and in movie theaters.

This is a world without social norms or any agreed upon standards for behavior. Luckily, humans invented social norms to aboard these kinds of scenarios… to help us predict each other’s behavior… to help us coordinate. They’re the glue that keep us together.

But what I found is that this glue is stronger in some groups than others. Some groups are tight, they have strong norms and punishment for deviance. Other groups are loose. They have weaker norms and they’re much more permissive. And it turns out that this distinction is really important in understanding behavior all around the world from abroad at home.

I first discovered this difference in a large study that I did with colleagues from around the world, the results of which were published in the journal Science. What we found was that just like we can classify people in terms of the personalities, we can also classify groups in terms of the strength of their norms.

So tight loose is a continuum. Some groups like Japan and Singapore, Austria, and Germany, bear tight. Other groups like New Zealand or Brazil, Greece, or the Netherlands bear loose. And what we found was that tight and loose confers really important trade-offs for groups that we don’t recognize.

So tight groups have the corner on order. They have lot more law enforcement and also security, and they have much less crime. There’s a great, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me show on NPR where Peter Sagal is asking the audience, “What if Japanese policemen need more of?”, and we’re all guessing, “Do they need higher pay? Do they need more vacation?”

Actually, they need more crime. Japan is such low crime that these police officers in some places were trying to egg people on to commit minor crimes because they were so bored.

Tight cultures also have more uniformity in what people wear and what people drive, and even in their city clocks. I analyzed how similar the clocks were in city streets, all around the world. In tight cultures, they’re almost identical city clocks. But in loose cultures, they say something very different and you’re not entirely sure what time it is.

Tight cultures with their strong rules have people also regulating their behavior more. They have more self-control. Tight cultures have less alcoholism. They have less debt and they’re less fat.

Loose cultures tend to be more disorganized. They have more crime, they have less synchrony and they have a host of self-regulation failures. But loose cultures corner the market on openness, they’re far more open to many different types of people… people from different religions from races, immigrants, people with disabilities, many stigmatized people.

In one experiment I did, I asked my research assistants from all over the world to wear fake facial warts. You can buy them on the internet. Or they were wearing tattoos and nose rings, and they were asking for help on city streets or in stores. And there was a very clear pattern. People in loose cultures were much more likely to get helped when they were running these stigmas as compared to tight cultures.

Loose cultures are also open to more ideas. They’re much more creative and they’re much more open to change. And tight culture struggle with openness.

So you might be asking by now what causes these differences? Tight loose cultures don’t share any obvious characteristics, geography or language or religion or tradition, but there is a hidden rationale and it has to do with threat.

Tight cultures have a lot of threat, whether it’s from Mother Nature, think disasters and famines…something that Japan has been struggling with for centuries or that threat might come from other humans… think invasions or the spread of disease or even high population density.

And it makes a lot of sense when you have a lot of threat, you need those rules to help coordinate to survive. When you have less threat, you don’t need as many rules. You can be more permissive.

Let’s go back to Singapore, which is called the fine country because it has so many punishments for various behaviours. It’s a very threatened country. It has a dearth of natural resources. It has a lot of conflict in its past, and it has extremely high population density, an astonishing 20,000 people per square mile. It’s like living in an elevator a lot of your life. Compare that to New Zealand that has 50 people per square mile and more sheep per capita than people.

When you live with a lot of people jammed around you, you need rules to help avoid chaos and conflict. In Singapore, this overpopulation can also help us explain the ban on gum. In a place where there’s so many mouths per mile, gum was causing a lot of problems. People like to chew gum and throw it on the floor. And it was causing a massive mess in Singapore. It was even causing elevators and trains to malfunction because the gum wads were covering up sensors.

So Lee Kuan Yew said, “Guys, we’re going to just ban gum. We’re going to get rid of this temptation and it’s the simple solution.” And if you lived in Singapore, you might actually also understand why this makes sense.

Once you grasp the tight loose lens, you can see these differences all around us. Rather than red or blue, we can also differentiate our United States, 50 States in terms of a continuum of tight and loose.

In our research, we could see the South and some parts of the Midwest bear tight. And the coasts tend to bear loose. Tight states, just like tight nations, tend to have more threat.

There’s a remarkable similarity between scores on tightness in our data and Mother Nature’s fury in terms of natural disasters. Tight and loose cultures also reflect the same trade-off at the state level. Tight States have got an order and stability. They have more law enforcement and they have more self-control and they have less divorce and less homelessness. Tight states are even much more polite.

My beloved New York state is ranked number one on rudeness. And that explains why New Yorkers who really like to flip people off, get in a lot of trouble when they do that in the South, I’ve witnessed that first-hand.

But loose states again corner the market on openness. They’re more creative, they’re much more tolerant. And even if more rude they tend to be much more fun according to our surveys. Once you grasp this tight loose lens, you can also use it to analyze other differences that have eluded us.

Let’s take social class. We tend to think about class differences typically in terms of bank accounts. But here again, our deeper cultural codes are helping to drive these differences.

Let’s do another thought experiment. I want you to think about what comes to mind when you see this phrase – follow the rules. Just what comes to mind.

When we we’ve done this experiment with the working class and upper-class we see a striking difference. The working class comes up with many positive associations with this phrase – good, structure, safety.

