She likes to eat human food. The U.S. is just different from other places in a variety of ways that we often dont stop to think about. Or if it will change at all. And how does a scholar like Neal think about culture per se? HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. Consider the prominent Muppets Bert and Ernie. Truth be told, I veer somewhat loose. Theres a huge variation in how much spontaneity people like versus how much structure they want. So if you base your understanding of a given culture on a body of research that fails to include them, youll likely fail to understand how that culture thinks whether were talking about another country or a group within your own country. And thats going to cultivate certain tonal abilities, which could feed into certain kinds of music, and things like that. HENRICH: If you go to other societies, people are much more willing to give the same wrong answer to go along with others. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. The authors argue that humans usually make decisions based on the incentives for their actions. DUBNER: But that the research subjects, they gave him a lot back and they thought it was going to him. The authors seek to find simple answers to complicated world problems. Remember what he said earlier: HENRICH: So how it is that we acquire ideas, beliefs, and values from other people and how this has shaped human genetic evolution. You can see this on many dimensions: how we work and travel; how we mate and marry; how we care for our children and our elderly; how we police; how we conceive the relationship between the individual and the state; even how we manage death! And theres large differences around the world, for example, on how much cultures are exposed to chronic threat. GELFAND: Classic things like the Mller-Lyer Illusion, which is these two lines where one looks longer than the other. The cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has been telling us about loose and tight cultures around the world. So Hofstede the Elder began to amass a huge data set about the workplace experiences and preferences of tens of thousands of I.B.M. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. The U.S. assembled a coalition of allies. DUBNER: I find that people who dont load dishwashers carefully are usually pretty loose with the planning. Whereas uncertainty avoidance means you have lots of etiquette and ritual. This carries over into many areas of society, including the labor market. HOFSTEDE: But it turned out that lumping them by nationality was the best thing to do. And how does this extraordinarily high level of individualism versus collectivism play out? Part of it is that when you live in a world that has carpented environments like right angles, where we live in houses in the States makes us focus on those right angles. There is some overlap between these six dimensions and some of the ideas we talked about in last weeks episode particularly the notion that some national cultures tend to be tight and others loose. Good on you, I say. Kumail NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. Uncertainty in economics means something very akin to risk. He contrasts places like Egypt, that had strict rules for authority and gender and purity, with the Persians who, using my terminology, he would have said that they were quite loose. John OLIVER: When was that moment that America became the most American America it could possibly be? Examples of these comparisons and questions can be seen in the list of contents, with . Macroeconomics, on the other hand, works on a larger scale. This was in contrast to the economists label of Homo economicus; that version of humans is more self-interested, less reciprocal. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. Okay, it took half of this episode to go through just the first of the six dimensions of national culture individualism versus collectivism. GELFAND: I also teach negotiation. Whether this means something brings you financial, emotional, or even community benefit. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on . IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Michael Fay wasnt a tourist; he was living in Singapore with his family, attending an American school. What Henrich discovered from running these experiments in different parts of the world is that the results vary, a lot. HOFSTEDE: If I had been born in America, I would have liked it, probably, because I would have been used to it. The downsides: less innovation, less openness to ideas that challenge the status quo, and less tolerance for differences in religion and race. As with most experiments like this, the research subjects were WEIRD usually they were students at the universities where the researchers worked. (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better) Tom BROKAW:A young American has been sentenced to a caning for an act of vandalism. No difference, that is, between tight and loose cultures. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Freakonomics. A. The next cultural dimension is what Hofstede and his late father called masculinity. That title is a bit misleading. So if you ask people to judge the absolute lengths of two lines, people in more individualistic societies tend to get that right. She was majoring in pre-med. Now, keep in mind this was London, English-speaking London not Uzbekistan or Botswana, even Mexico. ERNIE: Oh, gee. We will leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian. This suggests that looseness and tightness can co-exist. Documentary. The lawyer and journalist Dahlia Lithwick once argued that every living human can be classified according to one simple metric: Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. Essentially: loose, or tight. Joe Henrich again: HENRICH: In some societies, people really attend to scent, and they have a complex set of language terms that have the equivalent of basic color categories for scents. GELFAND: And that suggests that minorities, women, people of different sexual orientation, when they violate the same rule, might be held to higher accountability, to more strict punishment. And the rest is history, if you like. The U.S. is overall relatively loose. Heres one of the questions they asked. Theyll say, The Scandinavians have great childcare and family-leave policies. Or theyll say, China has built more high-speed rail in the past few years than the U.S. has even thought about. So, naturally, the next question is: cant the U.S. just borrow these Scandinavian and Chinese and German ideas and slap them on top of the American way of doing things? Why not? As advertised!. By the same cue, you could vastly admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity. Thats what the Ultimatum experiments set out to find. GELFAND: Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds. Its the tiny differences in sociality. Theyre what we call tight cultures. NEAL: I often think about how the U.S. has historically thought about freedom and how, say, the Soviet bloc had talked about freedom. And in a restrained society, theres going to be suicide. I had been led to believe, by you, that you are as dumb as bricks. And for me, its hard to divorce the toxicity of the grind from the toxicity of masculinity, when you always have to dominate. But the big C in my mind is very different than the little c.. The study of culture is a family business for Hofstede. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism: With Stephen Dubner. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. Once he saw that differences were driven by nationality, Hofstede sensed he was on to something big. So the U.S. produces the sort of Wal-Mart equivalent of religions: big churches giving the people what they want, high pageantry. And I think that is a hallmark of African-American culture in this country. So you can see that in an individualistic society, after becoming a world champion in a sport or certainly after winning a major war, people do not fight one another, but they admire one another. you ask. The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dateslike socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century. BUSH: Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. President Bush had framed these negotiations as going an extra mile for peace.. GELFAND: Having more adaptability, more innovation. The first is that a model of anything even nearly as complex as a national culture is bound to miss a lot of nuance. HOFSTEDE: Masculine society means that if you show power, that gives you social status. All rights reserved. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if we wanted to. Well hear about those dimensions soon enough. Freakonomics, which weighs in at just over 200 pages (plus a hefty section of bonus material for those interested in learning more), takes as its principal argument the idea that economics exist as a tool to study society. That is something that fundamentally many whites dont understand, right? HENRICH: So, Francisco is a good pal of mine and hes also a very charming fellow. HENRICH: We dont like people telling us what to do. This interest goes back to those negotiations between Jim Baker and Tariq Aziz. DUBNER: Do you think the average American and the average fill in the blank Laotian, Peruvian, Scot will be substantially more alike in 20 or 50 years, or not necessarily? They made sure to include a variety of ages, occupations, religions, social and economic classes. It may help if youre not originally from here. Not necessarily better or worse but very different. Caning as in a spanking, basically, on the bare buttocks, with a half-inch-thick rattan cane. This failure leads to confusion at the very least, but quite possibly deeper misunderstandings, perhaps all the way up to hatred and violent conflict. GELFAND: We have a whole new map of the U.S. where we can actually rank-order the U.S. 50 states in terms of how much threat they have. They tend to veer tighter on our measures than places on the coast. Tightness may create compliance; but looseness can drive innovation and creativity. Levitt's research on teacher cheating using Chicago Public Schools data.Clip from the 2010 documentary "Freakonomics: The Movie". DUBNER: And Im guessing youre the spontaneous type. NEAL: Were a country that presumes male leadership. You always have to win. GELFAND: They talk about individualistic accomplishments. Capital W-E-I-R-D, which stands for: HENRICH: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. GELFAND: In the U.S., various newspapers covered the story. The second player is given a choice between accepting or rejecting. HENRICH: So places like New York and London, people are blazing down the sidewalks. And also, of course, people listening to this: Make it happen, come on. 1 in individualism. I asked Michele Gelfand to talk about why a given country is loose or tight. And they were finding that people in Africa were not falling victim to this illusion. The fifth cultural dimension is one that I think will resonate with everyone whos ever listened to Freakonomics Radio, since it is at the crux of problem-solving. And if you get crumbs in your pajamas, theyll make you itch. But theres something else to be said about American culture. HENRICH: Im a researcher who tries to apply evolutionary theory to understand human behavior and human psychology and particularly culture. Published: 31 October 2020. She argues that both styles have their upsides and their downsides. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. DUBNER: When I look at the loosest country in the data, I see Ukraine. How much time have you spent thinking about what makes America, America? Theyre threatened by that interdependence, and they want to assert their cultural identities. The first player needs to offer enough money to satisfy the second player or the first player gets nothing. If you no longer even pretend to be one people and to be fair to all the citizens of your country, then youre not going down a road that leads to a great future. Both are long-term oriented, so they see a lot of context around things. Joe HENRICH: Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. We promise no spam. If you just look at Americans, its 70 percent American. GELFAND: The data suggests that those countries in Eastern Europe, are extremely loose, almost normless, we might say, because after the fall of the Soviet Union, these countries did a pendulum shift. HENRICH: It chafes us when we get ordered around. HENRICH: One study of the journals in social psychology shows that 96 percent of all subjects in social psychology come from societies that are Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Whereas if you have a state religion, it tends to get tired and old and boring. Hence the term, the changing same. I think there are historical moments that are transcendent. And you dont need them for ritual reasons. But its important to acknowledge that no culture is a monolith. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. To that end, the digital revolution is further shrinking the distance to power. We just need to do it. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. Different than the U.S. is just different from other places in a variety of that. Of the six dimensions of national culture is bound to miss a lot of nuance we often dont to... Running these experiments in different parts of the research subjects were WEIRD usually they were that. Lumping them by nationality was the best thing to do preferences of tens of thousands of I.B.M a! Now, keep in mind this was in contrast to the economists label of Homo economicus ; that version humans. 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