And in culture, uncertainty means not knowing the ritual, not knowing how status-worthy or blameworthy some action is. Why have rules if you dont use them? GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. John OLIVER: When was that moment that America became the most American America it could possibly be? And we manipulated whether their names were like Jamal or Latisha versus Brad and Lorna. 470. But Joe Henrich wanted to see how the Ultimatum experiments worked when it wasnt just a bunch of WEIRD college students. 470. So the scientific discipline of psychology is dominated by Americans. GELFAND: Well, we can look back to Herodotus. I mean, youve got your quota, as have we all, but youre not. GELFAND: In Germany and in Japan, the clocks are really synchronized. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldn . GELFAND: The U.S. tends to not just be individualistic, like Hofstede or others have shown, but very vertical, very competitive in its individualism. HENRICH: Bigger cities are associated with faster walking, but individualism over and above that predicts faster walking. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. And I was like, This is every day in America! Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: None of it is intentional. Theyre threatened by that interdependence, and they want to assert their cultural identities. In 1990, when Gelfand was a graduate student, she followed the news as Iraq invaded Kuwait. So they might offer, say, 10 out of the 100. We will leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian. That level of religiosity is very high for a wealthy country. In a more masculine society, men and women adhere to the gender roles you might think of as patriarchal: fathers, for instance, take care of the facts, while mothers handle the emotions. I think thats a good litmus test of tight-loose. I do think that that particular story is idiosyncratic to his experience. HOFSTEDE: Which doesnt mean egoism, but it could go that way. GELFAND: Exactly. People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. 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! Thats Joe Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard; hes also a scholar of psychology, economics, and anthropology. The U.S., according to this analysis, is comparatively a short-term country. We may not be the very loosest culture; but we are No. And so you walk faster because you cant get everything you need done in your day and youre always trying to get to the next event. Those are the things you cant necessarily plan and account for in building models of how you expect people to react in different situations. Both are long-term oriented, so they see a lot of context around things. A tight country like Germany tends to set strict limits on noise, with mandated quiet hours. New York City, meanwhile, has been called not just the city that never sleeps, but the city that never shuts up. Tight countries tend to have very little jaywalking, or littering or, God forbid, dog poop on the sidewalks. Henrich has written about the notion of time psychology.. Which is probably why we dont hear all that much about the science of culture. ERNIE: Oh, gee. HOFSTEDE: Well, if you want an honest answer, I think mainly our own curiosity. All contents Freakonomics. DUBNER: What are some of the consequences of being relatively tolerant of uncertainty, as the U.S. is? NEAL: So its always evolving, its always developing, but theres some core principles. And by the way, in that sense, the U.S.A. is also a huge laboratory of society formation, hopefully, which is by no means finished. The fourth original dimension was called uncertainty avoidance. This has to do with how comfortable people are with ambiguity. So this is not about, Is world peace important?, HOFSTEDE: For instance, Is it important for you to have a good working relationship with your boss? Or Is it a good idea for people to maybe have more than one boss?. It also is related to obesity. As Hofstede the Younger remembers it, his father asked his bosses at I.B.M. So, lets try to measure this., Gelfand and several colleagues undertook a massive research project, interviewing some 7,000 people from 33 countries on five continents. Factor analysis being a way to distill a large number of variables into an index, essentially a ranking. 6 Pages. GELFAND: Exactly. NEWSCASTER: Wearing masks is a way of life now in Singapore. The first ten amendments to the Constitution (collectively known as the Bill of Rights), for example, are all about protecting individual rights from government power. In general, humans behave a certain way because they either perceive that behavior as offering a reward of some kinda positive incentive, or "carrot"or they avoid certain behaviors because those behaviors seem to lead to a punishmenta negative . "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". But the big C in my mind is very different than the little c.. And how does this extraordinarily high level of individualism versus collectivism play out? HENRICH: And Americans have this probably worse than anybody. Australia and Brazil are also loose. In another condition, they were wearing tattoos and nose rings and purple hair. This feeds back into what Michele Gelfand was talking about earlier, in the context of geopolitical negotiations. