Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. I dont want to be a doom thinker. 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. If it were, Afghanistan and Venezuela, even Iran might be U.S.-style democracies by now. Not necessarily better or worse but very different. Bush made clear to Iraqs Saddam Hussein that this wouldnt stand. This is the dimension based on data from the World Values Survey. Sometimes incentives will be obvious, but often they will be hidden - and . Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. HOFSTEDE: If I had been born in America, I would have liked it, probably, because I would have been used to it. China is also very collectivistic and so are the Southeast Asian countries, but not Japan. Heres what Hofstede told us last week about culture: HOFSTEDE: If youre part of a society, youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. GELFAND: Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds. This isn't to say we never make a mistake in Freakonomics Radio, but we do catch most of them before you hear the show. Long Island, New York, is thebirthplace of the American suburb. Thats Joe Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology. 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. They can freely float about. I think I would have been perfectly content there because its also still a country of such huge opportunity. Needless to say, it's had a lot of success. In a society of small power distance, a lot. In each chapter, the authors analyze a different social issue from an economic perspective. DUBNER: I find that people who dont load dishwashers carefully are usually pretty loose with the planning. Were realizing that part of that push forward theres a toxicity to that in terms of how you treat other people, how you think about institutions. Thats to say that it emphasizes privacy and independence, like the U.S., but its much more egalitarian. 47 min. You can think about it at the household level. These are stereotypical names. How does the U.S. do on this dimension? the benefits to an individual from study and engagement in a topic. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. Wed rather think about solutions temporarily rather than as, this might take some time. It means that we need to attract different types of people to an organization. This realization is what led us to todays episode of Freakonomics Radio. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. 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 has to do with conformity. GELFAND: My own sweet Portuguese water dog, Pepper, I mean, that dog is just gigantic. GELFAND: And I thought, If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. Freakonomics has since grown up into a media company, complete with documentary, radio show, and blog. Offers went up as high as 55 or 60 percent in some places and then down around 25 percent in other places. HOFSTEDE: I like this question a lot. Wade meant that these unwanted children were not being bornthus, they could not grow up to be criminals. You could just do an across-the-board search of various Western religions and look at who the figureheads are. HENRICH: So places like New York and London, people are blazing down the sidewalks. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. Where would you think the U.S. ranks among all the countries measured on this dimension? And we did find a number of learned people who had data to back up the hypothesis. Listen to this episode from Freakonomics Radio on Spotify. Share. When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York: Colgate University. I do this for you and you do this for me. Folks who come from a collective standpoint where, I do this for you, but youre doing this for us thats a very, very different way of seeing the world. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertain. This man has proof of our individualism. HENRICH: Im Joe Henrich. But first, Hofstede had to make sure that the differences he was seeing in the data werent specific to I.B.M. GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. Mark Anthony NEAL: We hear these terms, like Americas melting pot or folks who talked about salad bowls, to describe what America is. That is one of the main guests in todays episode. When most readers think economics, they think advanced math, complicated models, and subjects like unemployment, the stock market, and the trade deficit. In Brazil and Greece, youre not entirely sure what time it is. 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 dont remember where I want to say Mongolia. NEAL: Were a country that presumes male leadership. Nevertheless, you might be able to intentionally create pockets of looseness so you can have more balance. But yes, its all workplace. If youre an economist, you might think that offering even $1 out of the 100 would be enough. To that end, the digital revolution is further shrinking the distance to power. Within countries, there is of course enormous variation. In our previous episode, we made what may sound like a bold claim. High religiosity coupled with high individualism reveals another feature of American culture. We need to change our practices. Michele Gelfand and several co-authors recently published a study in The Lancet about how Covid played out in loose versus tight cultures. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as supremely WEIRD) as America? 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. An expert doesn't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. data, gathered in the late 60s and early 70s. GELFAND: Sometimes people actually revert back into their cultural chambers. 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. HOFSTEDE: For the U.S.A., the world is like a market. The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, is designed to pose fundamental questions concerning economics using a variety of imaginative comparisons and questions. It was there, and later on in travels in the Middle East, and working on a kibbutz, and elsewhere, that I started recognizing this really powerful force of culture that was incredibly important but really invisible. The book takes the form of six chapters. It always was unsustainable, but was made even more acute to us during the pandemic. And then I meet you all, and then youre not. Once he saw that differences were driven by nationality, Hofstede sensed he was on to something big. to let him focus even more on this data. So if you ask people to judge the absolute lengths of two lines, people in more individualistic societies tend to get that right. DUBNER: Where is the loosest place in America? Our theme song is Mr. