Michele Gelfand || How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World

the podcast. Doctor Galfan is a distinguished University professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Doctor Gelfan uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture as well as its multi level consequences for human groups. In addition to publishing numerous articles in many prestigious scientific outlets, she's the author of the really great book Rule Makers Rule Breakers, How tight and loose cultures wire the World.

Doctor Klfan, what a pleasure it is to chat with you today. Oh so happy to be here. I hope I pronounced your last name correctly. Good good, So I want to begin with this a seemingly innocuous question, but which opens up of many cans of worms, or maybe just one can of worm. What are social norms? So this is a great question, and you know, as a cross cultural psychologist, I try to understand this really puzzling phenomena of culture. You know, culture is one of these

puzzles because it's omnipresent. It's all around us, but it's invisible, like we tend to ignore it all the time. And it's like the story of two fish where they're swimming along and they pass another fish who says, how is the water boys? And they swim on and one says to the other, what the hell is water? And for fish, this invisible thing is water, but for humans it's culture.

And a big part of culture is social norms, or these unwritten standards for behavior that sometimes become more formalized in laws and rules, but nevertheless, we follow social norms all the time endlessly without even realizing it, and we have to really understand their impact on social behavior. And that's why I wrote the book That's so cool. Well, thank you for writing it and for shining this slight

on this. But certainly there's individual differences in them. You know, you find like dark triad people, you know, people who score high on the dark Triad scales and macavalias and narcissm psychopathy. They don't like social norms. They are verse to it. Well, you know, I write in the book about sort of individual differences in people who like or dislike social norms, rule makers, rule bakers. You could think about the analogy of the chaos versus order muppets exactly

like think about Sesame Street. Like the chaos muppets are like you know, Cookie Monster, and you know and animal who love to like just create chaos and don't follow rules, and they think by Ernie or Bert actually and Kermit the Frog who love rules. And I actually have a tight loose mindset quiz on my website where you can find out where do you veer in terms of tight or loose mindsets. People who like tightness really notice rules. They have a lot of impulse control, and they like structure.

People who ve or lose tend to ignore rules more often. They're more impulsive, but they're more creative and they're more open minded. And in the book, I talk about the advantages and disadvantages of this construct across different levels from nations to neurons, from states to organizations. So it's something that I think about as a fractal pattern. It's is the repeated pattern of phenomenon across different levels, and so I try to illuminate why do tight moose differences evolve

in the first place at cross levels and what consequence. Yeah, I love that you linked that to creativity some people have I wonder how that relates to some people who argue that Asian cultures are less creative. You know, then, do you think that some of that can be explained

by sort of the looseness or tightness of the culture itself. Yes, So you know, in our first analysis of tight luser was across thirty something nations where we were able to classify nations as veering tight or loose, even knowing that all nations have tightan wose elements, and some countries like Japan and Singapore, China beer tighter than places like Brazil and New Zealand and the Netherlands. Oh, in Brazil, anything goes. Indicators of tightness was the accuracy of clocks and how

coordinated clocks are in city streets. So in tight cultures, the clocks and city streets pretty much say the same thing, but in loose cultures like Brazil or Greece, you're not entirely sure what time it is, because the clocks around you say a lot of different things. And that speaks to something that really is about the tight loose trade off.

Tight cultures have a lot of order and loose cultures a lot of openness, and that means that you know, both have strengths and liabilities depending on your vantage point. So your question by creativity, we have found that across nations, across states, across organizations that are tight, they tend to have less novelty, less idea generation than loose cultures. But what's interesting, and we're finding this more recently, is that

each has its own strength in terms of innovation. So loose cultures can create a lot of ideas, but tight cultures can implement them much better. So in fact, both again have strengths that can be brought to bear on a common issue like innovation. Oh great, have you read Richard Farida's work at all on the creativeties? Yeah, the creativity class and yeah, and that's the city level. Also,

I think his work is really interesting. That's right, because this also differs state by state within America, Right, do you think, like, is there a soulth difference versus No? I don't know. I don't want to grossly stereotype things without you actually telling me what is really important. Right. So in one of the chapters in the book, I talk about how we can move beyond red versus Blue

look tight and lose. And in fact, we have a paper in the PNAS and all proceeds in National Acacgemy that rank orders the fifty stations in of tight and loose. And it's kind of like you're saying that the South tends to Actually, you're tight. They have more strict rules, they have more order. To some extent, they have less creativity. They're also more polite. So the rudest states are the

loosest states, which tend to be on the coasts. But those states tend to have more creativity, like you surmised. And so what that means is that we can kind of look at different different states now through a new lens. One of the more important things that I talk about in the book is why these differences evolve in the

