GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. In the meantime, a bit more from the comedian Hannah Gadsby. The best thing you can become is yourself. HOFSTEDE: You could say these six dimensions of culture, they are perimeters to our sociality. GELFAND: Classic things like the Mller-Lyer Illusion, which is these two lines where one looks longer than the other. But theres something else to be said about American culture. GELFAND: Having more adaptability, more innovation. Today, an overview of the cultural differences. DUBNER: These are the two lines that are the same. Gelfand has spent a lot of time trying to understand how a given countrys looseness or tightness affects everyday life. Do you know what you are? It could give you new occasions to gain status in an unexpected way. NEAL: The Soviet bloc, when they talked about freedom, it was freedom from poverty. 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. You can see this on many dimensions: how we work and travel; how we mate and marry; how we care for our children and our elderly; how we police; how we conceive the relationship between the individual and the state; even how we manage death! When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness. China, Japan, and Turkey are also tight. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is . So the general rules of a loose or tight culture may not be consistently applied to all populations. The other point is a reminder: Its good to be humble about our ability our inability, actually to predict how a given culture will change. GELFAND: In the U.S., various newspapers covered the story. So I have no doubt that his subjects really liked him. NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. GELFAND: The U.S. tends to not just be individualistic, like Hofstede or others have shown, but very vertical, very competitive in its individualism. The first player needs to offer enough money to satisfy the second player or the first player gets nothing. In other words, Americans dont just see other people as individuals. 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: Its like that story of two fish where theyre swimming along. Henrich has also observed this about Americans. A loose country, like the U.S., tends to do well in creativity and innovation; in tolerance and openness; in free speech and a free press. Europe has very strong gradients between very individualistic Nordic and Anglo and Germanic countries; Germanic is a little bit more collectivistic. DUBNER: You sound very grateful that you were not born an American. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. Then you can have something very good happening. In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. That level of religiosity is very high for a wealthy country. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. It turns out that Americans were among the least likely to conform. 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. 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. He started working as an engineer during turbulent years of rebuilding, and soon became a personnel manager. It is still the case that you did have the summer of love. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner.Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. BERT: Ernie Ernie, dont eat those cookies while youre in your bed, huh? So you see these eye movements that are very different. It is a small price to pay to punish the first player for being so stingy. Most white Americans have an entirely different ancestral history. Needless to say, it's had a lot of success. Freakonomics, M.D. Freakonomics Science 4.7 932 Ratings; Each week, physician and economist Dr. Bapu Jena will dig into a fascinating study at the intersection of economics and healthcare. HENRICH: And the case I make is its been highly unsuccessful to just pick up institutions that evolved in Western societies and transport them to drop them in Africa or the Middle East or places like that, because there needs to be a fit between how people think about the world, their values, worldviews, motivations, and the affordances of the institution. HOFSTEDE: For the U.S.A., the world is like a market. According to Chapter 5 of Freakonomics, there is a black-white test score gap and that gap is larger when you compare black and white students from the same school. DUBNER: So weve done a pretty good job of beating up on the U.S. thus far. We look at how these traits affect . Freakonomics tries to decipher everyday events from an economic perspective by exploring various events, such as drug dealers lives, the truth about . So, what is it? What is culture? So, culture is about values, beliefs, absorbed ideas and behaviors. Henrich is saying that the export of American ideas isnt necessarily easier. you ask. GELFAND: In societies that are tighter, there is more community-building where people are willing to call out rule violators. 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. We do lab experiments, field experiments, computational modeling. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Part of the Freakonomics Series) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J . GELFAND: We have a lot of work to do, theres no question. 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. This carries over into many areas of society, including the labor market. As always, thanks for listening and again, I do hope you'll also start . Heres the dean of the National University of Singapores school of public health: YIK-YING TEO: We have a tradition of having national campaigns to galvanize people to proceed in a common direction. GELFAND: I grew up on Long Island. So were all constraining one another through our collective culture. So the picture that emerges from these findings is that Americans are less likely to conform in the name of social harmony; and we also treasure being consistent, expressing our true selves, regardless of the context. So, Japan has been hit by Mother Nature for centuries. 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. If you no longer even pretend to be one people and to be fair to all the citizens of your country, then youre not going down a road that leads to a great future. 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. I know that wasnt your intention. 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. Freakonomics is a registered service mark of Renbud Radio, LLC. And in a collectivistic society, a person is like an atom in a crystal. We developed these linguistic dictionaries to analyze language reflective of tight and loose, in newspapers and books, tight words like restrain, comply, adhere, enforce, as compared to words like allow and leeway, flexibility, empower. Factor analysis being a way to distill a large number of variables into an index, essentially a ranking. We had a very tight social order. An expert doesn't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. He has written several books about what music and other pop culture has to say about the broader culture. Fundamentally, individualism is a belief that the individual is an end in themself. The U.S., according to this analysis, is comparatively a short-term country. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; were also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on uncertainty avoidance, if that makes you feel better). I personally expect at some point in the not very far future to have another wave of youthful optimism and find a way to say, Look, guys, we can do it, the future could be bright. As we heard, the first four dimensions originated with the I.B.M. And this paper was basically sitting in the shelves of libraries for many years. Were always losing time. HOFSTEDE: In an individualistic society, a person is like an atom in a gas. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. 470. "Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.". And then I meet you all, and then youre not. During the Cold War. This realization is what led us to todays episode of Freakonomics Radio. Think Belarus, Myanmar, Russia, China. At the time, opinion surveys were relatively new; it was especially unusual for a company to survey its own employees. Why not? Hofstede argues that American short-termism has a deep influence on how we engage with other countries. You look at parents and how they treat their kids art. According to the individualist, all values are human-centred, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. The second player is given a choice between accepting or rejecting. 1424 Words. People get less interested. The book takes the form of six chapters. But Im Dutch, of course. 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 shouldnt surprise anyone that individualism might contribute to inequality or at least, as Henrich puts it, the justification of inequality. The authors argue that humans usually make decisions based on the incentives for their actions. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. What we saw in Egypt was very similar. So, organizations you can think about them as the people, the practices, and the leaders. Michele Gelfand is one of the premier practitioners of cross-cultural psychology. employees spread across the globe. One hallmark of short-term thinking: a tendency toward black and white moral distinctions versus shades of gray. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. We are supremely WEIRD. After reading Freakonomics it really opens the reader's eyes to unseen things in everyday life. GELFAND: But when people were wearing those really weird nose rings or those facial warts, they got far more help in loose cultures. 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. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. So that can be very beneficial. The first is that a model of anything even nearly as complex as a national culture is bound to miss a lot of nuance. And this is what Europe has. GELFAND: Exactly. So that leads to justifying more inequality. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. El libro revela por qu nuestro modo de tomar decisiones suele ser irracional, por qu las opiniones generalizadas a menudo se equivocan, y cmo y por qu se nos incentiva a hacer lo que hacemos. Michele Gelfand and several co-authors recently published a study in The Lancet about how Covid played out in loose versus tight cultures. SuperFreakonomics was the follow-up in 2009. And life is an adventure. We need to have different types of leadership. Each and every person has individual reasons for pursuing a career, or goal. Thats John Oliver. 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