Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have the cultural psychologist Michelle Galfand on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Doctor Galfan is a distinguished University professor at
Speaker 1: the University of Maryland, College Park. Doctor Gelfan uses field, experimental, computational,
Speaker 1: and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture as
Speaker 1: well as its multi level consequences for human groups. In
Speaker 1: addition to publishing numerous articles in many prestigious scientific outlets,
Speaker 1: she's the author of the really great book Rule Makers
Speaker 1: Rule Breakers, How tight and loose cultures wire the World.
Speaker 1: Doctor Klfan, what a pleasure it is to chat with
Speaker 1: you today. Oh so happy to be here. I hope
Speaker 1: I pronounced your last name correctly. Good good, So I
Speaker 1: want to begin with this a seemingly innocuous question, but
Speaker 1: which opens up of many cans of worms, or maybe
Speaker 1: just one can of worm. What are social norms? So
Speaker 1: this is a great question, and you know, as a
Speaker 1: cross cultural psychologist, I try to understand this really puzzling
Speaker 1: phenomena of culture. You know, culture is one of these
Speaker 1: puzzles because it's omnipresent. It's all around us, but it's invisible,
Speaker 1: like we tend to ignore it all the time. And
Speaker 1: it's like the story of two fish where they're swimming
Speaker 1: along and they pass another fish who says, how is
Speaker 1: the water boys? And they swim on and one says
Speaker 1: to the other, what the hell is water? And for fish,
Speaker 1: this invisible thing is water, but for humans it's culture.
Speaker 1: And a big part of culture is social norms, or
Speaker 1: these unwritten standards for behavior that sometimes become more formalized
Speaker 1: in laws and rules, but nevertheless, we follow social norms
Speaker 1: all the time endlessly without even realizing it, and we
Speaker 1: have to really understand their impact on social behavior. And
Speaker 1: that's why I wrote the book That's so cool. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for writing it and for shining this slight
Speaker 1: on this. But certainly there's individual differences in them. You know,
Speaker 1: you find like dark triad people, you know, people who
Speaker 1: score high on the dark Triad scales and macavalias and
Speaker 1: narcissm psychopathy. They don't like social norms. They are verse
Speaker 1: to it. Well, you know, I write in the book
Speaker 1: about sort of individual differences in people who like or
Speaker 1: dislike social norms, rule makers, rule bakers. You could think
Speaker 1: about the analogy of the chaos versus order muppets exactly
Speaker 1: like think about Sesame Street. Like the chaos muppets are
Speaker 1: like you know, Cookie Monster, and you know and animal
Speaker 1: who love to like just create chaos and don't follow rules,
Speaker 1: and they think by Ernie or Bert actually and Kermit
Speaker 1: the Frog who love rules. And I actually have a
Speaker 1: tight loose mindset quiz on my website where you can
Speaker 1: find out where do you veer in terms of tight
Speaker 1: or loose mindsets. People who like tightness really notice rules.
Speaker 1: They have a lot of impulse control, and they like structure.
Speaker 1: People who ve or lose tend to ignore rules more often.
Speaker 1: They're more impulsive, but they're more creative and they're more
Speaker 1: open minded. And in the book, I talk about the
Speaker 1: advantages and disadvantages of this construct across different levels from
Speaker 1: nations to neurons, from states to organizations. So it's something
Speaker 1: that I think about as a fractal pattern. It's is
Speaker 1: the repeated pattern of phenomenon across different levels, and so
Speaker 1: I try to illuminate why do tight moose differences evolve
Speaker 1: in the first place at cross levels and what consequence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I love that you linked that to creativity some people
Speaker 1: have I wonder how that relates to some people who
Speaker 1: argue that Asian cultures are less creative. You know, then,
Speaker 1: do you think that some of that can be explained
Speaker 1: by sort of the looseness or tightness of the culture itself. Yes,
Speaker 1: So you know, in our first analysis of tight luser
Speaker 1: was across thirty something nations where we were able to
Speaker 1: classify nations as veering tight or loose, even knowing that
Speaker 1: all nations have tightan wose elements, and some countries like
Speaker 1: Japan and Singapore, China beer tighter than places like Brazil
Speaker 1: and New Zealand and the Netherlands. Oh, in Brazil, anything goes.
