The U.S. Is Just Different — So Let’s Stop Pretending We’re Not - Freakonomics
""She did want to measure culture, and how it differs from place to place. She decided that the key difference, the right place to start measuring, was whether the culture in a given country is tight or loose.
GELFAND: All cultures have social norms, these unwritten rules that guide our behavior on a daily basis. But some cultures strictly abide by their norms. They’re what we call tight cultures. And other cultures are more loose. They’re more permissive...
Tight cultures, she writes, “are usually found in South and East Asia, the Middle East, and in European countries of Nordic and Germanic origin.” Loose cultures tend to be found in English-speaking countries as well as Latin-American, Latin-European, and formerly Communist cultures. The United States, you may not be surprised to learn, is on the loose end of the spectrum — although not in the top five. The five loosest countries according to this analysis were Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, and the Netherlands. Australia and Brazil are also loose. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. China, Japan, and Turkey are also tight. Now, let’s pull back and make an important point: labeling a given country tight or loose is an overall, aggregate measurement. Within countries, there is of course enormous variation. There are plenty of looser people in tight countries and vice versa. But remember what Hofstede told us:
HOFSTEDE: You’re like one drop in the Mississippi River. You may decide to go another way, but that doesn’t make the river change.
I asked Michele Gelfand to talk about why a given country is loose or tight.
GELFAND: In cross-cultural psychology, we study how ecological and historical factors cause the evolution of differences. And there’s large differences around the world, for example, on how much cultures are exposed to chronic threat. And that really can help explain some variation — not all, but some variation — in norms and values...
Loose cultures tend to be found in English-speaking countries as well as Latin-American, Latin-European, and formerly Communist cultures. The United States, you may not be surprised to learn, is on the loose end of the spectrum — although not in the top five. The five loosest countries according to this analysis were Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, and the Netherlands. Australia and Brazil are also loose. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. China, Japan, and Turkey are also tight...
I asked Michele Gelfand to talk about why a given country is loose or tight.
GELFAND: In cross-cultural psychology, we study how ecological and historical factors cause the evolution of differences. And there’s large differences around the world, for example, on how much cultures are exposed to chronic threat. And that really can help explain some variation — not all, but some variation — in norms and values... So, Japan has been hit by Mother Nature for centuries. Or more human-made threats, like how many times has your nation been invaded over the last 100 years? Groups that tend to have threat tend to develop stricter rules to coordinate...
DUBNER: When I look at the loosest country in the data, I see Ukraine. And I think, “Holy cow, Ukraine is surrounded by threat, including its next-door neighbor, Russia.” That relationship has not been a constant, but that makes me a little suspicious.
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. And that happens a lot. What we saw in Egypt was very similar. We had a very tight social order. When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness.
As for the U.S., Gelfand says the U.S. is not only loose but getting progressively looser... But even a loose country will tighten up when a threat arises.
GELFAND: Like during 9/11, during World Wars, we see increases in tightness. During the Cold War. We had a lot of struggles with tightening during Covid, clearly.
Gelfand says the countries that were most aggressive in trying to contain Covid tended to be tighter countries... Michele Gelfand and several co-authors recently published a study in The Lancet about how Covid played out in loose versus tight cultures. Controlling for a variety of other factors, they found that looser countries — the U.S., Brazil, Italy, and Spain — have had roughly five times the number of Covid cases and nearly nine times as many deaths as tighter countries. But, let’s look at the pandemic from a different angle: which country produced the most effective Covid-19 vaccines? Tightness may create compliance; but looseness can drive innovation and creativity.
GELFAND: The U.S. is one of the most creative places on the planet. Like, you saw in the U.S. trying to locate Covid in sewage. That’s a crazy, creative solution to try to deal with the pandemic...
Tight countries tend to have very little jaywalking, or littering — or, God forbid, dog poop on the sidewalks. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets.
GELFAND: In Germany and in Japan, the clocks are really synchronized. In Brazil and Greece, you’re not entirely sure what time it is...
