Michele Gelfand on "Tight and Loose Cultures" - Think Better Speaker Series

the purpose of this speaker series is to highlight the ways in which behavioral science can influence society shape policy impact business and improve human life one of the basic insights from behavioral sciences is that a lot of the forces that drive our behavior and drive our society is really inaccessible to us it operates out in ether we're not always even aware of the ways in which we're being influenced by some of these forces it's a little like asking a doctor what's ideal or what's most important for living a healthy life it's unlikely that she's going to say air we live in air all the time it's easy to forget how important it is but of course you live without air for just a minute and you will find out very quickly how important it is our speaker tonight michelle gelfan from the stanford gsb studies the behavioral science equivalent of air she studies culture she studies how the norms and expectations and beliefs and values and actions of those around us affect our own behavior and how understanding those cultural forces can help us to understand a lot of variability out there in human behavior but it is also the kind of thing like air that it's easy to forget about when you're living in the midst of it but take it away just for a minute by going somewhere else some other part of the country and you'll see just how powerful culture actually is in driving behavior michelle didn't always want to uh study culture i learned when she was an undergraduate at cornell she colgate sorry she went to she grew up in new york i learned this morning uh it's an insult to suggest she might have lived in new jersey um definitely not new jersey she's a new yorker she went to colgate as an undergraduate and it was on a trip overseas where she got really interested in culture she came back and applied to graduate programs and her boyfriend at the time todd who is now her husband of 27 years said you can go to graduate school and i'll follow you anywhere except to urbana-champaign in illinois which is of course exactly where she decided to go to graduate school starting a long career in uh interest in and the consequences of breaking rules um and what that does to your life this turned out apparently not to be such an important rule to for her to have broken given that they've been married for 27 years so what she has learned over the course of her time as an academic is that breaking rules like she did by going to urbana-champaign are more important in some places than others that is they mean more some cultures live in places where they are more tightly bound to rules than in other places where there's more of a laissez-faire kind of attitude and if you're like me once you learn about this research you will start to see this aspect of life showing up everywhere in places you hadn't seen it before you will see michelle's distinction between cultural tightness and cultural looseness showing up in your own mind you'll see it family office you'll see it showing up in your community you'll see it showing up around the world she'll show you air that you hadn't seen before for 25 years michelle worked building this research on cultural tightness and looseness as a professor at the university of maryland just last year she swapped coasts and she moved to the stanford gsb where she's been just for this last year acculturating to the business world she's tonight she's going to tell us about the work that she has built her career on and the work that she describes in her book rule makers rule breakers how tight and loose cultures wire our world you're in for a great talk please join me by welcoming michelle as our speaker tonight thank you so much for coming here tonight i'm just delighted to be here to tell you about the research that i've been doing on culture and i'll start my talk with a story about two fish and they're swimming along uh and one fish that's passing by them says hey boys how's the water and they swim by and one says to the other what the heck is water and this is a very simple story with a very profound point which is that sometimes the most important realities around us are the things that we can't see take for granted and for fish that is water but for humans that is culture and culture is this really interesting puzzle because it's all around us 24 7. and it affects everything from our nations to our neurons but it's only until we get outside of our cultural bubble do we realize that we are living our lives and being socialized with specific values and norms that guide our behavior and they're invisible

and what's interesting is that as humans we've made many technological feats we've put a man on the moon we've wired the earth we've discovered the laws of physics but what if we discovered the underlying laws of culture these deeper codes that are driving our behavior then we might be able to build a better world for all of us so as nick said i wasn't always so passionate about culture i was actually pre-med at colgate and i loved that topic also and now i do some cultural neuroscience that we can talk about in the q a but at the time as he mentioned i'm a native new yorker and like the new yorker cartoon um which you see we sort of acknowledge new jersey that's a big deal i would say but then there's basically you know a bunch of rocks in the pacific ocean and this view of the world got really challenged as nick said when i went away to london for a semester abroad i was the first kid in my family to go abroad a shelter kid from long island as we pronounce it and i was experiencing a lot of culture shock and i remember calling my father marty from brooklyn and confiding in him all the culture shock i was experiencing from the strange sights and sounds and smells but also things like people just going from london to paris or london to amsterdam just for the weekend and he said well think about it like it's going from new york to pennsylvania and i thought this was the most amazing comforting metaphor and this is a true story the very next day i booked a trip to egypt low budget tour couple week tour on the nile and my dad was like what do you think you're doing and i'm like papa it's like be going from new york to california don't worry about it and it was in egypt and later travels and working on a kibbutz and really experiencing the world that i recognized how little i knew about culture how important it was for defining who i was this kid from long island and yet i realized i really must know very little about myself if i don't know about culture so i went back to colgate pivoted from pre-med and i went to get a phd in cross-cultural psychology by harry triendis uh who was in happened to found the field of cultural psychology here in champaign-urbana um and i really wanted to use the tools of science to understand culture and then uh the rest is history you know i've been traveling around the world noticing lots of contrasts for example for many of you that have been to singapore you'll notice that there's a lot of rules that you need to abide by or else you might be fined more formally for example you're not allowed to litter you can't spit you can't bring large quantities of