first place. And what we find across nation states, et cetera, is that groups that have a lot of threat, whether it's from mother nature like chronic disasters or famine, or other human types of threats like pathogens or population density or invasions, tend to vear tighter. And the logic's pretty simple. When groups have a lot of threat, they need rules to coordinate to survive, and norms provide that they help

people to actually control themselves in difficult situations. And the tightest states in the US tend to have more threat, They have more pathogens, that have more disasters, and so forth. And so there's some kind of logic to why groups evolved to be tight or loose. I mean, with that said, and we could talk about it later. Threats now are, whether they're perceived or real, tend to produce the same

tight psychology. And that's something nowadays that we're dealing with more and more in terms of how is tight loose manifesting itself in politics and in other context where threat is less objective and more perceived. Oh you should we jump into the politics. Well, I mean, I could say, is that so for example, at the national level, on the state level, like I mentioned, objective chronic threat produces

a desire for tightness because again, norms. One of the biggest functions is that they helped us to coordinate, and we need more of those when we're actually threatened. But we also see in my lab that we can prime people to feel threatened, and almost immediately they desire stricter rules and more autocratic types of leaders. And actually that's a really important and a lot of ways evolution are really adaptive principle. Like again, when we're have collective threat,

we can't solve this on our own. We need strong rules to coordinate and strong leaders to help us survive. But some of the issue that we're facing is that people more and more feeling threatened when some threats are not real or they're exaggerated. And of course certain immigrants and stuff, sorry, like the thought of immigrants coming in

and Steah, that's right. I mean, we just published an op ed in La Times where we showed that the misestimation of illegal immigration is really unbelievably sure, I mean, it's on my website. And also like that perception made people feel that the United States is too disorderly, too loose, and it was that perception, in turn that drove their desire for people like Trump and in the elections. We

found the same thing in the US and France. People who felt threatened by immigration, by ISIS, by many other threats, felt the US was too disorganized and too loose, and that was in part related to their desire for someone like Trump. It happened in France also the same exact data.

We just published this data in Paswana Journal. And again what's really fascinating about this is that we have to understand what's real in terms of threat and what's perceived, because clearly there are some people that really feel threatened in rural areas and where manufacturing is really having a lot of problems, these ghost towns you see. I drove through Michigan this past summer. It was just amazing how

much change there is. People are feeling really threatened. They really want tighter rules to help return to this order that they felt they had, and that's in part explaining their desire from people like Trump. So I think when we think about the psychology of these elections and the deeper cultural codes that in part help us explain them, it's not a modern phenomenon. It happened in centuries ago. And I also have them writing about how, of course

leaders play into these threats. If we just created a new threat dictionary where we can analyze threatening speech, and we could clearly see people like Trump use way more threatening language than Hillary, and that people who are they're trying to target groups that are actually threatened with these language and then use that to gain popularity. That's happening all around the world. And we'll be going public with

the tight the threat Dictionary at some point. But it's important to understand that there's some threats that are really real driving some of these desire for autocratic leaders, and some that are misperceived, and we need to really negotiate those realities as and we need our leaders to do that. Wait, so is it fair to say that in the past two years America has become a tighter society on average?

You know, it's interesting. We produced a paper last year that looked at how the US has been loosening over the last two hundred years in general. But what you find, I think in many countries is that we're becoming more divided in terms of tight and loose based on world versus urban in many different countries. So the kind of axis of Titan's conflict is shifting. And again I think in large part that's driven by perceptions of threat. When

we have threat, we desire tightness. It's really an adaptive principle in general. And I think right now what we need to do is move beyond these kinds of stereotypes about people and understand why people are feeling threatened and

how to cope with those threats. Like, for example, in the book, I talk about how Germany is an interesting context where they tend to really have standardized rules, they're tighter for helping the working class, and we need to really try to help people to negotiate these new threatening realities. And I think that's the key to trying to avoid the rise of populism, oh for sure. For sure populism. Yeah,

authoritarianism as well. Yeah, because again the fact is that people in countries that have chronic threat, there's more autocracy, there's more off of security for freedom. You think about, you know, loose cultures have had less threat, they can have more freedom because they need less security, they have

less chronic threat. There are exceptions, of course, and there's lots of interesting discussions in my book about for example, why Israel, which tends to be pretty chronically threatened veers loose in a lot of domains also has its own bifurcation in terms of tight loose these days. But you know, there's exceptions that where some groups can overcome the kind of tightness proclivity by having a lot of debate, by

having a lot of dissent. And I have a lot of examples of some tight cultures that have loose elements and loose cultures that have tight elements, and just this kind of flashlight that can help us understand the world in a different way. Yeah, I mean in an elucidating way. Yeah, some people help you see in a different way, but it's useless. But I find you're not everyone who shows me something in a new way, like, oh, that's that's brilliant. But this is a good one. This is a good one.