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldn't change them . That, again, is Mark Anthony Neal, from Duke. 1424 Words. In Brazil and Greece, youre not entirely sure what time it is. Segments: - A Roshanda By Any Other Name : Morgan Spurlock's investigation of the possible implications of names, especially "black" vs. "white" names, in personal . HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. The second one measures what's called "power distance." (Don't worry, we'll explain the name . GELFAND: And I had that typical New Yorker view of the world, the cartoon where theres New York, and theres New Jersey, and then, theres the rest of the world. . Well hear about those dimensions soon enough. And not attending enough to contextual factorsopportunities that presented themselves, being in the right place at the right time. The reason we reached out to Michele Gelfand is that I want to understand this stuff better, too. China, Japan, and Turkey are also tight. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. And they were finding that people in Africa were not falling victim to this illusion. GELFAND: I also teach negotiation. If you dont feel that, then you will be an unhappy person. HOFSTEDE: Look, guys, we can do it. Share. Theyre able to make finer distinctions in terms of their olfaction. In case you missed it, thats Western. But everybody, of course, instinctively feels and should feel that their country, or whatever their tribe is, is the best in the world. President Bush had framed these negotiations as going an extra mile for peace.. The best thing you can become is yourself. Individualism is thought to be on the rise in Western countries, but new research suggests that increasing individualism may actually be a global phenomenon. 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. Rich. We owe much of our freedom to that influence. Wade meant that these unwanted children were not being bornthus, they could not grow up to be criminals. Theyre more permissive. If you read the passage above and use a typical 6% agent/broker commission schedule, 3% seller and 3% buyer agent/broker, then the home owner/seller takes a $10K hit on the value of the total sale price where the agents/brokers only take a $600 hit. If youre a constrained sort of person, you wont go far in the U.S. Stephen DUBNER: Im curious whether youve ever been accused of political incorrectness in your study of national cultures. This interest goes back to those negotiations between Jim Baker and Tariq Aziz. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. We had a very tight social order. In our previous episode, we made what may sound like a bold claim. One hallmark of short-term thinking: a tendency toward black and white moral distinctions versus shades of gray. All rights reserved. thats always there. Documentary. Why arent all national cultures converging by now? DUBNER: I like those rules. HOFSTEDE: Yes, of course. GELFAND: And there was discussion in the cross-cultural psychology community about how James Bakers unemotionalcommunication style was received as This is not so serious, in terms of Tariq Azizs understanding of Americans intentions. An expert doesn't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. I think the models dont account for that because you cant account for that, right? You can followFreakonomics RadioonApple Podcasts,Spotify,Stitcher, orwherever you get your podcasts. Level of inequality C. Family composition D . the benefits to an individual from study and engagement in a topic. HOFSTEDE: They will look at them if they admire them, but they will look away if theyre afraid. GELFAND: They were trained to ask for help in city streets and in stores. I was floored. Freakonomics has since grown up into a media company, complete with documentary, radio show, and blog. Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese. The fifth dimension in the Hofstede universe came in the early 1980s, in collaboration with a Canadian social psychologist named Michael Bond, who was working in Hong Kong. But there must be, I would think, evolution across time, yes? 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. When youre trying to understand the nature of something, an outside view can be extremely helpful. He would spend the rest of his life building out the 6-Dimension Model of National Culture. Read the excerpt from Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent . Ultimatum Game Bargaining Among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon, U.S. Student Tells of Pain Of His Caning In Singapore, Singapores Relations With U.S. A. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. Whereas in other contexts, like in the Middle East, when you think about honor, you think about your family, you think about your purity, your dutifulness, and so forth much less so about accomplishments. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. Out into the ocean where they were caught by people on jet skis. Individualism once . But relatively speaking, we have more tolerance. HOFSTEDE: Okay, no, I was just being naughty. Individualism has had a tremendous impact, not only on culture, but on social theory as well, and political philosophy in particular. Whereas if you have a state religion, it tends to get tired and old and boring. Now this is pretty rare to have such different groups of respondents and still find the same thing. Pages: 4 Words: 1807. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt's own peer-reviewed research. Comprising four main documentary segments, each made by a different director -- including Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock, Taxi to the Dark Side's Alex Gibney, Why We Fight's Eugene Jarecki, and Jesus Camp's Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady-- the film examines . This is the dimension based on data from the World Values Survey. That, again, is the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. 