gum into the country even walking naked in front of your curtains at night can land you a fine that's a true story so just watch out if you go to singapore if you take a short plane ride over to new zealand you might see people walking barefoot and banks i don't know if anybody's seen this a new zealand is the only country that i know of that had its own national wizard this guy it was the national wizard of new zealand and he was actually a fired professor from australia who landed in the streets of new zealand and he was lecturing on everything from rugby to religion um and making up you know making a ruckus of the place and basically the prime minister of new zealand at the time said would you like to be our wizard and your job is to entertain the country and that is what he did he would launch himself from gigantic eggs on libraries and all sorts of other things there's all sorts of interesting contrasts you see around the world for example for those of you that been to germany you might notice that in many places people wait patiently on the streets even if there's no cars around in my own home state of new york city you see people constantly jaywalking even with kids in tow and these examples really reflect something more fundamental even though they're very distinct and different examples they reflect how strictly people abide by social rules that either can be unwritten or more formal and written in codes and laws and social norms are this incredible invention by humans they really help us to coordinate and predict each other's behavior at an unprecedented level and one way to think about this is what would the world look like without social norms so try to imagine a thought experiment where you know you walk into an elevator and people are shaking their umbrellas and they're standing backwards try doing that sometime you know and just see how they look at you or go into a restaurant and start like just asking people to borrow their food and to eat much on their food or go into a library and start singing and dancing or even in this talk i could have started you know do some weird stuff and nick would say we got to be more selective about who we invite here um you know there's a reason why we also don't have sex in public settings like in movie theaters or in public parks most of us because that is something that would really disrupt the social order so in many ways you can think about social norms as really the glue that keeps us together and helps us really as a society we collapse without social norms and what i've been really interested in is how

strong that social glue is around the world it's what we call the difference between tight cultures and loose cultures type cultures have very strict norms and punishments for deviance and they restrict the range of behavior that's seen as permissible and loose cultures are much more weak in terms of their normative structure and they have more permissiveness a wider range of behavior that's seen as permissible and i'm just very interested in this distinction to try to understand how can we measure tight and loose and also what are its consequences for human groups what are the trade-offs that it confers and why does it evolve even in the first place and what i want to talk to you today is about a fractal pattern of tight moves fractal mean is a metaphor coming from physics that we can look to see whether there's a repeated pattern of tight loose across different levels from nations to neurons and see whether or not we can find some logic that pertains to all of these different levels of analysis so today i'm going to take you on a little journey where we talk about these different levels at first i'll start with the national level then we'll talk about zooming in the u. s can we see variation in titles at the state level what about organizations that we live in can we differentiate organizations that have strict rules uh verses that are more permissive i'm in the silicon valley so i can tell you right away that yes we could do that also in our own households and our own mindsets at the end of the talk i'm going to talk about how you can assess where you fall on this continuum i'm going to give you a little quiz at the end so you can start thinking about this and see whether or not you can predict your own scores on the titus mindset inventory and again across these levels why do they evolve what are their consequences and also i want to talk about how do we change them how do we pivot when we need to how do we negotiate these differences in all sorts of settings and i'll give some examples when it comes to organizations but also we'll talk about coven 19 toward the end and what we learn about this distinction so that's the menu for tonight let me start with the most broad level of analysis which was the international level this was a study we did across 30 plus nations as we were gathering survey data around the world we were also studying the characteristics of nations their histories their ecologies we were also doing some unobtrusive observations in city streets around the world and we wanted to simply see can we reliably measure how strict or permissive social norms are across countries we assume that of course all countries have tight or loose elements for example this is a pretty tight setting but we thought maybe we'll be able to reliably differentiate on a continuum those countries that veer tight versus those viewer loose and that's exactly what we found that countries such as japan singapore austria germany tended to veer tight cultures like the us brazil greece the netherlands tend to devere looser and what we were interested in is seeing what is the trade-off what are these things correlated with and why might they have evolved in the first place so i want to just give you the big picture the trade-off that we found across nations is what we refer to as the order versus openness trade-off so tight cultures tend to have a lot of order they have much lower crime and they have more monitoring whether it's police per capita or security cameras a colleague of mine nara ara nor zion at ubc would say people who feel watched feel accountable and they abide by rules and that's really what we see with this kind of indicator um how many people uh listen to wait don't tell me on sunday mornings peter said how can you not we're here in chicago so one i was listening to uh to him and i he was telling a story about what do japanese police officers need more of and we're all guessing maybe the higher pay maybe they need more vacation time it turns out they need more crime and it turns out that because they're so bored because the crime rate is so low in japan that they were trying to egg people on to commit minor crimes so that's just an example of order we find that tight cultures also have more uniformity in terms of what people wear what cars they drive even the clocks in city streets have more alignment in tight cultures we've actually measured this and we can see that in contexts like in germany or in japan the clocks and city streets are off by milliseconds but if you go to greece or brazil and you look at the clocks around the city streets you're not entirely sure what time it is um we also know that type cultures again with respect to order have much more self-discipline and self-control if you live in a context that has a lot of rules from a very early age you're socialized to manage your impulses to monitor your behavior and to adapt to the normative context like we do in libraries or the funerals or other contexts we manage our impulses so when you're repeatedly experiencing situations that are stronger that have stricter rules you develop that muscle for self-control uh much more than in