But you know it's not the only you know, cultural construct. It's just that for many years, and I was trained by Harry Trandis and I were working a lot on collectivism, individualism, the really important aspect of culture also groups versus individuality and privacy. But what happened was in the field of cross cultural psychology is that we got so obsessed with this one dimension. It's kind of like in personality psychology, only focusing on like one dimension like extraversion, to the

exclusion of other dimensions of culture. And many of us were guilty of that for a long time. And part of it's because cross cultural psychology wasn't the you know, really that popular every subdiscipline, because many of us were like kind of like tapping on people's shoulders, saying, wait, is your stuff really universal? Does it really apply to beyond like a very small percentage of the world, And so there was some safety in kind of focusing on collectivism.

That's my sort of sociology of science explanation for why it's taken so long for us to kind of move beyond I see, to look at other dimensions that are also useful for illuminating phenomenon. And so, you know, part of our quest in the science paper on tight Loose was to show that surely these contracts are related, but they're distinct. So, for example, some East Asian cultures like Japan and Singapore via collectivistic and tight, but there's also

individualistic cultures that ve are tight. Think about Germany, Austria, Switzerland. They tend to value privacy but also rules, and then you could think about cultures that are individualistic and loose, like the US and Australia, but there's also collectivistic cultures that that vier loose. For example, think about Brazil or Spain. In our data, they so we're trying to and they're correlated.

They're actually Harry trand This had told me that he thought they were correlated point four, and I couldn't believe it. When I analyzed the data at the national level. He was exactly right that tighte cultures tend to bear collectivistic But there's also like I mentioned these off diet and we found the same sort of distinction at the state level. You can have tight states that are collectivistic or or individualistic and the same thing we found now in traditional society.

So we have a new paper out that's analyzing pre industrial societies where we coded all these ethnographies for tighte loose. It gave me a lot of gray hair that I now die. You know, this is a this is like a really very immersive, you know methodology. We really wanted to see, like can we see the same signature of

this construct in pre industrial societies? And we do find the same kind of signature that type groups in the pre industrial eraror tended to have more threat and they also produced the same trade off of order versus openness. And also, like I mentioned, the connection between individualism and collectivism and type loose is also distinct in this kind of data. So the broader principle is that across cultural psychology is really expanding to like in great leaps and

balance these days. Methodologically, theoretically, it's really a great time to be in the field. And even with social norms, we're trying to really create interdisciplinary spaces involving biologists and computer scientists and all sorts of people economists doing work on social norms. We just formed a new society just as a plug. That's called the Study the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution, and it's phenomenally interesting place.

It's like being a Disneyland at this conference because there's just so many disciplines that are studying culture and understanding this complex phenomenon from different perspectives. So I'm really excited for that interdisciplinarity and bringing that into the field. I love that. Michelle. Hey everyone, if you find the themes we cover on the Psychology podcast interesting and enlightening, you might be interested in my new book, Transcend, The New

Science of Self Actualization. The book is the culmination of my journey to scientifically discover the factors that can lead us to optimal health, growth, creativity, peak experiences, and deep fulfillment. I believe we could still manage to have peak experiences, the most wondrous moments that make life worth living, regardless of our current life circumstances. We can choose growth for more.

You can visit Transcend hyphenbook dot com, a's transcend hyphenbook dot com with a hyphen between the word transcend and the word book. If you get a chance to read the book, it'd be great if you could leave a review on Amazon, tweet about it, or share the book with friends. I truly hope this book can help people get through these tough times and realize that we all have greater resiliency, creativity, and potential within us than we

ever realized. Okay, now back to the show. There's so much here, so much rich material, and the question is like where do I go next? Let me talk. Let me dive into corporations for a second, and businesses entire corporations can kind of be tight or loose, right now. But that's right. I mean, just like the same principle, organizations that have a lot of coordination needs likelines or nuclear power plants in the military, that operate in context

of serious threat, need tighter rules. They have cultures that have people, practices and leaders that are really different than loose organizations. I take this from Ben Schneider, who is

an organizational theorist. He always said that people make the place, and we found that tight cultures that are organizational cultures, tend to have people who are more conscientious, They have more standardized procedures and rules formality, and they have leaders that are more independent, and loose organizations that have less threat, more mobility, more diversity, tend to have people who are more promotion focused, more risk taking, They have more informality

and experimentation, and they have leaders that are more collaborative and team oriented. And what in the book I talk a lot about again the advantages of both and why they're so important as adaptations. But what happens when they merge is really a problematic and just like the invisibility of culture at the national level, organizations tend to merge