Speaker 1: Indicators of tightness was the accuracy of clocks and how
Speaker 1: coordinated clocks are in city streets. So in tight cultures,
Speaker 1: the clocks and city streets pretty much say the same thing,
Speaker 1: but in loose cultures like Brazil or Greece, you're not
Speaker 1: entirely sure what time it is, because the clocks around
Speaker 1: you say a lot of different things. And that speaks
Speaker 1: to something that really is about the tight loose trade off.
Speaker 1: Tight cultures have a lot of order and loose cultures
Speaker 1: a lot of openness, and that means that you know,
Speaker 1: both have strengths and liabilities depending on your vantage point.
Speaker 1: So your question by creativity, we have found that across nations,
Speaker 1: across states, across organizations that are tight, they tend to
Speaker 1: have less novelty, less idea generation than loose cultures. But
Speaker 1: what's interesting, and we're finding this more recently, is that
Speaker 1: each has its own strength in terms of innovation. So
Speaker 1: loose cultures can create a lot of ideas, but tight
Speaker 1: cultures can implement them much better. So in fact, both
Speaker 1: again have strengths that can be brought to bear on
Speaker 1: a common issue like innovation. Oh great, have you read
Speaker 1: Richard Farida's work at all on the creativeties? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: creativity class and yeah, and that's the city level. Also,
Speaker 1: I think his work is really interesting. That's right, because
Speaker 1: this also differs state by state within America, Right, do
Speaker 1: you think, like, is there a soulth difference versus No?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't want to grossly stereotype things
Speaker 1: without you actually telling me what is really important. Right.
Speaker 1: So in one of the chapters in the book, I
Speaker 1: talk about how we can move beyond red versus Blue
Speaker 1: look tight and lose. And in fact, we have a
Speaker 1: paper in the PNAS and all proceeds in National Acacgemy
Speaker 1: that rank orders the fifty stations in of tight and loose.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of like you're saying that the South
Speaker 1: tends to Actually, you're tight. They have more strict rules,
Speaker 1: they have more order. To some extent, they have less creativity.
Speaker 1: They're also more polite. So the rudest states are the
Speaker 1: loosest states, which tend to be on the coasts. But
Speaker 1: those states tend to have more creativity, like you surmised.
Speaker 1: And so what that means is that we can kind
Speaker 1: of look at different different states now through a new lens.
Speaker 1: One of the more important things that I talk about
Speaker 1: in the book is why these differences evolve in the
Speaker 1: first place. And what we find across nation states, et cetera,
Speaker 1: is that groups that have a lot of threat, whether
Speaker 1: it's from mother nature like chronic disasters or famine, or
Speaker 1: other human types of threats like pathogens or population density
Speaker 1: or invasions, tend to vear tighter. And the logic's pretty simple.
Speaker 1: When groups have a lot of threat, they need rules
Speaker 1: to coordinate to survive, and norms provide that they help
Speaker 1: people to actually control themselves in difficult situations. And the
Speaker 1: tightest states in the US tend to have more threat,
Speaker 1: They have more pathogens, that have more disasters, and so forth.
Speaker 1: And so there's some kind of logic to why groups
Speaker 1: evolved to be tight or loose. I mean, with that said,
Speaker 1: and we could talk about it later. Threats now are,
Speaker 1: whether they're perceived or real, tend to produce the same
Speaker 1: tight psychology. And that's something nowadays that we're dealing with
Speaker 1: more and more in terms of how is tight loose
Speaker 1: manifesting itself in politics and in other context where threat
Speaker 1: is less objective and more perceived. Oh you should we
Speaker 1: jump into the politics. Well, I mean, I could say,
Speaker 1: is that so for example, at the national level, on
Speaker 1: the state level, like I mentioned, objective chronic threat produces
Speaker 1: a desire for tightness because again, norms. One of the
Speaker 1: biggest functions is that they helped us to coordinate, and
Speaker 1: we need more of those when we're actually threatened. But
Speaker 1: we also see in my lab that we can prime
Speaker 1: people to feel threatened, and almost immediately they desire stricter
Speaker 1: rules and more autocratic types of leaders. And actually that's
Speaker 1: a really important and a lot of ways evolution are
Speaker 1: really adaptive principle. Like again, when we're have collective threat,
Speaker 1: we can't solve this on our own. We need strong
Speaker 1: rules to coordinate and strong leaders to help us survive.