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Freakonomics. As always, thanks for listening and again, I do hope you'll also start . GELFAND: When we ask people, What does honor mean to you? in the U.S., a lot of people talk about work. He has written several books about what music and other pop culture has to say about the broader culture. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity. Heres another example: HENRICH: People from more individualistic societies tend to focus on central objects. The country that ranks highest in long-term orientation is Japan; also high on this scale are China and Russia. Theyre longing for it. Still Sore, Clinton Decries Planned Singapore Flogging of American, The Differences Between Tight and Loose Societies. So, yeah, that is WEIRD. For instance: According to the 6-D Model of National Culture that weve been talking about, the U.S. is the most individualistic nation on earth. That is generated by looseness. But relatively speaking, we have more tolerance. Individualism, Modern Capitalism, and Dystopian Visions Introduction to Heritage and Multicultural American Identities: Contemporary Voices (1970-2000) Introduction to Contemporary Literature of the Twenty-First Century The Poetry of Physics RL.CCR.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt's own peer-reviewed research. In indulgent societies, more people play sports, while in restrained societies, sports are more something you watch. HENRICH: You want to be the same self, regardless of who youre talking to or what context youre in. I do think that today they are living through difficult times, but so are we. GELFAND: So, that has a lot of other effects on debt, on alcoholism, on recreational drug use. 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. making a claim about his individual experiences and looking for evidence. And its by no means easy. Were always losing time. But if you want to talk about humans, Homo sapiens, then you have a generalization problem. HOFSTEDE: He decided to take a job there. HOFSTEDE: Well, if you want an honest answer, I think mainly our own curiosity. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. SFU will never request our users provide or confirm their Computing ID or password via email or by going to any web site. It means I did it my way.. The same experiment was done in other, non-WEIRD countries, like Ghana and Zimbabwe. Happiness is going to be lower, but crime, too. HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., the boss needs to be a team player. Paperback - April 22, 2020. But Im Dutch, of course. This feeds back into what Michele Gelfand was talking about earlier, in the context of geopolitical negotiations. So he left I.B.M. If youre violating the social order, youre going to be punished.. Joe Henrich points out that even our religions are competitive. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. (This is part of theFreakonomics RadioAmerican Culture series). Why Does the Most Monotonous Job in the World Pay $1 Million? People tend to be super-creative and theres a lot of negotiation of rules. Groups that tend to have threat tend to develop stricter rules to coordinate. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. Theres not going to be violent crime. It was a collaboration between Hofstede the Elder, his son Gert Jan, whod begun working with him by now, and a Bulgarian linguist named Michael Minkov, who had been analyzing data from the World Values Survey. But Joe Henrich wanted to see how the Ultimatum experiments worked when it wasnt just a bunch of WEIRD college students. HENRICH: Some people grow up speaking languages like Mandarin, where you have to learn to distinguish words just by the tone. Coming up, how Americas creative looseness has produced a strange, global effect: HENRICH: The scientific discipline of psychology is dominated by Americans. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. Once you begin looking for evidence, you see an almost infinite array of examples. HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. Im a professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. 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. It's part of our founding D.N.A. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. So looking decisive, muscular, active or if youre a woman, sexy that makes you more status-worthy. HENRICH: We dont like people telling us what to do. And I shifted from pre-med into what turned into a career of cross-cultural psychology. Theres some D.N.A. That would be very beneficial because now you might be going down the path of civil war, really. GELFAND: Were trained from a very early age not just to be independent, but to be better. The next dimension is what the Hofstedes call uncertainty avoidance.. You have to pronounce it right. These attacks continue as I speak. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is . Life is going to be hard. The downsides of looseness are less coordination, less self-control; more crime and quality-of-life problems. 470. GELFAND: All cultures have social norms, these unwritten rules that guide our behavior on a daily basis. Individualism once . So were all constraining one another through our collective culture. FREAKONOMICS is the highly anticipated film version of the phenomenally bestselling book about incentives-based thinking by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.. NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. And when I started to work with Harry Triandis, who was one of the founders of the field, I thought, Wow, this is a super-interesting construct. The second one measures what's called "power distance." (Don't worry, we'll explain the name . And I could see there, a little bit similarly to the U.S., how the various ethnicities are trying to live together. OLIVER: When was that moment when America became the most American America it could possibly be? Thats the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. The U.S. is overall relatively loose. 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? Now that weve taken a top-down view of how the U.S. is fundamentally different from other countries, were going to spend some time over the coming weeks looking at particular economic and social differences, having to do with policing, child poverty, infrastructure, and the economy itself. 