without doing a lot of culture due diligence. They merge a lot of times because of strategic types of compatibilities, but don't recognize that there's the kind of iceberg beneath the surface where Titan loose is going to rear its head. And we've been analyzing organizations and what happens when they merge, when they don't, when they do have big tight loose differences, and finding that there's really big losses financially, the bigger

the differences. And so our point actually in a new paper on this topic is that we really need to negotiate culture like tight loose. Is we invented norms. We have stronger loose norms for good reasons, but we can actually negotiate them. We can negotiate them before we emerge. We can negotiate them in households with our spouses, which I do a lot with when I'm trying to parent you know kids. I mean, it comes up all the

time between you know, two individuals. You know how strict or permissive she should be in different domains with your kids. In organizations, which domains can you give up a little slack and have a little bit more order when you're merging? And so I talk quite a bit about that in the book, that how a lot of these difference are negotiable, and that's the exciting thing is to think about how do you create this what I call mbidexterity. How can you have kind of both and adapt them as needed?

And a lot of it just involves recognizing the constructs and talking about them and again getting to like this negotiation table when it comes to culture. Oh yeah, absolutely, this this idea of that neither is absolutely good or bad and context matters. And it sounds more like you're saying balanced matters. But are they are these two different Is it one continuum or are they two separate continuums

that interact? This is what I'm trying to my head around. Yeah, so in all of our data, they're typically unidimensional, and you kind of can think about strict and permissive norms, but they can also be You can also find in any social system some domains that are very tight and some that are loose. So, for example, Japan is a good example, I guess a pretty tight culture, but you

can find pockets where there's a lot of looseness. And actually it's kind of funny, it's they're all usually organized looseness, like going out with your boss and getting drunk. It's pretty like And karaoke is even something one of my former students was telling me, like, it's pretty tight because in allowing people be loose in a tight way, you know, or you think about the US, it's pretty loose in general.

But there's certainly domains that are tight. You know. For example, privacy is a very tight domain in the United States, where we don't just show up at each other's houses randomly. You could try that see how people react, right, But privacy is are really valued domain. And my theory would be that in any culture, the domains that are really important tend to evolve to be tight because we really cherish them. And New Zealand's another good example. You know,

it's a pretty loose context. People walk in barefoot and banks and burning couches on university campuses. But there's some domains that are pretty tight. And one of them has to do with what people call the tall poppy syndrome, not trying to appear like you're better than others, or you'll be like kind of cut down. And that stems from the very strong value of egalitarianism in New Zealand.

So there's a strict value around egalitarianism. So while it's a unit dimensional construct, we can find domains that are tight or loose. And the exciting thing for me is to kind of figure out why that is. I want to get back to something you said about balance. I think you know. For me, one interesting application of tight

loose theories is what I call the Goldilocks principle. Remember that kind of book, that storybook about not too hot, not too cold, not too soft, not too hard, And I have a whole chapter on this, because the idea is that groups need to be a tight or loose for good reasons, but that the groups that get too extreme and either direction have a lot of problems. So you can imagine system to get too tight, like United Airlines is a good example. When that whole pr fiasco happened.

Those organizations need to be your tight airlines. You don't want them making all sorts of weird decisions. But they arguably became too tight and they were just normalizing everything, and people I interviewed said, yeah, people were following the rules just blindly. They need to insert some flexibility, some looseness into that type system. It's something I call flexible tightness. And on the flip side, I talk about places that get entirely to loose, almost chaotic and disorganized what dirt

Hin would have called anime. You know, these are contexts like for example, Tesla, I argue is getting into that kind of zone where it should be or loose. It's a it's a creative industry, you know, innovative company. But arguably that system was getting too loose where you know, it needed more structure, it needed more organization or coordination. I call that structured looseness. And so then by the way, the gold Ucks principle, I really had a good, great

time like analyzing it from different perspectives. So it applies to or organizations, but and to nations. I found that nations that are two tight or too loose have higher suicide a being in general. And it applies to households. You know, parents that are too helicopter like or to lais a fair produce kids that are problematic. So the bottom line is that we need to kind of recalibrate

norms in some context. We need to know when we need to loosen norms that are getting too tight, and we need to tighten norms that are getting too loose in other contexts, And of course it's not easy, but I find some I have some examples in the book of ways that this has been done in context that maybe we need to think about doing this in and

be more mindful in a sense about culture. And so that's kind of part of the part of the story has to do with Yes, we need to stand and empathize with tight with differences, but we need to be mindful of when they get too extreme. Yeah. No, it's a really really good point. These you can kind of see these extremes playing itself out again on politics on