A loose country, like the U.S., tends to do well in creativity and innovation; in tolerance and openness; in free speech and a free press. The downsides of looseness are less coordination, less self-control; more crime and quality-of-life problems.
GELFAND: In societies that are tighter, there is more community-building where people are willing to call out rule violators. Here in the U.S., it’s actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms.
She sees the lack of self-control in loose countries as particularly worrisome.
GELFAND: So, that has a lot of other effects on debt, on alcoholism, on recreational drug use. It also is related to obesity. Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese...
Joe Henrich wanted to see how the Ultimatum experiments worked when it wasn’t just a bunch of WEIRD college students.
HENRICH: I was doing research in the Peruvian Amazon. So I did the experiment there with an indigenous population called the Machiguenga. And the Machiguenga were much closer to the predictions of Homo economicus, where you’d make low offers and never reject. So, they would offer a mean of about 25, 26 percent. There were a number of low offers of 15 percent, which didn’t get rejected. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places — hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. And we found the full spectrum of variation. Offers went up as high as 55 or 60 percent in some places and then down around 25 percent in other places.
DUBNER: I remember once, years and years ago, when I was reading this research that you were doing, speaking with Francisco Gil-White, who was then at Penn, and he told me that when he was running this Ultimatum experiment, I don’t remember where — I want to say Mongolia.
HENRICH: Yeah, he was in Mongolia.
DUBNER: But that the research subjects, they gave him a lot back and they thought it was going to him. And he said the reason was that he was a young postdoc, and he had holes in his jeans. And the research subject explained to him that, “Oh, I feel so bad for you that you can’t afford pants without holes in them that I can’t take the money from this poor American kid.” And it struck me as a way in which this experiment could be perverted"
Ahh, "stereotypes"!
The Pros and Cons of America’s (Extreme) Individualism - Freakonomics
""HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., there is little constraining. If you’re a constrained sort of person, you won’t go far in the U.S.
Stephen DUBNER: I’m curious whether you’ve ever been accused of political incorrectness in your study of national cultures. Is that a yes?
HOFSTEDE: Yes, especially by people from Anglo countries. Culture can be quite an offensive concept, particularly to people who project it onto an individual characteristic, as if it was about an individual...
Collectivistic cultures are those of the Amerindian empires. The Aztec, the Inca, and today’s Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, are very collectivistic. China is also very collectivistic and so are the Southeast Asian countries, but not Japan. Europe has very strong gradients between very individualistic Nordic and Anglo and Germanic countries; Germanic is a little bit more collectivistic. Latin countries tend to be more collectivistic, especially Spain and Portugal — not so much Italy and France...
Where would you think the U.S. ranks among all the countries measured on this dimension? That’s right: we are No. 1, the most individualistic country in the world, 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede scale of individualism. Spoiler alert: This dimension is one of the six in which the U.S. is the biggest outlier in the world...
HOFSTEDE: High individualism is correlated with trying new stuff. Because if you try something new, you show to the people around you that you are an individual and you can make your own decisions. And that is a status-worthy thing. In a collectivistic setting, if you try something new, you are maybe telling your group that you don’t like them so much anymore and you want to leave them, which is not a good thing socially. You could ask people, “What do you like to eat?” The more collectivistic they are, the more likely they are to talk about their grandmother and what she made, and they’re less likely to start entirely on their own diet.
Here are some things that tend to thrive in highly individual societies: human rights, a free press, divorce, and a faster pace of life. We even walk faster...
Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, “The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. It is that the wealth comes first, and the individualism follows.” Henrich takes a more nuanced view...
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that individualism might contribute to inequality — or at least, as Henrich puts it, the justification of inequality. The notion of the American Dream has long been that prosperity is just sitting out there, waiting for anyone to grab it — as long as you’re willing to work hard enough.
HENRICH: So Americans tend to be more work-obsessed than other people.