Speaker 1: But some of the issue that we're facing is that
Speaker 1: people more and more feeling threatened when some threats are
Speaker 1: not real or they're exaggerated. And of course certain immigrants
Speaker 1: and stuff, sorry, like the thought of immigrants coming in
Speaker 1: and Steah, that's right. I mean, we just published an
Speaker 1: op ed in La Times where we showed that the
Speaker 1: misestimation of illegal immigration is really unbelievably sure, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's on my website. And also like that perception made
Speaker 1: people feel that the United States is too disorderly, too loose,
Speaker 1: and it was that perception, in turn that drove their
Speaker 1: desire for people like Trump and in the elections. We
Speaker 1: found the same thing in the US and France. People
Speaker 1: who felt threatened by immigration, by ISIS, by many other threats,
Speaker 1: felt the US was too disorganized and too loose, and
Speaker 1: that was in part related to their desire for someone
Speaker 1: like Trump. It happened in France also the same exact data.
Speaker 1: We just published this data in Paswana Journal. And again
Speaker 1: what's really fascinating about this is that we have to
Speaker 1: understand what's real in terms of threat and what's perceived,
Speaker 1: because clearly there are some people that really feel threatened
Speaker 1: in rural areas and where manufacturing is really having a
Speaker 1: lot of problems, these ghost towns you see. I drove
Speaker 1: through Michigan this past summer. It was just amazing how
Speaker 1: much change there is. People are feeling really threatened. They
Speaker 1: really want tighter rules to help return to this order
Speaker 1: that they felt they had, and that's in part explaining
Speaker 1: their desire from people like Trump. So I think when
Speaker 1: we think about the psychology of these elections and the
Speaker 1: deeper cultural codes that in part help us explain them,
Speaker 1: it's not a modern phenomenon. It happened in centuries ago.
Speaker 1: And I also have them writing about how, of course
Speaker 1: leaders play into these threats. If we just created a
Speaker 1: new threat dictionary where we can analyze threatening speech, and
Speaker 1: we could clearly see people like Trump use way more
Speaker 1: threatening language than Hillary, and that people who are they're
Speaker 1: trying to target groups that are actually threatened with these
Speaker 1: language and then use that to gain popularity. That's happening
Speaker 1: all around the world. And we'll be going public with
Speaker 1: the tight the threat Dictionary at some point. But it's
Speaker 1: important to understand that there's some threats that are really
Speaker 1: real driving some of these desire for autocratic leaders, and
Speaker 1: some that are misperceived, and we need to really negotiate
Speaker 1: those realities as and we need our leaders to do that. Wait,
Speaker 1: so is it fair to say that in the past
Speaker 1: two years America has become a tighter society on average?
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting. We produced a paper last year
Speaker 1: that looked at how the US has been loosening over
Speaker 1: the last two hundred years in general. But what you find,
Speaker 1: I think in many countries is that we're becoming more
Speaker 1: divided in terms of tight and loose based on world
Speaker 1: versus urban in many different countries. So the kind of
Speaker 1: axis of Titan's conflict is shifting. And again I think
Speaker 1: in large part that's driven by perceptions of threat. When
Speaker 1: we have threat, we desire tightness. It's really an adaptive
Speaker 1: principle in general. And I think right now what we
Speaker 1: need to do is move beyond these kinds of stereotypes
Speaker 1: about people and understand why people are feeling threatened and
Speaker 1: how to cope with those threats. Like, for example, in
Speaker 1: the book, I talk about how Germany is an interesting
Speaker 1: context where they tend to really have standardized rules, they're
Speaker 1: tighter for helping the working class, and we need to
Speaker 1: really try to help people to negotiate these new threatening realities.