both the left end the right. Extreme tightness and extreme looseness I think maps onto far right and far left, and in some sense, in some sense, you know, they're definitely correlated. I mean, I think from a political point of view. One of the things I talk about is how we need to understand that when systems get entirely loose and chaotic, or when people perceive a lot of chaos. This is something from talked about, you know, decades ago,

when he perceived when people perceive disorder, they yearn for security. So, for example, I talk about something in the book that has to do with why people welcomed Isis in some context, and we have some data on this. You know that we look at this and think this is a random occurrence, and of course it's multiply determined. But the context where Isis was able to really take over. We're places that were totally normalless, where people are craving for some kind

of order. Or you take someone like Dutarte, which Americans think is they think he's crazy and they don't understand why would the Philippines why would people have such positive feelings and attitudes about this guy? And again it through Tyler's theory. The idea is that in these contexts they were getting almost normalists and people yearn for the kind of security they're willing to give up freedom in these contexts.

The samapies in Russia, the Pies in many contexts. And so one of these sort of policy implications is that we need to really be diagnosing contexts that are getting very disorderly and understand the human psychology that goes around that in terms of you know what type forces will take over those contexts. And one other example I talk about is I don't want to give too an examples and no one's going to read the book now, right, But the other better, The other context is Arab Spring.

You know, we were on the ground collecting data after mcbarrick was ousted, and you know, it's a really interesting phenomena of this kind of pendulum shift that we call kind of autocratic recidivism. You know, people were screaming freedom after they got rid of him, but then they started realizing this place is totally disorderly, like we can't even

coordinate on any kind of basis. There was increases in crime and violations of norms and all sorts of contexts, and we found people who felt like there was a lot of looseness or extreme looseness desired the Musslim Brotherhood or the Salafi government again, and it's same kind of principle that we're putting in place from from just using modern cultural psychology theory to say that it's not too

surprising in context where autocrats breed distrust among people. After all, people you know, trusted each other, they probably throw out the autocrat. So those contexts have very little trust. Then you throw out any kind of organizing power like the autocrat provides coordinating mechanism and you have chaos, you have normallessness,

and so you kind of see this repeated pattern. We have some data, empirical data, but also some modeling that we've been doing on this computational modeling to try to understand how do we prevent that so in any event, that's kind of the broader principle that Goldilocks kind of invites, which is try to think about, you know, how do you anticipate these radical shifts around world world in ways that might have been predictable. I I think it's a great point, and I I just think about how some

of this is in the eye of the beholder. Some people might what they may see is chaos may differ from what someone else sees his chaos. I keep thinking about, you know, like kind of an elephant in the room here, like Jordan Peterson. You know, his whole mission is fighting defending against the chaos of the feminine. And I don't know about the I say that chicily, but defending against the chaos of the left of far left what we

should say? And uh And and he has you know, a huge, huge following that that sees that problem as well. And and I can see some of the points he's making for for sure. But I wonder if you know, there's some people who who hate Jordan Peterson, but in their own view, they they they see him as the chaos. I just wonder if we're if so much of us are talking past each other in terms of like fighting over who who's the real chaos. You know, I'm not

the real chaos. You're the real chaos, and you know, And I just wanted to bring that up because I like having honest discussions. Yeah, of course, I mean I think that chaos is when I talk about it, it's sort of like disorder, right, It's about like things are like unpredictable and you can't organize social action. And for some people, people like you said, have different tolerances of that.

But in general, as it gets more extreme, I think groups really do yearn for a tighter social order, and I think the question is how to balance tight and loose. You know, we need each other, we need order, and

we need openness. Right, So the question is in a lot of ways, and of course I don't have the answer to this, but it is how do we accomplish that as nations, as in households, how do we sort of strike a balance where when we get tight, it helps us with order and coordination, but it also makes us lose out on creativity and tolerance. But when we get to loose, we are really creative and tolerant, but we lose out on some of the order needs that people have. And so part of it is trying to

str that balance. Well, that would that he would say, that's that's his mission. Is that is that like our society has become too to this chaos thing, that he needs to restore the balance, the savior of the balance. Well, I think I think a lot of people, including our politicians, are saying that, and I think the question is again, I'll sort of bring in some of the Stephen Pinker's arguments.

Who I really I find that he is really hitting the nail on ahead that in many ways, and clearly there's some exceptions, but in many ways, we're much less threatened than we were as a species many many years ago. I've been reading some books about sort of the history of East and West Berlin recently and thinking, whoa I imagine being around in the fifteen hundreds, with chronic war, constant threats, constant pathogens, constant famines. You know, we are as a as a world much safer in many ways.

