Better Essays. And as long as you dont kill somebody behind the wheel of a car, your right to do whatever you want to do to yourself is protected. Were trying to buy time, save time. His father was Geert Hofstede. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. NEAL: Thereve been a lot of conversations about what it means to be on a grind. I hate to call out Michele Gelfand, but even in the loosest of cultures, dogs dont have unfettered access to food. 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. HOFSTEDE: For the U.S.A., the world is like a market. HENRICH: It chafes us when we get ordered around. Australia and Brazil are also loose. High religiosity coupled with high individualism reveals another feature of American culture. Caning as in a spanking, basically, on the bare buttocks, with a half-inch-thick rattan cane. The sixth dimension is called indulgence vs. restraint.. So, yes, the same attributes that can be a big problem can also be a big boost. As an Amazon Associate, Freakonomics may earn commissions from qualifying purchases made through links on this site. 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. 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. Freakonomics is a registered service mark of Renbud Radio, LLC. 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. HOFSTEDE: I like this question a lot. BERT: Ernie Ernie, dont eat those cookies while youre in your bed, huh? 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. Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the book for readers who run screaming at the thought of cracking open a book with the word "economics" in the title. GELFAND: Places in the South have tended to have more natural disasters. So, what is it? The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dateslike socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century. It was back in grad school that Michele Gelfand first asked herself this question. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. How does the U.S. do on this dimension? Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. 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. HOFSTEDE: He decided to take a job there. Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . Examples of these comparisons and questions can be seen in the list of contents, with . When Americans did this experiment, a third of them conformed and gave an obviously wrong answer. So how much would you offer? ERNIE: Oh, gee. GELFAND: Were trained from a very early age not just to be independent, but to be better. But a lot of the world is much more like a family. 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. 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. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. This is part of the history that made the U.S. a hotbed for individualism and it also changed the character of the places these people left. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent . Im a professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands. Henrich and a couple of colleagues came up with the WEIRD label when he was teaching at the University of British Columbia. When something is not easily measured, it often gets talked about in mushy or ideological terms. He veers tighter. Youre culturally confident. All rights reserved. HENRICH: We have a kind of religiosity equivalent to somewhere like Kuwait. Latin countries tend to be more collectivistic, especially Spain and Portugal not so much Italy and France. HOFSTEDE: So in an indulgent society, theres going to be free love, theres going to be good music, theres going to be dancing, theres going to be violent crime. GELFAND: They were trained to ask for help in city streets and in stores. Theyre what we call tight cultures. But heres the thing about culture: it can be really hard to measure. HOFSTEDE: Because its true: the very same dimensions under different circumstances, can work the other way. HOFSTEDE: Thats my idea. GELFAND: Classic things like the Mller-Lyer Illusion, which is these two lines where one looks longer than the other. And: In present-day Scandinavia levels of individualism would thus have been significantly higher had emigration not occurred.. Sinopsis. Freakonomics Radiois produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. And it got the attention of President Clinton: Bill CLINTON: Its the first Ive heard of it, Ill look into it. This would never happen in a society of large power distance. Good on you. John OLIVER: When was that moment that America became the most American America it could possibly be? And then you see how often the subject wants to go along with the other people, as opposed to give the answer they would give if they were by themselves. But the Chinese, even rich, will be a lot more collectivistic and a lot more long-term-oriented than the Americans. He did some work in the factory and it shaped him to a great extent because there, he could see that the world of the organization looks so differently from the floor than it does from above. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into . Mark Anthony Neal of Duke is not surprised that the U.S. scores relatively high on the masculinity scale. Heres how he puts it in his latest book: You cant separate culture from psychology or psychology from biology, because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think. One example he gives is literacy. You might think that these relatively minor differences dont add up to much. Greeks are very strong on that. After reading Freakonomics it really opens the reader's eyes to unseen things in everyday life. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. They are descended from people who came here of their own free will and in order to execute their own free will. GELFAND: So, that has a lot of other effects on debt, on alcoholism, on recreational drug use. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York: Colgate University. I mean, youve got your quota, as have we all, but youre not. We promise no spam. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusThe Best of Freakonomics with Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, m. Theyre more permissive. Think Belarus, Myanmar, Russia, China. Fascinated by the human in the system, he did a PhD in organizational behaviour. But yes, its all workplace. Its focus on individual behaviour also lends itself to a preoccupation with manipulating individual choices. 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 . This really contrasts with lots of places where there are legitimate traditional authorities and people tend to defer to those authorities. HOFSTEDE: This is not about a homogenous soup, but its about the power of the millions versus the individual and the power of ostracism. But no. We often look to other countries for smart policies on education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. All contents Freakonomics. Very soon, there will be an Institute of Gladwell Studies. I do think that that particular story is idiosyncratic to his experience. So, again, if you want to talk about Americans, youre okay. We promise no spam. The U.S. is just different from other places in a variety of ways that we often dont stop to think about. 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. I think thats a good litmus test of tight-loose. Share. So the general rules of a loose or tight culture may not be consistently applied to all populations. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as supremely WEIRD) as America? (That will also need some explaining.) We see them as individuals with whom we are in competition. But it can make life harder for the millions of Americans who arent so entrepreneurial, or rugged, or individualistic. 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. Like, you can buy them on the internet. So you could over-eat and over-indulge and over-drink. And that happens a lot. But somehow, that diversity and that early celebration of permissiveness has overridden that. The Coronavirus Shutdown Is Revealing Americas Troubling Obsession With Work, Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change During the Age of Mass Migration, A Rising Share of the U.S. Black Population Is Foreign Born, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Indulgence versus Restraint, 10 Minutes withGeert Hofstede on Masculinity versus Femininity, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Individualisme versus Collectivisme, Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context, A Re-Inquiry of Hofstedes Cultural Dimensions: A Call for 21st Century Cross-Cultural Research, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Achievement Values: A Multimethod Examination of Denmark and the United States, Hofstedes Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith A Failure of Analysis. Like, you saw in the U.S. trying to locate Covid in sewage. This interest goes back to those negotiations between Jim Baker and Tariq Aziz. GELFAND: Exactly. DUBNER: Can you give me a good example of an idea or a theory that I might come across in a Psych 101 textbook that would just be so American that it wouldnt really be useful if you actually care about humans? In Germany, for instance, labor unions often have a representative on company boards, which can radically change the dynamic between companies and employees. This failure leads to confusion at the very least, but quite possibly deeper misunderstandings, perhaps all the way up to hatred and violent conflict. So after we ran that first project, we redid the entire project, and we took concerns like the one Francisco had. Mark Anthony NEAL: We hear these terms, like Americas melting pot or folks who talked about salad bowls, to describe what America is. BROADCASTER: The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence. Follow. the benefits to an individual from study and engagement in a topic. You can think about it at the household level. HOFSTEDE: There was a Quaker at the head of I.B.M. Open Document. And heres one of the people who created the WEIRD designation. (This is part of the, competition amongst religious organizations. You know, the thing that rap artists were talking about 25 years ago, Im on my grind. Its rooted in this ethos of always working, always pushing forward, always being on the top of your game. Thats the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. And I was interested in this, and I thought maybe it would tell us something about an innate human psychology for reciprocity or something like that. Needless to say, it's had a lot of success. Well find out what it means to be WEIRD although not weird in the way youre thinking. Download Print. But its important to acknowledge that no culture is a monolith. Which is probably why we dont hear all that much about the science of culture. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. GELFAND: In cross-cultural psychology, we study how ecological and historical factors cause the evolution of differences. And the research subject explained to him that, Oh, I feel so bad for you that you cant afford pants without holes in them that I cant take the money from this poor American kid. And it struck me as a way in which this experiment could be perverted. It also is related to obesity. Gert Jan Hofstede is a Dutch culture scholar whos been walking us through these dimensions. In a society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate, he writes, people have a thicker corpus callosum than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. The corpus callosum is the bunch of nerve fibers that unites the two brain hemispheres. In the latest issue of American Scientist, statisticians Kaiser Fung and Andrew Gelman wrote a strong critique of Levitt and Dubner's work. HENRICH: Im Joe Henrich. 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.. SFU will never request our users provide or confirm their Computing ID or password via email or by going to any web site. When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. So, say its $100, and the first player can offer a portion of the $100 to a second player. Around this time, he started doing some teaching at the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. It is that the wealth comes first, and the individualism follows. Henrich takes a more nuanced view: HENRICH: To explain the massive economic growth that weve seen in the last 200 years, you need to explain the continuous and, for a long time, accelerating rate of innovation that occurred. 