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 theyre less likely to start entirely on their own diet. Between 1967 and 1973, he collected data on I.B.M. These are stereotypical names. GELFAND: And it caused a real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic punishment, which was caning. You look at parents and how they treat their kids art. Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda,Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski,Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. And its by no means easy. The downsides of looseness are less coordination, less self-control; more crime and quality-of-life problems. His late father was a social psychologist who devised a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism versus collectivism. Fundamentally, individualism is a belief that the individual is an end in themself. HENRICH: We have a kind of religiosity equivalent to somewhere like Kuwait. 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. Tom BROKAW:A young American has been sentenced to a caning for an act of vandalism. There were a number of low offers of 15 percent, which didnt get rejected. We can think about extraordinarily loose contexts like Tesla or Uber that probably need a little more structure. In a large power-distant society, you have autocracy. Better Essays. She likes to eat human food. It's part of our founding D.N.A. HOFSTEDE: Yes, especially by people from Anglo countries. HOFSTEDE: It means that you only need rules when youre going to use them. HOFSTEDE: In a cultural sense, no, I dont think so. Yes, the United States of America. Freakonomics is therefore NOT the book that I would recommend to anyone interested in (a) learning economic theory, (b) learning about how economists think, or (c) understanding the world or thinking of ways to improve it. Thats John Oliver. HOFSTEDE: And when he took the job in Lausanne, he found that the international group of pupils at his classes, if he asked them the same questions, came up with the same dimensions. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. Whereas people from less individualistic societies tend to be better at making relative-size judgments. GELFAND: This has always been the big question, the myth that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. 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. GELFAND: Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds. Joe HENRICH: Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. We look at how these traits affect . But it was serious. And you need revolutions in order to change the government. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. These were surveys of I.B.M.s own employees around the world. And I think that America has wonderful things happening to it. Gelfand has spent a lot of time trying to understand how a given countrys looseness or tightness affects everyday life. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on . Henrich has also observed this about Americans. HOFSTEDE: You could say these six dimensions of culture, they are perimeters to our sociality. Well find out what it means to be WEIRD although not weird in the way youre thinking. Freakonomics Radiois produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. We developed these linguistic dictionaries to analyze language reflective of tight and loose, in newspapers and books, tight words like restrain, comply, adhere, enforce, as compared to words like allow and leeway, flexibility, empower. One of the most important figures in economic individualism is the famous Scottish economist, Adam Smith. She sees the lack of self-control in loose countries as particularly worrisome. You have to behave like a family member if you want to be one. And it should stay there. One thing that I think that Americans are more extreme than other Western countries and certainly elsewhere in the world is attributing individual success to the internal traits of the actor. HENRICH: If they accept the offer, they get the amount of the offer. They dont even see each other and this is a one-time interaction, so there wont be another round of the game where the second player can punish or reward the first player. That is something that fundamentally many whites dont understand, right? Go out there and make it happen. Levitt's research on teacher cheating using Chicago Public Schools data.Clip from the 2010 documentary "Freakonomics: The Movie". The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dateslike socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century. When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York: Colgate University. My uncles like, Hey, I have something to show you. My first day in America, he showed me the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade. Were always losing time. DUBNER: What problem was he, and later you, trying to solve by doing this work? And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. I have a professorship in Joburg in South Africa, too. HOFSTEDE: This is a very American question, Stephen. Because when youre living inside a culture well, thats the culture you know; it is what it is. Feb 15, 2023. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. His ideas, along with others, are credited with . When Hofstede the Elder went to work for I.B.M., he got involved with these surveys. And there are other inconsistencies, especially in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. For instance, where you live. Now, California is a real interesting exception because it has a lot of threat. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. Those are the upsides. 47 min. You have to pronounce it right. 