470. Macroeconomics, on the other hand, works on a larger scale. BERT: Ernie Ernie, dont eat those cookies while youre in your bed, huh? You can followFreakonomics RadioonApple Podcasts,Spotify,Stitcher, orwherever you get your podcasts. Well hear about those dimensions soon enough. Weve interviewed dozens of academic researchers about lowering healthcare costs or improving access to childcare or building smarter infrastructure or creating a more equitable economy. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better) Again, its worth repeating that no culture is a monolith. 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. NEAL: We realized that the grind is unsustainable. Out into the ocean where they were caught by people on jet skis. There are plenty of looser people in tight countries and vice versa. In 1990, when Gelfand was a graduate student, she followed the news as Iraq invaded Kuwait. And the whole point about negotiation is you figure out what is your highest priority in the situation, what domain is so important for you in terms of your tightness or your looseness, and then negotiate accordingly. And that is a status-worthy thing. These were surveys of I.B.M.s own employees around the world. Uncertainty in economics means something very akin to risk. Allen Lane 20, pp304. So the U.S. produces the sort of Wal-Mart equivalent of religions: big churches giving the people what they want, high pageantry. You know what it is, you know how it works, you dont necessarily have access to the people who really hold on to it. 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. Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese. HENRICH: So, Francisco is a good pal of mine and hes also a very charming fellow. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. Later on, fast forward, Pertti Pelto, whos an anthropologist. The snob effect occurs when an individual's demand for a specific product increases when the number of units of that product other people purchase increases. 470 Replay) Freakonomics Radio Documentary According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes . People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. DUBNER: Im curious for advice on how we should balance weve become an economic powerhouse, and we recognize that there is a lot of benefit to that. If someone acts in an inappropriate way, will others strongly disapprove in this country? Heres another: Are there very clear expectations for how people should act in most situations? In 2018, Gelfand published a book of these findings called Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. - Lyssna p 470. And: In present-day Scandinavia levels of individualism would thus have been significantly higher had emigration not occurred.. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Replay) According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better). Whereas in countries that are bogged down in cronyism and corruption, it doesnt happen. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. And thats helped to produce the looseness that exists to this day. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. DUBNER: Are you the creator of the looseness-tightness system for looking at culture? By this time, Hofstede the Elder had already gotten a Ph.D. in social science. Freakonomics is a book about 'freaky' research and insight. 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. Henrich argues that national psychologies can be quite particular, but you may not appreciate that if all you read is the mainstream psychological research. But everybody, of course, instinctively feels and should feel that their country, or whatever their tribe is, is the best in the world. Is that a yes? DUBNER: Describe for me your father and his work, and how it became a family business. Good on you, I say. HOFSTEDE: Its rather futile to advise somebody what their national culture should be because theres no way you can change it. HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. And it produces this illusion. Also, he uses some very bold examples (crime rates versus abortion, drug dealership, cheating teachers, etc) to make some very simple . This suggests that every time a social scientist runs an experiment whose research subjects are WEIRD thats capital-letter WEIRD the results of that experiment may be meaningful in the U.S. and some other places, but quite likely not in others. But Im Dutch, of course. No difference, that is, between tight and loose cultures. 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. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. GELFAND: We have a lot of work to do, theres no question. Go out there and make it happen. The focus of that episode was American culture. 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. HENRICH: Because Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. Levitt's research on teacher cheating using Chicago Public Schools data.Clip from the 2010 documentary "Freakonomics: The Movie". HENRICH: But if you want to talk about humans, then you have a problem. This individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy. Around this time, he started doing some teaching at the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. I know that wasnt your intention. Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. Oh say, can you see, the home run I just hit. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if we wanted to. GELFAND: I was watching this negotiation between Tariq Aziz and James Baker. We will leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian. One hallmark of short-term thinking: a tendency toward black and white moral distinctions versus shades of gray. Fundamentally, individualism is a belief that the individual is an end in themself. Here in the U.S., its actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms. So yeah, the U.S. has that assignment ahead of it. Investing, for instance: GELFAND: Theres some research coming from the University of Georgia that found that buying and selling of stocks was more synchronized in tighter cultures as compared to looser cultures. This paper examines the production of race on the Internet by examining the elements that make up the weblog Freakonomics: the topic, the environment, the medium, and the users. 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