context where you have weaker norms when there's more permissiveness we also know that for example tight cultures have less obesity and less debt and they have less alcoholism and drug abuse so there's all sorts of ways in which we see that self-discipline manifest at the macro level now most cultures struggle with order they have higher crime they have less synchrony and they have a host of self-regulation failures but they corner the market on openness and we can see this in a variety of different indicators um they have more tolerance on all sorts of um large-scale studies on the world value surveys we can see that they are more open to immigrants to people of different races religion sexual orientations even when we actually can send our arrays out around the world with various stigmas we see that they're helped more in looser cultures and as an example i had my research assistants trained in germany to go back to their home countries they were wearing fake facial warts that i bought them you can buy them on the internet just fyi i also in another condition had them wearing a tattoos and nose rings and purple hair and the other condition they were just wearing the normal face and they were sent out with a standardized script to ask for help and in stores as well as in streets and when people were just wearing the normal face there was no cultural difference in helping behavior but as i mentioned they were far more likely to be helped in loose cultures when they were wearing these kind of stigmas loose cultures also have more creativity in large crowdsourcing studies we see that people from loose cultures are more likely to enter those contests and they're more likely to win and in general whose cultures tend to be more adaptable when new styles and norms and new norms that have a better economic value enter into the population they're more likely to be to take off more quickly in loose culture so you can see that there's real trade-offs where loose cultures have issues with order type cultures really struggle with openness so the question here is what predicts this you know what might actually explain why these differences exist um we didn't find that gdp was a reliable differentiator between tight and loose cultures there are tight cultures that are rich and poor and loose we didn't see any common language or religion or geographic location that united tight cultures on the one hand and loose cultures in the other but what our theory was really pretty simple we hypothesized and found that tight cultures tend to have a lot more chronic threat throughout their histories threat can be coming from mother nature or human nature and the idea is really simple when you have a lot of chronic threat you need stricter rules to coordinate to survive and as i mentioned this can come from human-made threats think about how many times your nation's been potentially invaded like in the u. s we haven't been chronically worried about canada and mexico invading us at least most of us have not thought that u. s is separated by two oceans in terms of you know from other continents um also mother nature think about mother nature's fury this is not randomly assigned around the world some countries experience chronic natural disasters chronic famine don't have much arable land and so forth also we can think about things like pathogen prevalence and we measured all of these things as we're collecting data we measured countries histories over the last hundred sometimes over the last 500 years to see whether or not we can show any kind of proof of concept that the more chronic threats you had the higher the tightness by the way not all threats fell into this category for example with the territorial threat we reasoned it wasn't just about how much your country was involved in threats so the u. s has been involved in threat all over the world the question for us is it has to be on your own territory because that really relates to the need for coordination and stricter rules to survive and so this is what we found in this study we found some evidence that when we look at as population density is increasing we see the same with tightness same with food deprivation disasters territorial threat over the last hundred years pathogen prevalence all tended to push groups toward tightness now not all type cultures have a lot of threat not all goose cultures have been on easy street there's also other predictors of tight loose including how much mobility is there when there's a lot of mobility it's harder to agree upon rules or diversity when you have more diversity in general and a lot of debates then it's also pushes groups toward looseness but nevertheless we see this pattern pretty clearly in the national data once we start thinking about why do cultures evolve the way they do might there be some ecological pressures for certain types of values and norms it can help us be less ethnocentric about those contexts so let's go back to the singapore context where you're not allowed to bring large quantities of gum into the country if you tell americans about this they think it's ridiculous like why can't

people chew gum when you think about having a context where there's over 20 000 people per square mile it kind of sounds reasonable that lee kuan yew who was kind of a cultural psychologist said you know guys like this gum is causing a lot of problems it's people chew their gum and they throw it on the floor it's becoming a natural hazard you know this gum is wadding up elevator sensors and all sorts of train problems on the subway so we said you know we're gonna have to ban this tasty street given uh how small of an area that we all live in and in fact there's a lot of potential chaos in that context that where rules can help avoid that chaos i want to mention this is not just a modern phenomenon this is something we could see applying to small-scale societies that predate modern nations all over the world we can look at small-scale societies this is what we did when we partnered with some anthropologists this is my colleague joshua jackson and we're partnering with carol ember who's an anthropologist we can start coding ethnographies for how strict or permissive they were across various different domains whether it's socialization or gender or marriage and we can see whether or not the same pattern is found in pre-industrial societies and that's exactly what we found in a paper we published a few years ago that the more density the more warfare more pathogens more scarcity the tighter we can see these pre-industrial societies so this is just to suggest that we can see this pattern in modern nations we can see it in historical contexts what about zooming in let's sort of talk about this fractal pattern