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. And we did find a number of learned people who had data to back up the hypothesis. This realization is what led us to todays episode of Freakonomics Radio. So if you only want to talk about American psychology, youre fine. And thats helped to produce the looseness that exists to this day. Thats Mark Anthony Neal of Duke University. Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition. We just need to do it. The examples include: school teachers and sumo wrestlers cheating, the Ku Klux . Potentially offensive or not, Hofstede really believes in the power of culture so much so that he remains the steward of a massive research project begun more than 50 years ago by his late father. Michele Gelfand is one of the premier practitioners of cross-cultural psychology. 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. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. We had a very tight social order. The first one measures the level of individualism in a given culture, versus collectivism. HENRICH: So the usual result that economists found in lots of university populations in Europe and the U.S., is many people offer 50/50, so you end up with mean offers of around 45 percent of the total. 493 Update) Adam Smith famously argued that specialization is the key to prosperity. But Im Dutch, of course. HOFSTEDE: Okay, well, dont. And then I meet you all, and then youre not. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. Henrich says yes. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. Freakonomics Quotes. As for the U.S., Gelfand says the U.S. is not only loose but getting progressively looser. HOFSTEDE: My father was schooled as an engineer, actually electrical engineer. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. 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. 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. It suggests that as in most things in life balance is desirable. Later on, fast forward, Pertti Pelto, whos an anthropologist. Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda,Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski,Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. HENRICH: Im a researcher who tries to apply evolutionary theory to understand human behavior and human psychology and particularly culture. At the time, opinion surveys were relatively new; it was especially unusual for a company to survey its own employees. The second one measures whats called power distance. (Dont worry, well explain the name later.) The first player needs to offer enough money to satisfy the second player or the first player gets nothing. Its the tiny differences in sociality. HOFSTEDE: Which doesnt mean egoism, but it could go that way. 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. Categories like age, gender, job type, job seniority, and so on. And that also means that fighting is a good way to get what you want. HENRICH: This cashes out in an ability to make better abstract or absolute judgment. As of today, it covers six dimensions or, as the Hofstedes put it, six basic issues that society needs to organize itself. Its called the 6-D, or 6-Dimension, Model of National Culture, and it is one of the most intriguing explanations Ive ever seen for why American society is such an outlier in the world for better and worse. By the way, Gelfand doesnt really take a position on whether loose or tight is superior. We will learn which countries are tight, which are loose, and why. Its also the cleaning lady. Words: 777. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. HOFSTEDE: So youre asking about cultural convergence. This suggests that looseness and tightness can co-exist. Some of the countries with high power distance: Russia, China, and Mexico. GELFAND: Clinton went to negotiate to say, Hey, this is just totally inappropriate, this punishment. And the Singaporean governments reaction was, Look, this is our culture. If you plot the U.S. on G.D.P. Employees were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements like Competition among employees usually does more harm than good. And, Having interesting work is just as important to most people as having high earnings., HOFSTEDE: Simple questions about daily things that people understand. Wade meant that these unwanted children were not being bornthus, they could not grow up to be criminals. But one has arrows going out and one in? And then theres the big C, the stuff that we have these big conversations about, that we do these incredible studies about, which is really about the worldview of groups of people coming together, in a community, in a nation, in a family, right? 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. Hannah GADSBY: Have you ever noticed how Americans are not stupid? Historically, politically, and yes culturally. This individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy. The U.S. is overall relatively loose. He started working as an engineer during turbulent years of rebuilding, and soon became a personnel manager. This is really a conversation that pleases me a lot. Well go through the other five dimensions, much faster, I promise. The individual agents/brokers only take a $150 hit after their costs/fees. So the scientific discipline of psychology is dominated by Americans. Thats Joe Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard; hes also a scholar of psychology, economics, and anthropology. You can never admit weakness or failure. Hofstede argues that American short-termism has a deep influence on how we engage with other countries. Know, the same attributes that can be really hard to measure Pelto, whos an anthropologist much and!, we study how ecological and historical factors cause the evolution of differences a in. Faster, i promise: Im a researcher who tries to apply evolutionary theory to understand human and! Very soon, there will be a big problem can also be a big problem can also be lot! To offer enough money to satisfy the second player socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century differences! 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