Speaker 1: And I think that's the key to trying to avoid
Speaker 1: the rise of populism, oh for sure. For sure populism. Yeah,
Speaker 1: authoritarianism as well. Yeah, because again the fact is that
Speaker 1: people in countries that have chronic threat, there's more autocracy,
Speaker 1: there's more off of security for freedom. You think about,
Speaker 1: you know, loose cultures have had less threat, they can
Speaker 1: have more freedom because they need less security, they have
Speaker 1: less chronic threat. There are exceptions, of course, and there's
Speaker 1: lots of interesting discussions in my book about for example,
Speaker 1: why Israel, which tends to be pretty chronically threatened veers
Speaker 1: loose in a lot of domains also has its own
Speaker 1: bifurcation in terms of tight loose these days. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's exceptions that where some groups can overcome the kind
Speaker 1: of tightness proclivity by having a lot of debate, by
Speaker 1: having a lot of dissent. And I have a lot
Speaker 1: of examples of some tight cultures that have loose elements
Speaker 1: and loose cultures that have tight elements, and just this
Speaker 1: kind of flashlight that can help us understand the world
Speaker 1: in a different way. Yeah, I mean in an elucidating way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some people help you see in a different way, but
Speaker 1: it's useless. But I find you're not everyone who shows
Speaker 1: me something in a new way, like, oh, that's that's brilliant.
Speaker 1: But this is a good one. This is a good one.
Speaker 1: But you know it's not the only you know, cultural construct.
Speaker 1: It's just that for many years, and I was trained
Speaker 1: by Harry Trandis and I were working a lot on collectivism, individualism,
Speaker 1: the really important aspect of culture also groups versus individuality
Speaker 1: and privacy. But what happened was in the field of
Speaker 1: cross cultural psychology is that we got so obsessed with
Speaker 1: this one dimension. It's kind of like in personality psychology,
Speaker 1: only focusing on like one dimension like extraversion, to the
Speaker 1: exclusion of other dimensions of culture. And many of us
Speaker 1: were guilty of that for a long time. And part
Speaker 1: of it's because cross cultural psychology wasn't the you know,
Speaker 1: really that popular every subdiscipline, because many of us were
Speaker 1: like kind of like tapping on people's shoulders, saying, wait,
Speaker 1: is your stuff really universal? Does it really apply to
Speaker 1: beyond like a very small percentage of the world, And
Speaker 1: so there was some safety in kind of focusing on collectivism.
Speaker 1: That's my sort of sociology of science explanation for why
Speaker 1: it's taken so long for us to kind of move
Speaker 1: beyond I see, to look at other dimensions that are
Speaker 1: also useful for illuminating phenomenon. And so, you know, part
Speaker 1: of our quest in the science paper on tight Loose
Speaker 1: was to show that surely these contracts are related, but
Speaker 1: they're distinct. So, for example, some East Asian cultures like
Speaker 1: Japan and Singapore via collectivistic and tight, but there's also
Speaker 1: individualistic cultures that ve are tight. Think about Germany, Austria, Switzerland.
Speaker 1: They tend to value privacy but also rules, and then
Speaker 1: you could think about cultures that are individualistic and loose,
Speaker 1: like the US and Australia, but there's also collectivistic cultures
Speaker 1: that that vier loose. For example, think about Brazil or Spain.
Speaker 1: In our data, they so we're trying to and they're correlated.
Speaker 1: They're actually Harry trand This had told me that he
Speaker 1: thought they were correlated point four, and I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: When I analyzed the data at the national level. He
Speaker 1: was exactly right that tighte cultures tend to bear collectivistic
Speaker 1: But there's also like I mentioned these off diet and
Speaker 1: we found the same sort of distinction at the state level.
Speaker 1: You can have tight states that are collectivistic or or
Speaker 1: individualistic and the same thing we found now in traditional society.
Speaker 1: So we have a new paper out that's analyzing pre
Speaker 1: industrial societies where we coded all these ethnographies for tighte loose.
Speaker 1: It gave me a lot of gray hair that I
Speaker 1: now die. You know, this is a this is like
Speaker 1: a really very immersive, you know methodology. We really wanted
Speaker 1: to see, like can we see the same signature of
Speaker 1: this construct in pre industrial societies? And we do find
Speaker 1: the same kind of signature that type groups in the
Speaker 1: pre industrial eraror tended to have more threat and they
Speaker 1: also produced the same trade off of order versus openness.
Speaker 1: And also, like I mentioned, the connection between individualism and
Speaker 1: collectivism and type loose is also distinct in this kind
Speaker 1: of data. So the broader principle is that across cultural
Speaker 1: psychology is really expanding to like in great leaps and
Speaker 1: balance these days. Methodologically, theoretically, it's really a great time
Speaker 1: to be in the field. And even with social norms,
Speaker 1: we're trying to really create interdisciplinary spaces involving biologists and
Speaker 1: computer scientists and all sorts of people economists doing work
Speaker 1: on social norms. We just formed a new society just
Speaker 1: as a plug. That's called the Study the Society for
Speaker 1: the Study of Cultural Evolution, and it's phenomenally interesting place.