because of course countries are diverse can we look at a place like the united states which is really diverse and can we start studying states maybe we can move beyond red and blue to think about variation across the 50 states in the u. s and that's what we did in another paper we classified countries based on states based on survey measures we had as well as other objective measures things like how many teachers use corporal punishment in schools that's an indication of strictness and punishments how many dry counties are there in a state that's an example of constraint versus latitude that's probably why i've never moved to utah or to indiana for example and these things all co-vary together and we can then put a state on a metric of titan loose but even more interestingly we can start looking at the predictors and that's exactly what we did in this study we looked at the same kind of ecological variation and in fact state level tightness is predicted by some of the similar types of patterns that we saw in the national data we know that natural disasters vary around the country kansas for example is hit with lots of natural disasters it tends to veer tight in our data illinois by the way is moderately loose just to let you know and uh indiana tends to veer tighter we also see pathogens scarcity and those context states that have a lot of rural populations where there's a lot of gossip mill and a lot of monitoring tend to veer on the tighter side and we also see that the same order versus openness trade-off can be found at the state level in the u. s we gathered lots of data on this order and openness trade-off and you'll see that for example tight states have people who have more conscientiousness this is a measure of the big five personality that has to do with rule orientation they have less homelessness less divorce less mobility more law enforcement per capita they also have lower drug use particularly recreational drug abu use and less debt even controlling for other factors lose culture states struggle with these things but on the openness side they have more people who score higher in openness they have more creativity we measured this in terms of patents and foreign artists per capita and they have more equality in terms of discrimination claims and minority-owned businesses controlling foreign rnas and so forth so the same um kind of pattern you can see across this level of analysis titles is not a static construct it changes over time also i can see people are probably wondering about this you know we think about the us you know 100 years ago even beyond that was it as loose as today probably not and we can actually assess that that's we try to do as scientists we try to find that now we can't go back and survey people back then but we can develop measures to try to get at this construct using linguistic measures and looking at how the language that people use over time has changed so for example in this particular paper again with my um colleague josh jackson and partners with uh soham day in computer science department and amber fox we wanted to try to develop a dictionary linguistic dictionary signature of titan loose you can see the words that we found using large corpora that coalesced around tight words included things like prevent comply constrain uphold confine looser words included things like freedom create openness leeway flexibility and what you see here in this graph is that over the last 200 years we see that

looseness has been rising and tightness has been decreasing in american texts and large corpora that we were analyzing but what's even more interesting is whether this predicts the order and or openness tradeoff was telling you about so as we were gathering this data we wanted to get at whether or not we see shifts in openness but also disorder as looseness is increasing and that's exactly what you see here what we know from this data controlling for lots of trends is that periods of looseness are associated with more creativity in the united states more patents more trademarks more films but less order in terms of truancy and debt so this is a trade-off we even see over time that we experience here in the u. s so one more fractal pattern i want to talk about before i want you to vote on which you think is better tighter loose but i want first to ask you to think about this prompt when i say follow the rules just think about what comes up in your mind kind of what kind of statement in your mind is that you just think of naturally when i say follow the rules this is an unobtrusive measure of how people make meaning around rules and we can code this for the valence that people have and what they say about rules and that's exactly what we do some people will say things like nuisance goody two-shoes like you know kind of you know overly sensitive they don't they think rules are you know made for you know people who are uh two conformists other people that we've surveyed about this will say good structure order they like rules now if you go into any american bookstore you will see lots of books on break the rules like i've even found books that are for children that are how to create anarchy like i can show you this it's actually in my office and so you can see mainstream american culture really is focused on breaking the rules but we're very interested to see is are there differences even in the us at a different level now zooming into states in terms of social class so we often think about social class as really just about our bank accounts but actually what we can see is that in fact there's big differences culturally in the working and upper class in terms of tight loose and our theory in this data was in this project was that you know working class are subject to a lot of threat potential threats they have to worry about falling into poverty uh into hard living what sociologists call that um the chance of having to be subject to the dreads of poverty they live in more dangerous neighborhoods they live in occupations that are more dangerous and that also um have less discretion and there's been some work on this in sociology uh melvin cohen has looked at how you know parents are training their kids like good job analysis where they say hey we're they're going to be in occupations that are going to have more discretion then we're going to help them to become more anti-conformist versus those that have more constraint we want to actually measure threat and see whether or not threat is an additional predictor to help explain working and upper class kids and that's exactly what we found in studies of over a thousand people we can see that uh the working class has greater tightness they talk about positive things about rules and that prompt i gave you they report more tightness in lots of different contexts their daily life they also like tightness it's desired i'm going to sort of get to later on why kind of people who are promising to return people to a tight social order might be more appealing to people who experience a lot of this kind of threat that we know of is happening in the working class we found through our data collected at the zip code level that in fact working class live in more dangerous areas and they also report