And so this is where I think trying to discern and again it's no easy quest. What's real and what's imagined in terms of threat is really critical for not

unnecessarily tightening. And that's such a good point. That's kind of our you know, our quest with trying to also develop some of these dictionaries to try to target and find out where are the places where people are feeling super threatened and what kind of consequences is that happening in real time so that we can and yeah, this stuff is so complex, doctor Shelton, because people, I feel like people different their perceptions of what's a threat and

what's not a threat. I mean, look for some reason to Republicans, uh uh, snowflake liberals are threatening, you know, like that's threatening to them, you know, and on the on the left you know, of course very well, if I think for anyone, alt right is threatening, even for Republicans, you know. I mean one of the things that you know, and I read about this in the book is you know, and everyone talks about these echo chambers. Part of the problem is that it's not just that we perceive each

other very negative. As you were saying, we sort of have these very extreme stereotypes, and partly that's because we don't have any real meaningful context where we're starting to interact with people on the other side of the aisle. One of the techniques that we developed recently that's coming out in Behavioral Science and Policy Journal is this thing called the daily diary technique, and we actually use this to try to help people understand each other better through

daily diaries. So imagine you start reading someone's diary from Pakistan, or if someone in Pakistan reads an American diary for like seven days, And this is what we did. Actually, we have randomly assigned people to read real diaries versus diaries from someone in their own country or diaries from someone in a different country. And what was interesting is at the start of the study, Pakistanis didn't just see

the US as loose. They saw the US as like extraordinarily loose, like people half naked all the time or calling the police and their parents for being too strict. And Americans, if they knew where Pakistan was, which was a big if, didn't think about Pakistani's playing sports and reading poet. They only saw them as being in mosques all the time. This is kind of a narrow situational sampling, and they had really negative stereotypes about each other, so

we were targeting those negative stereotypes. The diaries were unedited. It was clear that the US diaries involved more looseness and the Pakistani diaries involved more tightness on a daily basis. But what was so remarkable was after this diary intervention that was my after New York accent, you see a big change and how people were perceiving each other. And they didn't see that they were so they were completely similar, but they saw that they were more similar than they

ever had imagined. And we're now doing a study with the Dai diaries trying to also target Republicans and democrats to see can we actually get people, you know, to kind of see each other's worlds in a more realistic way. Yes, we differ in a lot of ways, but we encounter a lot of the same situations on a daily basis. So we're targeting what stereotypes they have of each other.

You know, every de stereotyping endeavor would involve different focus groups and different stereotypes to target, but I think you know, in this world where we do tend to be in echo chambers. This is one technique of probably many, where we could try to get people to actually experience the situations and and similarity they have at a far deeper level than they'll be able to in otherwise in other contexts.

So that's just to say that we are different and with different important ways, but that you know, having meaningful conversation. There's some examples of this happening across the left and right right that there was a faculty at Stanford that recently ran this big, you know, kind of de stereotyping intervention face to face and by the end of it, having brought in people from from Republican and democratic sides, they were able to see again there's how much more

commonality they had. They were able to come all of them were able to come become more centrist. So, you know, I think there is hope. I'm not going to say I'm not terrified. I'm actually writing an article for the Guardian and right now they asked me to write an article and what did I change my mind on this year?

And I thought, well, actually, one thing I've changed my mind on is how fragile democracy is like I used to just take it for granted, like of course, like and you know we're all talking about this, that you know, how it's becoming the norms of democracy are being shattered.

But I actually started thinking about how unusual democracy is, just how crazy of an accident it is, and and how much you know, the psychology of the desire for order the fromin kind of sense is way more typical than the feeling of safety and so in any of it. But I do have hope again, based on some of these examples, that you know, this, this is something that we will look back on and feel stronger about. I hope.

So do you do you find that with people understanding each other's perspectives more, they start to perceive them as less threatening. Do you think there's a correlation, there's a causation there. Well, I think that it's certainly the case that when you have such extreme stereotypes, you know, you

feel this great distance from each other. So in the Pakistan American study, we measured cultural distance, like how much you perceived the nations to be really different, and that was the prime mover of differences and in targeting stereotypes. So at the end of the study, Pakistani saw and Americans that they had less cultural distance when they read each other's diaries that's commanded to what they read people's diaries from their own country, and that helped Pakistanis to

see Americans as more moral. At the end of the study, they didn't see us as immoral or as aggressive, and Americans saw Pakistani's have more freedom than they ever would have anticipated. So we're trying to shift different stereotypes. But I want to mention that before we did this study, we did different technique I was really excited about, but it totally failed. This is kind of a shout out to all the people out there that have a lot of failed research. But you know, basically, I thought this

is an awesome study. We prime people using contextual priming that's been used in other other contexts in Pakistan. We had people flat looking at pictures of Americans in tighter context like looking like they were at work or with

their families. They were also seeing pictures of them at parties as and also but and at flip side, we showed Americans pictures of Pakistani's not just in mosque, was also dancing and reading poetry, playing sports and so forth, and We're hoping this contextual priming would shift stereotypes, and it did nothing, absolutely nothing. This is after we translated this in or do and that translated and et cetera.

