HOFSTEDE: He decided to take a job there. Everybody gets tickled until they laugh. HENRICH: Because Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. You have to pronounce it right. You might want to change, but if you get ostracized, its very difficult to persist. In one experiment, Gelfand sent a bunch of research assistants to different places around the world. HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. It means I did it my way.. The focus of that episode was American culture. And the rest is history, if you like. And that really can help explain some variation not all, but some variation in norms and values. Its focus on individual behaviour also lends itself to a preoccupation with manipulating individual choices. He interviewed people at I.B.M. BUSH: Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. She did want to measure culture, and how it differs from place to place. 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? And there are other inconsistencies, especially in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. For instance, where you live. Pages: 4 Words: 1807. 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. So rules for the sake of having rules are not good. These attacks continue as I speak. The U.S. patent database goes back into the 18th century and what a number of studies in economics as well as work in my lab has shown is that openness to other people so, trust in strangers, an inclination towards individualism, a desire to stand out, to be the smartest guy in the room fosters more rapid innovation because people are more likely to exchange ideas, theyre more interested in distinguishing themselves. BROADCASTER: The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence. You realize, you want a black or white value judgment. The next dimension is what the Hofstedes call uncertainty avoidance.. And I think that is a hallmark of African-American culture in this country. We said that a lot of good ideas and policies that work elsewhere in the world cant work in the U.S. because our culture is just different. HENRICH: This probably wouldnt be in a psych textbook, but something like the Ultimatum game. HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., there is little constraining. Its also the cleaning lady. 1424 Words. - Lyssna p 470. The spirit of competition of what Michele Gelfand calls vertical individualism seems to permeate every corner of American society. This does not mean that no one in a loose culture, like the U.S., is stigmatized or mistreated. Self-centered so if you give them tasks and have them list traits about themselves, theyll tend to list their attributes and characteristics rather than their relationships. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. Theyre what we call tight cultures. Scholars in this realm have a general agreement on what culture is and what its not. Freakonomics, which weighs in at just over 200 pages (plus a hefty section of bonus material for those interested in learning more), takes as its principal argument the idea that economics exist as a tool to study society. Because $1 is more than zero, so the second player would still be better off. 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. Hofstede analyzed these data at what he called the ecological level. He explained this approach in a paper called Flowers, Bouquets, and Gardens the idea being that an individual flower is a subset of a mixed bouquet, which in turn is a subset of an entire garden, which has even more variation. Why have rules if you dont use them? The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. When most readers think economics, they think advanced math, complicated models, and subjects like unemployment, the stock market, and the trade deficit. We put in a bunch of other checks and controls. In a more masculine society, men and women adhere to the gender roles you might think of as patriarchal: fathers, for instance, take care of the facts, while mothers handle the emotions. Season 10, Episode 49. The country that ranks highest in long-term orientation is Japan; also high on this scale are China and Russia. So the general rules of a loose or tight culture may not be consistently applied to all populations. And it was like, This stuff is really lousy. She decided that the key difference, the right place to start measuring, was whether the culture in a given country is tight or loose. 470. So, culture is about values, beliefs, absorbed ideas and behaviors. Ambiguity is good. On many Freakonomics Radio episodes, well hear about some idea or policy that works well elsewhere in the world but hasnt taken root in the U.S. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. And how are we defining culture? During the Cold War. DUBNER: Are you the creator of the looseness-tightness system for looking at culture? But even a loose country will tighten up when a threat arises. That, again, is the American culture scholar Joe Henrich. NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. So that leads to justifying more inequality. Michele Gelfand and several co-authors recently published a study in The Lancet about how Covid played out in loose versus tight cultures. It also is related to obesity. Not necessarily better or worse but very different. It's an unnatural activity that has become normal. But its also a tremendous outlier. Well hear about those dimensions soon enough. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. Within countries, there is of course enormous variation. In the U.S., it was freedom to do whatever the hell that you wanted to. Mobility also produces looseness, because its harder to agree upon any norm. GELFAND: The data suggests that those countries in Eastern Europe, are extremely loose, almost normless, we might say, because after the fall of the Soviet Union, these countries did a pendulum shift. Joe Henrich again: HENRICH: In some societies, people really attend to scent, and they have a complex set of language terms that have the equivalent of basic color categories for scents. Thats my idea. For example, we asked bank managers some years ago to look through scenarios of people violating organizational rules, like coming to work late, staying on the phone too long, maybe checking their email. Although the concept of an individual may seem straightforward, there are many ways of understanding it, both in theory and in practice. Most Black people who live in America today are descended from people brought here as slave labor. You can followFreakonomics RadioonApple Podcasts,Spotify,Stitcher, orwherever you get your podcasts. And this paper was basically sitting in the shelves of libraries for many years. Here in the U.S., its actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Needs to Become Less American, Measuring Inequity Aversion in a Heterogeneous Population Using Experimental Decisions and Subjective Probabilities, Westerners and Easterners See the World Differently, Economic Man in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies, Ultimatum Game with Ethnicity Manipulation: Problems Faced Doing Field Economic Experiments and Their Solutions, Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if we wanted to. Yes, other phenomena like how things smell to us. Multilevel Research of Human Systems: Flowers, Bouquets and Gardens, The Interaction Between National and Organizational Value Systems, 11 A. M. Sunday Is Our Most Segregated Hour,, The U.S. Is Just Different So Lets Stop Pretending Were Not (Ep. Gelfand says the countries that were most aggressive in trying to contain Covid tended to be tighter countries. There is no evidence for convergence other than if countries become equally rich, they all go to more individualistic. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. I dont want to be a doom thinker. Neal is making a couple of compelling points here. And I think that America has wonderful things happening to it. Freakonomics has since grown up into a media company, complete with documentary, radio show, and blog. Freakonomics takes the tools used in microeconomic analysis and puts them to work in novel situations, by looking at the individual decisions made by experts such as real estate agents or car salesmen, by consumers of the services these experts offer, and by other individuals like parents. This episode was produced by Brent Katz. John OLIVER: When was that moment that America became the most American America it could possibly be? Uncertainty in economics means something very akin to risk. I do think that humanity as a whole is sort of evolving to being more reflective. HENRICH: Im Joe Henrich. Henrich is saying that the export of American ideas isnt necessarily easier. And by the way, in that sense, the U.S.A. is also a huge laboratory of society formation, hopefully, which is by no means finished. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. Heres what Hofstede told us last week about culture: HOFSTEDE: If youre part of a society, youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. We are acronymically WEIRD. Most sociologists agree that individualistic cultures value individual choice, personal freedom, and self-actualization (Kemmelmeier 2002). Henrich has also observed this about Americans. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. DUBNER: But that the research subjects, they gave him a lot back and they thought it was going to him. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like The Freakonomics podcast "Is the American Dream really dead?", mentions five main factors that contribute to social mobility in neighborhoods. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. The comedians John Oliver, Hannah Gadsby, and Kumail Nanjiani all grew up outside the U.S. HENRICH: If they accept the offer, they get the amount of the offer. In 1990, when Gelfand was a graduate student, she followed the news as Iraq invaded Kuwait. Theres a huge variation in how much spontaneity people like versus how much structure they want. Thats the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. HOFSTEDE: High individualism is correlated with trying new stuff. Youre culturally confident. They want to be happy. HOFSTEDE: I like this question a lot. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Part of the Freakonomics Series) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J . Why arent all national cultures converging by now? Where would you think the U.S. ranks among all the countries measured on this dimension? thats always there. GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. 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