having higher threat and that in part explains some of the differences we find in titles i'll just say that these differences are found very early in age our most recent samples the youngest samples we've surveyed are about three years old this is a girl from the working class um who uh whose parent gave his permission to show this picture now we can't exactly ask these kids you know what do you think are rules they look at you kind of strangely but what we can do is we can have them interacting with the puppet this is max the puppet it's really lovely to watch people interacting they're playing with max and they're playing these new games and then max does something kind of weird in the middle of the experiment he starts violating the rules and he's announcing i'm playing the rules correctly and you just simply videotape these kids and see what do they do they protest do they laugh well it turns out that the working-class kids are much more likely to protest against max than the upper class kids because those kids have been trained even as young as three years old because they have a cushion that it's okay to break the rules so we see these differences arising very early they also produce later in life some of the same trade-offs that i mentioned when we bring people into the laboratory working class tend to be more rule-abiding and they also tend to be

less creative just like we see at other levels by the way there's some colleagues of mine at uc berkeley that looked at this in the field where they looked at which cars in california are more likely to violate the rules including trying to cut off pedestrians which is against the law cars like bmws and mercedes much more likely to do that stuff as compared to plumber vans and so forth so this is found also in the wild so let me just pause for a minute and ask you which is better tight or loose if you were to vote right now how many people would vote if you had to design a world how many people would vote for tightness looseness how many people are going to abstain okay so this is a classic interesting question around how do we design societies plato confucius certainly hobbes thought we should have tightness but then jon stewart mill even freud he thought rules make us neurotic he was kind of neurotic right and the question is what's the right answer you know what's the data say and we sort of reason maybe it's neither maybe groups need to veer tight or loose for good reasons but it's the groups that get to the extremes either extraordinarily tight or super loose that have a lot of dysfunction for different reasons when you're in a context that's really super constrained it makes you feel repressed and it makes you want to exit that situation something dirkheim called fatalistic suicide but on the flip side extreme looseness what he called anime suicide anime meaning disorder or normlessness can also be untenable because you can't coordinate your action at all so we wanted to see can we see evidence of this that actually there's this curvilinear non-linear relationship between titles and well-being and that's exactly what we found this looks like a kind of a crazy graph but it's basically a u-shaped curve where the extremes are showing higher depression higher blood pressure higher suicide and lower well-being now this is not something that's just important for the national level when you start thinking about freedom and constraint in all sorts of settings you can think about this pattern of how do we avoid these extremes so for example we know in decision making that having too much choice or too little choice this is another way to re-label that phenomena having extraordinary looseness and extraordinary tightness also produces dissatisfaction so those extremes are really problematic it's same with leadership we know from the leadership literature that leaders that are provide too little discretion that are really directive that don't give people any autonomy or they're very authoritarian produce really unsatisfied followers unmotivated followers but so is the flip side that when leaders provide too much discretion when they're losing fair when there's so much job autonomy this happened a lot during covet right it was really hard for us to kind of maintain those connections with our followers and with our subordinates and so forth even academic advisors have recently seen some discussion around this are um when people talk about those that are ineffective talk about both extremes of being hovering too much or not being involved at all and we can think about this with parenting for those of you know that are parents you know that you know it's really tough um to raise kids because we want to really monitor our kids a lot but we know that overly strict parents those helicopter parents produce kids who have a lack of self-discipline who develop depressed anxiety and also who when they're released into the wild can actually not have the ability to self-regulate but at the same time overlaps parents produce very also maladaptive kids as well with poor working habits who engage in risky behavior and so forth so what this suggests and this is kind of the final the end of like part three of the talk is that how do we think about negotiating tight loose how do we create the kind of balance in any social system at any level of analysis to have both empowerment but also accountability and this just suggests that we need to identify diagnose context that we think where we need to loosen tight norms but also we might need to identify context where we need to tighten social norms and you know culture is invisible and it's omnipresent but if we understand the logic of it then we can actually be intentional we can engage in intentional cultural change and this is just to say that culture is not destiny we can actually manage it overtly and mindfully and i'm just going to give you a couple examples i work now a lot with the us navy i'm also working with some online platforms to try to deal with these issues in very different ways and pivoting in different directions but you can think about organizational cultures for many of you that work in organizations think about your own organization where does it fall in the titles continuum certainly some organizations need to veer tight airlines hospitals the military we don't want them making all sorts of crazy decisions they have a lot of threat and coordination needs but sometimes they can start getting too tight you saw this with united airlines

