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A book excerpt and interview with Michele Gelfand, an author and psychologist at the University of Maryland
The influence of culture on politics is profound, explaining the rule-bound Japanese, orderly Swiss, laissez-faire French and gun-totin’, freedom-lovin’ Americans. That, at least, is the thesis of Michele Gelfand, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland. In her book, “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World”, she sets out how deep cultural codes drive human behavior, and how they affect the strength of social norms.
Ms Gelfand differentiates between tight cultures, which have strict norms and punishments, from loose cultures, which are more permissive. This distinction, she argues, helps us to understand differences across nations, social classes, organisations and families. As part of The Economist’s Open Future initiative, we asked Ms Gelfand several questions about her ideas. Her replies are followed by an excerpt from her book, on the “Goldilocks Principle” of balancing both sorts of cultures.
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The Economist: Tight and loose cultures seem irreconcilable. Are they destined to be in conflict with one another?
Michele Gelfand: Tight and loose are actually compatible—each of their strengths is the other’s liability. Tight cultures have a lot of order; they have less crime, more uniformity and more self-control. Loose cultures can be disorganised and have a suite of self-regulation problems. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. They’re more open to different people (immigrants, minorities, the stigmatised), different ideas and change—issues that tight cultures struggle with. Moreover, many complex tasks require both tight and loose cultural elements. Take organisational innovation. It requires looseness to come up with cutting-edge ideas but it requires tightness to implement them and scale up. The best leaders are those that are “ambidextrous”—they can find synergies between tight and loose cultural elements.
The Economist: Can tightness and looseness of societies really be measured?
Ms Gelfand: In our paper published in Science, we developed multiple measures of the strength of norms. For example, in our surveys, we’ve shown that people around the world share their perceptions of how strict or permissive the norms are in their society. These measures, in turn, are correlated with other indicators of compliance with norms and tolerance for deviance from...