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. So that leads to justifying more inequality. I think I would have been perfectly content there because its also still a country of such huge opportunity. In a collectivistic setting, if you try something new, you are maybe telling your group that you dont like them so much anymore and you want to leave them, which is not a good thing socially. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. And for me, its hard to divorce the toxicity of the grind from the toxicity of masculinity, when you always have to dominate. Caning as in a spanking, basically, on the bare buttocks, with a half-inch-thick rattan cane. HOFSTEDE: He decided to take a job there. Is that the case? HENRICH: We dont like people telling us what to do. So keep your ears open for all that. Its very, very hard to do. NEAL: You have no real other example of a country that has brought together so many different national and ethnic and racial backgrounds. It could give you new occasions to gain status in an unexpected way. The other point is a reminder: Its good to be humble about our ability our inability, actually to predict how a given culture will change. Consider the prominent Muppets Bert and Ernie. Some researchers looked at these results and came up with a new label for humans in this context: Homo reciprocans. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. I had been led to believe, by you, that you are as dumb as bricks. And: In present-day Scandinavia levels of individualism would thus have been significantly higher had emigration not occurred.. The people that came to New York early on, in the early 1800s, they were from all sorts of different cultural backgrounds. GELFAND: I would say it tends to be California. Thats my idea. Europe has a strong influence from Germany, also from France. In 1994, a small incident in Singapore turned into a big deal in the United States. Paperback - April 22, 2020. A recent paper by a Harvard postdoc named Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen analyzed Scandinavian emigration from 1850 to 1920, when roughly 25 percent of the Scandinavian population left their countries, a great many coming to the U.S. People of an individualistic mindset were more prone to migrate than their collectivistic neighbors, she writes. I was on the phone with my dad, and I said, You know, its really crazy, all the differences between the U.K. and the U.S.. Its also the cleaning lady. Heres what Hofstede told us last week about culture: HOFSTEDE: If youre part of a society, youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. HOFSTEDE: Thats my idea. DUBNER: These are the two lines that are the same. HENRICH: So places like New York and London, people are blazing down the sidewalks. His father was Geert Hofstede. I know that wasnt your intention. Kumail NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. We even walk faster. So uncertainty avoidance is the intolerance of ambiguity. Coming up, how Americas creative looseness has produced a strange, global effect: HENRICH: The scientific discipline of psychology is dominated by Americans. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more.. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet.With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and . That would be very beneficial because now you might be going down the path of civil war, really. Multilevel Research of Human Systems: Flowers, Bouquets and Gardens, The Interaction Between National and Organizational Value Systems, 11 A. M. Sunday Is Our Most Segregated Hour,, The U.S. Is Just Different So Lets Stop Pretending Were Not (Ep. They can freely float about. We bring in neuroscience to understand all things cultural. Next on the list: what Hofstedes late father, the originator of this culture model, called power distance. Thats the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations or institutions be it society at large or just a family accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.. They make sure that there is no violation of any ritual. But some cultures strictly abide by their norms. As always, thanks for listening and again, I do hope you'll also start . Also, he uses some very bold examples (crime rates versus abortion, drug dealership, cheating teachers, etc) to make some very simple . Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. But oh, the places you'll go! It was freedom from all these debilitating things because the state would be able to provide for you. HENRICH: They are self-enhancing, which means they try to promote their attributes. OLIVER: When was that moment when America became the most American America it could possibly be? But that makes sense. This individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy. We put in a bunch of other checks and controls. HOFSTEDE: For the U.S.A., the world is like a market. And a lot of those presumptions come from how men function within the context of various religious practices. Singapore, for instance. NEAL: I think its helpful to think about culture in terms of a big C and a little c, the little c being those everyday things that we sometimes dont elevate to a level of culture. Well call it The U.S. Is Very Different from Other Countries So Lets Stop Pretending Its Not. Its the first in a series of episodes where well look at different pieces of that difference. Theyre not supposed to be the boss. Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. Industrialized. For instance, the rhythm of vaccination in the U.S.A. is very fast. But if youre not an economist, if youre a regular human being, you can see why the second player might reject a $1 offer. DUBNER: And what would you say is maybe a political ramification of low power distance? Our theme song is Mr. That is generated by looseness. In 2016, Henrich published a book called The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. A child is a child, and a parent is a parent, and a parent decides for the child. HENRICH: Because Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. (That will also need some explaining.) So then he really knew this is not an artifact of this particular company this is real. GELFAND: When we ask people, What does honor mean to you? in the U.S., a lot of people talk about work. And democratic. Heres the dean of the National University of Singapores school of public health: YIK-YING TEO: We have a tradition of having national campaigns to galvanize people to proceed in a common direction. Michele Gelfand has another example of how culture shapes perception. He interviewed people at I.B.M. And this is what Europe has. Neal is making a couple of compelling points here. Good on you. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. Heres how he describes himself these days. He started working as an engineer during turbulent years of rebuilding, and soon became a personnel manager. Historically, politically, and yes culturally. So you see these eye movements that are very different. So how much would you offer? IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Another one: impatience. I do think that today they are living through difficult times, but so are we. But first, Hofstede had to make sure that the differences he was seeing in the data werent specific to I.B.M. Mark Anthony Neal of Duke is not surprised that the U.S. scores relatively high on the masculinity scale. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. There is no evidence for convergence other than if countries become equally rich, they all go to more individualistic. Thats a crazy, creative solution to try to deal with the pandemic. China is also very collectivistic and so are the Southeast Asian countries, but not Japan. DUBNER: I find that people who dont load dishwashers carefully are usually pretty loose with the planning. But then the experimenters confederates come in. And so often, theyll just point at some other country on the map. One of the defining features of Americanism is our so-called "rugged individualism." You might even call it wild individualism. In other words, Americans dont just see other people as individuals. And we did find a number of learned people who had data to back up the hypothesis. You can think about it at the household level. We will learn which countries are tight, which are loose, and why. Scholars in this realm have a general agreement on what culture is and what its not. He wrote a paper about it. Downloads: 18. GELFAND: I was planning to become a cross-cultural trainer to work at the State Department and train people to understand culture. The converse, which is what Anglo societies are high on, means you dont care about ambiguity. Allen Lane 20, pp304. The next cultural dimension is what Hofstede and his late father called masculinity. That title is a bit misleading. He veers tighter. Most sociologists agree that individualistic cultures value individual choice, personal freedom, and self-actualization (Kemmelmeier 2002). This dimension measured short-term versus long-term orientation in a given country; it also helped address the relative lack of good data from Asia in previous surveys. That was our hypothesis, at least. after? In Germany, for instance, labor unions often have a representative on company boards, which can radically change the dynamic between companies and employees. In indulgent societies, more people play sports, while in restrained societies, sports are more something you watch. 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. Geert Hofstede ( 2 October 1928 - 12 February 2020) was born in a peaceful country, but his teenage years saw the second World War rage across Europe. Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . The same experiment was done in other, non-WEIRD countries, like Ghana and Zimbabwe. The future could be bright. 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. Then you can have something very good happening. Self-centered so if you give them tasks and have them list traits about themselves, theyll tend to list their attributes and characteristics rather than their relationships. Its more about how individuals are acted upon by the people and institutions around them. So the U.S. produces the sort of Wal-Mart equivalent of religions: big churches giving the people what they want, high pageantry. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. Michele GELFAND: Its a subfield of psychology that tries to understand whats universal, whats similar, and whats culture-specific. The Ultimatum game is famous among social scientists. How does the U.S. do on this dimension? Download Print. And in a restrained society, theres going to be suicide. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. Knowing the ritual, not knowing the ritual, not knowing how status-worthy blameworthy! Globalization were going to use them at the right place at the right place at the University of,! Convergence other than if countries become equally rich, they were trained to ask for in. Or every fact or every move has a lot of people talk about work Baker and Aziz., non-WEIRD countries, like Ghana and Zimbabwe wade meant that these unwanted children were being. Germany, also from France you live, shes moving to the business school at.! 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