i think the military is concerned about this because we know that the trade-off is order and openness and the military wants to be more innovative and we know we can diagnose this through unobtrusive observations but also through surveys where overly tight organizations start looking helicopter-like very standardized having a lot of rules people being afraid to speak out overly loose organizations though are also problematic we can see this in the silicon valley i live there now and i can attest to that we can see it online we could see it in this wild west of the social media where we now live they're very chaotic there's not a lot of accountability or oversight unpredictable and organizations this can i see i'm getting a 10 minute i'm not sure if that's negotiable but okay um we see it in reviews on glassdoor we can see we can analyze glass door reviews in terms of how people talk about their organizations vis-a-vis tight and loose are too disorganized and decentralized minimal top-down strategy very chaotic irregular rules are ultra tight very hierarchical rigid and flexible micromanaging to the point of how many times you use the restroom so this suggests that we can actually try to be more ambidextrous meaning we can try to pivot as needed and be tight and loose mindfully and this is what we've been starting to do we've been developing ways in which we can loosen up tight cultures we call this flexible tightness these cultures need to be tight in many respects but maybe we can insert some discretion into these contexts like the military and airlines hospitals likewise we can also try to tighten up whose cultures we call this structured looseness where we insert some accountability and structure into these contexts and i'm just going to give two examples and then we'll move on to covid my last titus ambidexterity quest flexible tightness how do you loosen tight organizations we call this the ease model and we've been doing this with the navy first of all we can examine whether a rule is really necessary in trying to also pivot from tight to loose in these contexts we can allow exploration free time to help people to really think outside of the box decentralizing the structure is also very helpful for loosening and encouraging pushback but also structured looseness on the flip side requires something very different we call this the secure model here we want to set clearer boundaries and benchmarks and establish structure centralizing is more useful in this context when we're trying to insert some accountability and oversight emphasizing reliability and enforcing the rules these are ways that we can start introducing some accountability into these contexts now i want to say this is really the devil's in the details this is obviously not easy to do it's difficult to do it for different reasons when we're trying to loosen tight organizations this threatens the need for control these are contexts that had a lot of safety needs and coordination needs so when you have these manufacturing firms that i've worked with that want to suddenly loosen you know that's really difficult because it threatens that need for control and order and we need to take baby steps in this kind of context implement small changes on the flip side when we're trying to insert some tightness into loose system there's a lot of pushback because of autonomy um i even have some people in the early days of microsoft who talked about this who said you know there was so much looseness and they need to tighten so they had to actually get people to be involved in the change to get them to feel empowered to buy into it uh to do it collaboratively so i would can talk more about this in the q a but let me just finish with talking about titans and covet 19. um you know this is such a difficult time in fact rulemakers who breakers are published right before covid and never did in my wildest imagination think i'm going to be studying you know a global pandemic and a global threat i've been studying threat for years i've been studying pathogens kind of from a distance so suddenly i had to start thinking about like okay you know what does this pretend like which cultures are going to do better during covet and why and i wrote an op-ed about this in the boston globe in early march and i said look you know there's a lot of research out there mine and others that would suggest that it's adaptive to tighten during collective threat temporarily and in fact we've done this during 9 11 world war ii etc so maybe there's this is going to happen naturally but then i thought you know this is a different kind of threat cobit is invisible it's a germ it's a lot more easy to ignore it than to ignore warfare or terrorism and also we started thinking like we've never really looked to see whether loose cultures take longer to tighten during a global threat and this is what evolutionary biologists actually call evolutionary mismatches they talk about this not respect to culture but respect to other aspects of human functioning and the idea is simple it's that traits that have evolved in one environment that can be really advantageous in that context like loosenesses for innovation can be highly disadvantageous in environments when that trade is not needed and or it's actually problematic

for dealing with the new environment now environmental changes can occur very rapidly that's what we saw here and this sort of suggested to us maybe we might see liabilities of looseness during covid not all loose cultures but this is what we wanted to study and found um this graph shows the correlation between tightness and cases per capita basically what it says is that the higher the tightness the lower the cases this is also controlling for lots and lots of different factors um including wealth and inequality and density and government intervention and testing and so forth and lots of other factors this was published in the lancet planetary health uh just a couple months ago same thing with deaths per capita but what was even more astonishing about this data is that we saw big differences in the amount of fear that people had of covet around the world and it was astonishing this is yougov data across 20-something countries they measured how fearful people were of covert from the day one in a country of a case up until the end of the fall of and thai cultures just had more fear from the beginning and even into the fall even though they were doing better in terms of covid uh and loose cultures had much less fear that it when you don't have another way of thinking about this we don't have the threat instinct that is or threat signal that is reaching people when it's been interfered with or it's been muted or so forth like it can happen in a you know global threat like a pandemic where it's invisible then um it's going to be a problem and in fact this kind of partially mediated uh some of the cases in death's data now that's not to say that losis is not a great thing it sure is but we need to be mindful of how should we be ambidextrous in future threats how can we pivot when it's necessary clearly i think some of the lessons we've learned uh that hopefully we'll take into the future threats that we have is that we need to be much more clear and consistent in terms of our messaging make the threat concrete make it concrete from people who we trust locally particularly in loose cultures that matters a lot from our barber shops from our priests and our rabbis also reminders that tightness is temporary that there's some evolutionary adaptation of tightening during threat and that the faster we tighten the faster we reduce the threat that's something we've seen with a lot of our modeling and the faster we can get back to our freedom and of course national identity really helps in this matter um some cultures like new zealand that are famously loose with a crazy wizard actually were able to be ambidextrous they were able to pivot with really good leadership and also with the