making a claim about his individual experiences and looking for evidence. So he left I.B.M. HENRICH: Im a researcher who tries to apply evolutionary theory to understand human behavior and human psychology and particularly culture. The five loosest countries according to this analysis were Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, and the Netherlands. Open Document. 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. On many Freakonomics Radio episodes, well hear about some idea or policy that works well elsewhere in the world but hasnt taken root in the U.S. HENRICH: And this can include motivations, heuristics, biases, beliefs. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. BERT: Ernie Ernie, dont eat those cookies while youre in your bed, huh? The notion of the American Dream has long been that prosperity is just sitting out there, waiting for anyone to grab itas long as youre willing to work hard enough. But thats only the first study. Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. So I have no doubt that his subjects really liked him. (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better) But if youre not an economist, if youre a regular human being, you can see why the second player might reject a $1 offer. So uncertainty avoidance is the intolerance of ambiguity. (Ep. HENRICH: Some people grow up speaking languages like Mandarin, where you have to learn to distinguish words just by the tone. 1424 Words. Here in the U.S., its actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms. Categories like age, gender, job type, job seniority, and so on. But a lot of the world is much more like a family. Freakonomics Radio . Henrich says yes. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn't) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything. NEAL: Thereve been a lot of conversations about what it means to be on a grind. Segments: - A Roshanda By Any Other Name : Morgan Spurlock's investigation of the possible implications of names, especially "black" vs. "white" names, in personal . Im a professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands. HOFSTEDE: He decided to take a job there. President Bush had framed these negotiations as going an extra mile for peace.. And its another dimension on which the U.S. is a substantial outlier. Okay, it took half of this episode to go through just the first of the six dimensions of national culture individualism versus collectivism. The focus of that episode was American culture. Henrich has written about the notion of time psychology.. In contrast, the Freakonomics blog features the work of Levitt's friends, and SuperFreakonomics relies heavily on anecdotes, gee-whiz technology reporting and work by Levitt's friends and colleagues. 469). But there must be, I would think, evolution across time, yes? It was: And your culture, your American culture, is very different. At this point, we should probably define terms. And yes, well talk about what makes America, America at least as seen through the eyes of Kumail Nanjiani, who was born in Pakistan. Oh say, can you see, the home run I just hit. Theres far less stigmatization of people in terms of their race, their religion. A child is a child, and a parent is a parent, and a parent decides for the child. GELFAND: If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. So if you ask people to judge the absolute lengths of two lines, people in more individualistic societies tend to get that right. GELFAND: Ill just say that there are also other contexts where we naturally tighten. As Hofstede the Younger remembers it, his father asked his bosses at I.B.M. The third measures masculinity versus femininity in a given culture. Stay up-to-date on all our shows. Everybody gets tickled until they laugh. In restrained societies, people tend to suppress bodily gratification, and birth rates are often lower; theres also less interest in things like foreign films and music. Because for all the so-called globalization of the past half-century or so, the U.S. still differs from other countries in many ways. DUBNER: When I look at the loosest country in the data, I see Ukraine. NEAL: So its always evolving, its always developing, but theres some core principles. Culture can be quite an offensive concept, particularly to people who project it onto an individual characteristic, as if it was about an individual. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. The two players dont know each other. Because when youre living inside a culture well, thats the culture you know; it is what it is. We will learn which countries are tight, which are loose, and why. So you see these eye movements that are very different. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner.Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. We met him earlier, but just briefly; heres a proper introduction. DUBNER: And Im guessing youre the spontaneous type. HOFSTEDE: I like this question a lot. As always, thanks for listening and again, I do hope you'll also start . Some researchers looked at these results and came up with a new label for humans in this context: Homo reciprocans. GELFAND: And I thought, If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. Meaning, if you grew up in someplace like the U.S., when you look at an image youre more likely to pay attention to whats in the foreground, in the center. There is no evidence for convergence other than if countries become equally rich, they all go to more individualistic. Latin countries tend to be more collectivistic, especially Spain and Portugal not so much Italy and France. If basic things like visual illusions are not universal, what about other phenomena? He veers tighter. In a future episode, well look at why the U.S., for all its wealth, has such a high rate of child poverty, and whats being done to address that. International, and they were just starting international opinion surveys. 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. I do think that humanity as a whole is sort of evolving to being more reflective. HENRICH: It chafes us when we get ordered around. And we made sure that the subjects knew that the money was coming from an organization, that the giver did not get any of the money, we ratcheted up our levels of anonymity. And I was like, This is every day in America! BROADCASTER: On the third trial, something happens. 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. I do think that today they are living through difficult times, but so are we. You could just do an across-the-board search of various Western religions and look at who the figureheads are. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. She says these are merely visible indicators of a countrys tightness or looseness and its what you dont necessarily see that shapes a given countrys culture. DUBNER: I find that people who dont load dishwashers carefully are usually pretty loose with the planning. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt's own peer-reviewed research. When Americans did this experiment, a third of them conformed and gave an obviously wrong answer. 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? Documentary. We also realize that were a culture in distress in many, many, many ways. ERNIE: Oh, gee. This is a pretty interesting result: one stranger giving away roughly half their money to another stranger when, theoretically, 10 or 20 percent would keep the second player from rejecting the offer. But that makes sense. HOFSTEDE: It means that you only need rules when youre going to use them. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: This American teenager from Ohio, Michael Fay, was in Singapore and was arrested and charged with various counts of vandalism and other shenanigans. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, 55 percent pray at least daily, and 36 percent attend a religious service at least once a week. GELFAND: My own sweet Portuguese water dog, Pepper, I mean, that dog is just gigantic. HOFSTEDE: And his special methodological trick was not to do what is now called a pan-cultural analysis across all the respondents, but first to lump them into groups. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. This leads to less obesity, less addiction, and theres less crime in tighter cultures. Fundamentally, individualism is a belief that the individual is an end in themself. GELFAND: In societies that are tighter, people are willing to call out rule violators. And we found the full spectrum of variation. Henrich is saying that the export of American ideas isnt necessarily easier. GELFAND: Weve had our share of threat, but just not chronic threat. And in one condition, I had them wearing these fake facial warts. Relatedly: Americans place a high value on being consistent across different situations. And we can see a strong trend that looseness has increased over the last 200 years. It has to do with conformity. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on . Im a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. 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. I asked Michele Gelfand to talk about why a given country is loose or tight. Hofstede analyzed these data at what he called the ecological level. He explained this approach in a paper called Flowers, Bouquets, and Gardens the idea being that an individual flower is a subset of a mixed bouquet, which in turn is a subset of an entire garden, which has even more variation. Gelfand says the countries that were most aggressive in trying to contain Covid tended to be tighter countries. One of the areas of cultural study that first hooked her had to do with optical illusions. I hate to call out Michele Gelfand, but even in the loosest of cultures, dogs dont have unfettered access to food. Twenty states rewarded individual schools for good test scores or dramatic improvement; thirty-two states sanctioned the schools that didn't do well. The negotiations didnt work out. GELFAND: Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds. But heres the thing about culture: it can be really hard to measure. But for folks who are pushed out of the mainstream you know, Black folks have rarely had the luxury of thinking about just simply being themselves. For instance, the rhythm of vaccination in the U.S.A. is very fast. 470. Europe has very strong gradients between very individualistic Nordic and Anglo and Germanic countries; Germanic is a little bit more collectivistic. The final dimension on the Hofstede model is called indulgence versus restraint. Like, the military should be tighter than tech. Public school quality B. 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