It’s the upper-class that is very negative connotation about rules. Goody two-shoes, nuisance… In our research, the working class is far tighter than the upper-class and it makes sense. They experience a lot of threat, they’re worried about falling into poverty. They work in more dangerous jobs where rules help keep people safe. And they also live in more dangerous neighbourhoods where rules can keep kids out of trouble. 

It’s the upper-class that has more of a safety net. They have less threat. And so they can afford to be more rule breakers.

Actually, it explains why University of California, Berkeley researchers found that Mercedes and other upper-class cars were much more likely to violate traffic rules and even cut up pedestrians as compared to plumber vans and lower-class vehicles.

But again, just like our other research, we could see the trade-off with class differences. In our research, it’s the, upper-class, the rule breakers that are more creative and they’re far more tolerant of people who are different.

Amazingly, these differences arise very early. We brought three-year-olds into the laboratory and we couldn’t ask them exactly what do you think about rules? But we wanted to see how did the working class and upper class react to a puppet who violates the rules.

This is Max, the puppet. They befriend the puppet and they’re playing games with them according to the rules they learn. And all of a sudden in the middle of experiment, Max, the puppet becomes Max, the rule violator. And he starts announcing that he’s playing the rules correctly.

And what you see is a striking difference… again the working class kids are upset by these norm violations. It’s the upper-class, that’s more likely to laugh and they let Max off the hook.

Tightness and looseness can also help us understand many really bewildering things happening in the world. Take the rise of populism. It’s not explained easily by just some kind of mesmerizing personalities. In fact, it’s explained better by feelings of threat.

Before the U.S. election, we surveyed people and the people that felt very threatened, whether it was by ISIS or immigrants or North Korea, wanted the country to be tighter. And this predicted their vote for Trump. Same exact pattern in the elections in France when we collected data there. And it also explains the patterns of Brexit.

Threats don’t even have to be real to tighten people up. In my laboratory, I can give people fake threat about disasters or invasions, and it tightens them up immediately. They want stricter rules and strong leaders.

And of course, leaders around the world are using this tight psychology. They’re amplifying and exaggerating threats. They’re targeting the groups that are most threatened in order to be popular. And this is not just relevant to the modern age. This has been happening for centuries. And it capitalizes on this very powerful evolutionary principle of threat and tightness.

I want to leave you with a question that’s very important, which is: Which is better, tight or loose?

Philosophers have been debating this for centuries. Is it better to have rules or is it better to have freedom? Plato, Confucius and Hobbes wanted rules. They wanted tightness. John Stuart Mills and even Freud advocated for freedom; for looseness… which is correct?

Actually, what if neither are correct? While certainly groups have to bear tight or loose for good reasons, what I’ve found is that groups that get too extreme in either direction have a lot of problems. When we get extremely loose, things become normless and unpredictable, like that world that we thought about earlier and it’s unbearable.

But on the flip side, when we get too tight, it’s oppressive and also unbearable. This is what I call the Goldilocks principle of tightness and looseness… that we need a balance of the strength of norms in our everyday lives for the maximum happiness.

And we’ve seen this with our own research. In nations we see that groups that are either too loose or too tight, have more suicide and less happiness. It even applies to our households. Parents who are too over-controlling or parents who are too laissez-faire produce maladaptive kids. It’s the balance in households of tight-loose that produces healthy families.

It also applies to organizations. The best leaders are ambidextrous. They know how to deploy tightness and looseness at the right time. And innovation is a great example of this. We need looseness to create ideas, but we need tightness to implement them.

So I want to leave you with a few different ideas of how you can use the tight loose code in your everyday life:

The first is that we should understand our own mindsets. We each have a certain default on the tight-loose spectrum based on our own personal experiences. On my website, I have a quiz where you can see where do you fall on that spectrum.

And it’s very empowering to understand where we are and why we became that way. It helps us to understand our own actions and reactions, a variety of setting and with people.

The second is that we need to cultivate empathy for others’ mindsets. Often people that we have a lot of conflict with or people that we have the biggest differences in our tight-loose mindsets, and understanding where they come from can be a great to understand and empathize and build better relationships.

And finally, we can harness the power of social norms to better our world. Culture isn’t destiny. We can tighten up norms when they’re getting too loose or loosen up norms when they’re getting too tight. The Internet’s a perfect example. It offers us a lot of advantages in terms of efficiencies and connections, but let’s face it, it’s a normless place and it needs tightening.

Luckily for us, humans developed and invented social norms and we can use them to better our planet.

Thank you.

Resources for Further Reading:

The Lies Our Culture Tells Us About What Matters – And A Better Way To Live: David Brooks (Transcript)

Julien S. Bourrelle: How Culture Drives Behaviours at TEDxTrondheim (Transcript)

Rethinking Culture: Small Actions Today, Big Impact Tomorrow by Jolynna Sinanan (Transcript)

Saba Safdar: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Culture (Transcript)

[/read]

Related Posts

• The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics – Joshua Citarella on Modern Wisdom (Transcript)
• Jeffrey Sachs: Trump’s Distorted Version of the Monroe Doctrine (Transcript)
• Robin Day Speaks With Svetlana Alliluyeva – 1969 BBC Interview (Transcript)
• Grade Inflation: Why an “A” Today Means Less Than It Did 20 Years Ago
• Why Is Knowledge Getting So Expensive? – Jeffrey Edmunds (Transcript)