population that was willing to all uphold the rules so i'll end with am i still on time i have a willing problem apparently according to my husband have a wooing problem i want to just get to the final level of analysis which is your own tightness mindset and i'll ask you using dollywood's fabulous metaphor are you an order muppet or a chaos muppet so are you like you know bert and kermit the frog you know who notice a lot of rules who like to avoid making mistakes and also who like a lot of structure you know bert's known to like collect paper clips and so forth he's always immaculately dressed and his roommate ernie drives him crazy because the chaos muppets as we call them don't really notice rules they're a little more impulsive they like to take risks and they tolerate a lot of ambiguity and it's a really interesting distinction i like to use the word mindsets because it really is about these different psychological affordances of strong or weak norms noticing rules managing impulses and how we deal with structure or lack thereof and we all fall on the default the continuum even though we can sort of activate our inner bert and when we're you know in a library or in a symphony uh or we can kind of let our inner uh inner cookie monster animal let loose when we're in a public park or when we're at a dinner uh but we all for our own reasons based on our own cultural experiences our uh the kind of threats we've dealt with in our lifetime and so forth we have a certain place on this continuum i have a little qr quiz so you can take the quiz and you know i will say i'm going to be honest i veer moderately loose on my own quiz my husband todd who by the way is from chicago um he veers moderately tight he's an attorney so he has a lot of accountability all the time like billable hours the whole you know you know kind of accountability that goes with being a lawyer or a public servant and you know once you start thinking about your own mindset you can ask yourself like why might i have scored this way on the quiz what about my own background has kind of makes that natural for me but then we can start thinking about our partners or our bosses or our neighbors or our kids and start thinking about like why might they be the way they are and why might that make sense it kind of promotes cultural empathy and then maybe even further than that

how do we negotiate these differences because for example i get a lot of pushback on how i load the dishwasher really annoying to my spouse but you know we can start thinking about even in our household how do we think about which domains do we need to be tight or loose in um and then we can actually negotiate that we can each get our highest priority it sounds a little cheesy but i also teach negotiation so we've got to think about win-win agreements and my poor kids have had to live through this um neither of them are social scientists they all want the marine science but the point mainly is here is that we can actually negotiate this and actively construe the level of norm strength we want in different domains even in our own private lives and i'd be really curious after you take the quiz uh if you can email me on my website you can see all my information um and my contact information is right here but i would love to hear about any ways in which this distinction you've seen it operate in your own lives whether it's as you read the newspaper whether it's your own conflicts with various people in your lives and just anything you've noticed about this um now that you've heard more about this um this cultural code so i want to just on behalf of the group here uh thank you for attending i think better and thanks for having me it really was a joy to be here back in chicago i spent a lot of time here in grad school because i was escaping from champaign although i did love champagne urbana and i eventually loved all the corn and i still have the most fond memories i feel very fortunate to have gotten my phd at university of illinois urbana-champaign so thank you very much and i would love to hear your and comments and thank you michelle so we do have time for some questions there are two mics here i wanted to start it off with a question from our zoom audience um how can you authentically understand the cultural norms of a society when you're not a member of that culture yeah this is a fantastic question it actually speaks to something that we've been measuring in psychology now which we call cq or cultural intelligence and actually it's distinct from iq and it's distinct from eq emotional intelligence and it's a muscle that we can develop through our you know active uh engagement in the norms and values of a culture whether it's reading through movies and so forth but cq is also informed by having cultural mentors i know when i go to the middle east a lot which is you know quite frequent i have a big research team out there where we're studying things like the psychology of honor i constantly even i'm a cross-cultural psychologist and violating norms of honor all the time like if i'm on my phone when i'm trying to talk to my colleague they're like hey like you're disrespecting me like am i not important enough that you know you can't put your phone down or other things like that and i have cultural mentors that will tell me honor violation like you know you're a cultural psychologist you need to get some help in any context from the locals and help to understand um the important cultural codes so i think it's an active life quest and a journey to behind cq matters a lot i have a new handbook coming out on cross-cultural organizational behavior whole chapter that's devoted to cultural intelligence how it affects mergers and acquisitions how it affects leaders of diverse teams people have high cq create organizations that are more inclusive and they also do better in the global environment so it's worth it matters it also matters for negotiation and intercultural negotiations when we study it above and beyond iq you can be really super smart and you can be even emotionally intelligent but cq is really what drives success in intercultural interactions hi thanks for the talk um i was thinking about that follow the rules thing and like the reaction that i got and i was thinking that um personally i find that rules easier to follow when i understand underlying principles or values that it's trying to body so i don't know if you've done any research about like maybe tight cultures in which principles are explained versus tight rules in which they're just kind of by fiat like that could be a distinction between different kinds of type cultures yeah i don't know if you've done any research on that yeah it's so interesting um and we haven't but um i think it's a really interesting point because what we suspect is that over time people don't really understand even why they're performing the rules they don't really think about it even silly rules there's actually a new emerging literature on silly rules you know why do people in the military have to have a certain type of socks or why did we legislate the kind of haircuts they're going to have their silly rules they seem to have no function you know why are we doing this but actually it turns out in some initial modeling done by some colleagues of ours like actually what we're finding is that groups that have a lot of silly rules actually more willing to comply with the