And what we found is that people just didn't believe these pictures, you know, they just found them to be incomprehensible. So that's why we went out and we started doing some of the daily diary studies. She said, you know, let's just get right to the point and expose people to, you know, the real lives. And we told them it was a study about social memory, so they weren't primed

to think this is about fostering into cultural understanding. But in any event, that's just kind of a story of science of you know, keep on, keep rocking on, even as there you expect something to work, but you know, there's always inter thing, you know, kind of reasons why it doesn't. Yeah, but you gave me hope and then you took the hope away there. I mean, I tend

to be an optimist by nature. And as I mentioned, I think one of the things exciting about cross cultural psyche to me is that once we understand you know, kind of the cultural coach driving behavior, we can start negotiating them, looking out for them, using them I mentioned earlier, like in my own household, Like, so I veer loose. I'm gonna be totally honest, you know. And my husband, he's a lawyer, he veers tighter. He's also from the Midwest. I'm a Jewish New Yorker, you know, and we tend

to negotiate tight and loose, even with our kids. Like we sort of say, good guys, like what domains need to be tight, what domains need to be loose? How do we kind of negotiate that. What's our priorities? And that I study negotiations, so I mean it's all about what are your most important priorities? And so you know, for me, you know, I'm like, okay, well, and we came to an agreement. It's important to be strict in domains of school work and health and and how people

treat each other, the two sisters. But you know, we're gonna give up a little more latitude in terms of like their bedtime and how messy they are. I don't think Todd's too happy about that. He's like, thous is a mess We have, you know, dog, two birds, two daughters, You know, but the house is kind of a mess. But I think that's the point, is that and we're actually now starting to develop tight loose domains, specific domains on which you can sort of negotiate this in households.

And again, some groups need to beer tighter in the households than others, but nevertheless it's negotiable. Well that's good to hear. So how can modifying a nation's norms address protracted social problems? Well, you know, this is a really interesting question because you know, the national level is kind of tricky. You know, these are like norms require you know, they're slow to change. They're particularly slow to change when going from tight to loose than going from loose to tight.

But I have some examples book of whole nations doing this. Iceland was a good example. Some years ago. It was just having massive problems with looseness, Like cities were unsafe, kids were out drinking constantly, like there was just a real problem with disorder. And there was this kind of realization that they didn't use the terminology, but they had to tighten up. They had to have more monitoring, they

had to have more engagement and more accountability. And that's exactly what they did, and I talk about the story in the book so you can read it, but it does provide hope that there's a way to also kind of tighten up contexts that have gotten too loose in organizations. Provide some examples of that. Actually, Microsoft had some good examples.

I interviewed Bob Herbolt who talked about in the early days that things were just totally unstandardized and they needed to tighten up a lot of their processes because as you scale up in organizations, you need to have more coordination and more standardization. And at first when they tried to implement more tightness, more coordination, more rules, more accountability, there was a lot of backlash. You know, it was threatening to needs for autonomy in a lot of ways.

But you know, he was able to negotiate with people and say, this is why we need to do this, this is why we need to tighten up these operations. And so I think there's a lot of examples that where you could see you have great leadership and you have ways to it and in tight context that's trying

to loosen versus a loose context trying to tighten. You have different processes that you try to use and I have a whole sort of discussion around like, how do you engage in flexible tightness where you're trying to insert some more flexibility into that system, where you give people more room to explore, where you have less sensualization or flip side, how do you structure looseness when you're used to so much freedom. It involves more centralization, involves more monitoring,

more benchmarking. So there's there's definitely ways to do it. It's going to depend on the context, of course, but either way, it requires good leadership and it requires, you know, an attention to culture. You know, that's the issue that I think a lot of us who study culture think is amazing because back to the fish story, you know, we kind of ignore it and we take it for granted.