The average U.S. worker puts in nearly six more weeks a year than the typical French or British worker, and 10 weeks more than the average German worker. For some Americans, at least, working hard is a badge of honor.
GELFAND: When we ask people, “What does honor mean to you?” in the U.S., a lot of people talk about work...
HENRICH: [Americans] are self-enhancing, which means they try to promote their attributes. Self-centered — so if you give them tasks and have them list traits about themselves, they’ll tend to list their attributes and characteristics rather than their relationships.
GELFAND: The U.S. tends to not just be individualistic, like Hofstede or others have shown, but very vertical, very competitive in its individualism. And that’s different than in Scandinavia and in New Zealand and Australia, which has much more horizontal individualism. That’s to say that it emphasizes privacy and independence, like the U.S., but it’s much more egalitarian...
Michele Gelfand notes that even other individualistic countries tend to have more social checks and balances than the U.S.
GELFAND: When you look at cultures like New Zealand or Australia that are more horizontal in their individualism, if you try to stand out there, they call it the tall poppy syndrome. You’re going to be shut down. There, it’s really important to maintain that humility, to be focused on your privacy, but not trying to one-up other people.
The spirit of competition — of what Michele Gelfand calls “vertical individualism” — seems to permeate every corner of American society. Joe Henrich points out that even our religions are competitive.
HENRICH: My favorite explanation for this — I think this has been put out most clearly by a sociologist named Rodney Stark — is that with freedom of religion, you get competition amongst religious organizations. So the U.S. produces the sort of Wal-Mart equivalent of religions: big churches giving the people what they want, high pageantry. Whereas if you have a state religion, it tends to get tired and old and boring. People get less interested...
According to the 6-D Model of National Culture that we’ve been talking about, the U.S. is the most individualistic nation on earth...
HOFSTEDE: If you are, let’s say, a toddler, what do you get to decide for yourself? In a society of small power distance, a lot. At school in the Netherlands, I’ve seen a mother ask her two-year-old, “Shall I change your nappy?” And then the child gets to decide whether its nappy gets changed. This would never happen in a society of large power distance. A child is a child, and a parent is a parent, and a parent decides for the child.
The U.S. also has a small power distance — 40 on a scale of 100, which puts it among the lowest in the world. This carries over into many areas of society, including the labor market.
HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., the boss needs to be a team player. They’re not supposed to be the boss... In the U.S.A., individualism coupled with masculinity creates a society where if you’re not a winner, you’re a loser. And this dynamic leads to a lot of fighting for the sake of fighting... you might be going down the path of civil war, really. If you no longer even pretend to be one people and to be fair to all the citizens of your country, then you’re not going down a road that leads to a great future...
DUBNER: When you’re inclined to look at the U.S. in a positive light, do you find uncertainty avoidance to be largely a force for the good in terms of creating and building a strong society, or do you think it’s more —?
HOFSTEDE: This is a very American question, Stephen. You realize, you want a black or white value judgment...
Everybody, of course, instinctively feels and should feel that their country, or whatever their tribe is, is the best in the world. If you don’t feel that, then you will be an unhappy person...
The U.S., according to this analysis, is comparatively a short-term country. One hallmark of short-term thinking: a tendency toward black and white moral distinctions versus shades of gray. Another one: impatience...
HOFSTEDE: For the U.S.A., the world is like a market. But a lot of the world is much more like a family. You have to behave like a family member if you want to be one. In the Germanic world, we have systems, which means that nothing stands alone. Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. And this is what Europe has. Europe has a strong influence from Germany, also from France. Both are long-term oriented, so they see a lot of context around things... In an individualistic society, depending on how the mood is, you can get very different developments. 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. By the same cue, you could vastly admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity. Then you can have something very good happening. For instance, the rhythm of vaccination in the U.S.A. is very fast. Whereas in countries that are bogged down in cronyism and corruption, it doesn’t happen. So, yes, the same attributes that can be a big problem can also be a big boost."