rules that are really important so uh and that's i think the logic in the navy also is that people learn that they'll follow these silly rules that they're gonna comply with the rules that are important on the battlefield so i think in large part sometimes rules seem like kind of really silly but they have they seem to co-evolve with context where there's really important reasons to um obey rules that you can you don't want to keep explaining to people this is why we do this and this is what's happening they're kind of uh they have sort of a opaque in a lot of ways and rituals are like that too um so i think that cultures that have a lot of rules tend to also have these rituals where people are not thinking about them but i would like to talk to you about maybe we can design some research on that we're always looking for new ideas here right this is like our you're like our laboratory and we're crazy scientists so it would be really super cool to look at that um especially even with like the three-year-olds and the younger kids um because that's really interesting and i also think that under context of thread it's hard to keep talking about why we're doing these like you don't have a lot of time to do that might be why they become so opaque some of the rule following yeah i'm curious given your understanding of difference between tight and loose cultures uh how do you believe that influences like the proclivity for certain cultures to lean towards entrepreneurial activity or even the tolerance of entrepreneurial activity and failure yeah this is a great question and actually um in the book i talk about that um in fact there's data that we've analyzed that show that loose cultures have far more tolerance for entrepreneurship types of careers they're seen more positively clearly it's much more of a loose code but i will say that it's important that it doesn't mean that loose cultures are necessarily great at innovation because we think about innovation as being both creating ideas but also being able to implement them and actually some of those cultures can come up with a lot of good ideas but that doesn't mean they're going to be able to scale up that requires tightness and requires coordination and likewise tight cultures might not have a lot of idea generation but they can really scale up and so i differentiate entrepreneurship and creativity from innovation in that sense and we have some recent evidence that we publish that shows that actually having that kind of ambidexterity actually enables nations to be highly innovative in terms of having both tight and loose and i think it's a key challenge in organizations is having these leaders who can help groups to promote openness and entrepreneurship but also promote what we say closed leadership in terms of accountability structure scaling up and there's all sorts of ways that we can advise on that but they're both needed so yeah the answer is yes but they also know in terms of the importance of both types of codes also one last thing i'll say about that i was interviewing a lot of people in the silicon valley and it's an interesting phenomenon not surprisingly there's a lot of loose mindsets of people who start these companies they're really risky and then you know the dream of getting bought out and you know going public and so forth is like amazing but then what i found talking to people is that they invariably enter into tighter worlds you know they're bigger organizations they have to have tighter rules and they're like whoa like this is not good i feel really constrained and i'm going to go just start up another startup i'm going to be a stereo startuper um and you know the kind of contempt is mutual because when we talk to people who are in you know manufacturing contexts who realize they want to be looser so they hire an r d group or they bring on people who have loser mindsets they just drive each other crazy you know because they're missing deadlines and they're a little loosey-goosey on kind of protocol and so there's what's again interesting about this is that we don't anticipate these differences we don't think about this as before we do this what kind of cultural clashes are we going to have this also applies to mergers and acquisitions we've done a lot of work on mergers across cultures over the last like 30 years and again with the best intentions think of daimler and chrysler like best intentions this was supposed to be an awesome merger but what they didn't realize is this iceberg beneath the surface of what they're going to wind up having to deal with and we've studied that more systematically now we can see the price tag that happens when tight and loose organizations merge again it's negotiable but most times we're not thinking about it we're just thinking about the strategic compatibility so that's just another you know kind of thought when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship yeah one more question hi um thank you for your talk um i wanted to find out if you can tell me more a little bit about um what you were referencing the uh the ambidextrousness because i work in a creative organization i have a lot of art directors and creative directors but then we also have like a lot of business people as well and so you can imagine like the collisions that we have so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and how do you foster creativity and innovation in that type of environment yeah i mean it's such a fascinating question i think even the fact that you're asking that question says a lot because often we just kind of make these attributions about people

that like we don't really like them they annoy us like we don't think about wait they have certain strengths that we have liabilities on it in fact the exact strengths of some cultures of the liabilities of others and vice versa and so once we start to appreciate like wow we actually need each other like we need both tight and loose in this organization is here's what each party brings to their group brings to the table then it's a matter of creating a lot of joint kind of incentives and incentive structure to help people feel like they're really part of the same overarching goal and each participating in terms of order efficiency coordination versus creativity i write a little bit about this in the book there's various different um ways in which we've seen that happen like on the ground and i'd be happy to tell you more about that and get more examples from you because this is a really new emerging literature and and topic of how we can be ambidextrous in all sorts of contexts and who are these people and what are their training and how do we get people to appreciate each other's strengths whether they're in marriages or they're in you know mergers or so forth so i think it can be done and that's really um what our charge is now once to apply this knowledge in all sorts of contexts so let's hear about your titles mindset quiz during the chatter after the talk and whether you were surprised and what you think that might be from thank you