It's a really powerful force that affects everything from our politics to our parenting, but we don't think about it, you know. I have to say it wasn't always interesting culture. I was pre med when I was in college at Colgate, and I actually went abroad for a semester and I

was totally like in shock. I mean I remember calling my father Marty from Brooklyn and confiding in him how crazy this culture shock was I was the first person to leave the country from my family, and I was telling him about all the culture shock, including that people from London would go to Paris or to Amsterdam just for the weekend, and I thought, I found that to be really puzzling. And so he said to me something that changed my life. He said, well, imagine like it's

going from New York to Pennsylvania. And I'm like, Dad, that is such an awesome metaphor, and actually this is a true story. The next day, I booked a trip to Egypt, a low budget toward to Egypt, and I told him that. He was like, what are you doing? And I said, Dad, just think about it, like I'm

going from New York to California. And you know, it was true, like I just want I realized how little I know about the world and about myself by extension, and so when I was trying, I went to Egypt, and I had a lot of time on my hands, and they're in the semester broad and it really changed my whole view of, you know, kind of how little

I know about this important phenomenon of culture. And so when I got back to Colgate, I was lucky I took a human development class by Carolyn Keating, who has been studying visual illusions in Africa and showing that certain illusions like the Mueller Lyar illusion are not universal. And I was like, WHOA, Like maybe this is something I can actually study and and actually you know, research using scientific tools. And that's kind of what landed me working

with Harry Transis in Shampan or Banna. I wasn't too excited about going to Shampan or Bana, but but you know, I went through triendous and you know what I mean, that's that's kind of an exciting thing. You know. I always say, like finding your passion. It's trite, it's it's a you know, catch all Frae catch all story, but it is true that you'll never work a day in your life, you know. I I'm more excited about this field now having been in it for twenty five years,

you know, even more excited than I ever was. So an that's kind of a long story about how I got it. That's great. That's a lot of people can't say that, so that's great. And also I'm hearing from you that it's it's very possible to harness the power of social norms. You know that that things things can change. I actually I like this quote from your book. When people have thrived in the face of adversity, they've done so because of other people and the social norms they've

created together. Isn't that good? That's a good quote. Do you remember that? Does that sound familiar? Maybe you didn't, Actually, maybe you didn't. Maybe I'm making that up. You know, I think that at any change, you know, it requires a lot of negotiation, and it's not easy because people who are coming from the type you agree with that, right, you agree with it though, right, you know, when you're

think under I needs. People who are going from tight to loose are threatened by autonomy and the lack of control. People going from loose to tight are threatened by a loss of autonomy. So it's really takes great leaders to kind of figure out how to make that balance and how to negotiate that. But I do think it's an important thing to to be mindful of, and that the more we recognize these codes and and talk about them,

the better off we are than just having them remain invisible. Yeah, I mean, you do talk about I hope I'm reading the same book now you talk about how recalibration can do things like reduce abuse and even in the even in the internet setting. You know, that's right, you're reading my book Attack, you know, No, I mean I talk

about the Internet as a great example that needs tightening. Yeah, and it's an interesting context because you know, in many ways, we again want to calibrate it so that we don't lose the benefit of looseness, lose the benefit of the connectivity and the and the creativity and the you know,

great exposure. Sure we have too many things at the same time we're living our world's now online, you know, But evolution perspective, we were always in context where we're able to kind of recalibrate our social norms, and now we need to do that more deliberately. You see that happening bottom up. You see it on Reddit, for example, where people are starting to create ways to keep people accountable.

Because that's really what this is about. I mean, we've known this for years, right in psychology, when you're not face to face, people do all sorts of weird things. You know, This lack of social presence makes people unaccountable, makes them more norm violating. So Reddit's developing mechanisms from the bottom up to try to avoid those scenarios, to have people feel like that space, they're in a living space,

that where they're accountable for their behavior. I mean, of course there's also top down ways this happens, you know, through what we're seeing now emerging with you know, leaders on these social media platforms kind of stepping up and saying, well, you know, we were engineers, we didn't know this is going to happen. You know. I think you know, actually Kara Swisher I was on one of her podcasts and she's like, well, don't you think they're evil? These guys?

You know, or maybe shouldn't say like that, but don't you think that they, like, you know, really are you know, should have recognize this? And you know, I think not necessarily, you know, because we know as psychologists that these contexts breed really negative types of behaviors. But you know the point now is to exert more top down control, more bottom up control, try to achieve the Goldilocks principle, you know, through these kinds of processes. Because it's definitely a context

where we need to start being mindful about social norms. Absolutely, but you are hopeful. I'm going to end here on a hopeful message that we can recalibrate in a way we can cultivate greater social norms that facilitate greater cooperation among nations and ethnic groups. Yeah. Absolutely, I think we have religions and political persuasions. I think we have evidence for that. Again, it takes a lot of work, but I think, you know, I remain optimistic until proven otherwise.

I love it. Thank you so much for appearing on the Psychology Podcast. They talking about your very original and important in the world today research. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's

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