Speaker 1: It's like being a Disneyland at this conference because there's
Speaker 1: just so many disciplines that are studying culture and understanding
Speaker 1: this complex phenomenon from different perspectives. So I'm really excited
Speaker 1: for that interdisciplinarity and bringing that into the field. I
Speaker 1: love that. Michelle. Hey everyone, if you find the themes
Speaker 1: we cover on the Psychology podcast interesting and enlightening, you
Speaker 1: might be interested in my new book, Transcend, The New
Speaker 1: Science of Self Actualization. The book is the culmination of
Speaker 1: my journey to scientifically discover the factors that can lead
Speaker 1: us to optimal health, growth, creativity, peak experiences, and deep fulfillment.
Speaker 1: I believe we could still manage to have peak experiences,
Speaker 1: the most wondrous moments that make life worth living, regardless
Speaker 1: of our current life circumstances. We can choose growth for more.
Speaker 1: You can visit Transcend hyphenbook dot com, a's transcend hyphenbook
Speaker 1: dot com with a hyphen between the word transcend and
Speaker 1: the word book. If you get a chance to read
Speaker 1: the book, it'd be great if you could leave a
Speaker 1: review on Amazon, tweet about it, or share the book
Speaker 1: with friends. I truly hope this book can help people
Speaker 1: get through these tough times and realize that we all
Speaker 1: have greater resiliency, creativity, and potential within us than we
Speaker 1: ever realized. Okay, now back to the show. There's so
Speaker 1: much here, so much rich material, and the question is
Speaker 1: like where do I go next? Let me talk. Let
Speaker 1: me dive into corporations for a second, and businesses entire
Speaker 1: corporations can kind of be tight or loose, right now.
Speaker 1: But that's right. I mean, just like the same principle,
Speaker 1: organizations that have a lot of coordination needs likelines or
Speaker 1: nuclear power plants in the military, that operate in context
Speaker 1: of serious threat, need tighter rules. They have cultures that
Speaker 1: have people, practices and leaders that are really different than
Speaker 1: loose organizations. I take this from Ben Schneider, who is
Speaker 1: an organizational theorist. He always said that people make the place,
Speaker 1: and we found that tight cultures that are organizational cultures,
Speaker 1: tend to have people who are more conscientious, They have
Speaker 1: more standardized procedures and rules formality, and they have leaders
Speaker 1: that are more independent, and loose organizations that have less threat,
Speaker 1: more mobility, more diversity, tend to have people who are
Speaker 1: more promotion focused, more risk taking, They have more informality
Speaker 1: and experimentation, and they have leaders that are more collaborative
Speaker 1: and team oriented. And what in the book I talk
Speaker 1: a lot about again the advantages of both and why
Speaker 1: they're so important as adaptations. But what happens when they
Speaker 1: merge is really a problematic and just like the invisibility
Speaker 1: of culture at the national level, organizations tend to merge
Speaker 1: without doing a lot of culture due diligence. They merge
Speaker 1: a lot of times because of strategic types of compatibilities,
Speaker 1: but don't recognize that there's the kind of iceberg beneath
Speaker 1: the surface where Titan loose is going to rear its head.
Speaker 1: And we've been analyzing organizations and what happens when they merge,
Speaker 1: when they don't, when they do have big tight loose differences,
Speaker 1: and finding that there's really big losses financially, the bigger
Speaker 1: the differences. And so our point actually in a new
Speaker 1: paper on this topic is that we really need to
Speaker 1: negotiate culture like tight loose. Is we invented norms. We
Speaker 1: have stronger loose norms for good reasons, but we can
Speaker 1: actually negotiate them. We can negotiate them before we emerge.
Speaker 1: We can negotiate them in households with our spouses, which
Speaker 1: I do a lot with when I'm trying to parent
Speaker 1: you know kids. I mean, it comes up all the
Speaker 1: time between you know, two individuals. You know how strict
Speaker 1: or permissive she should be in different domains with your kids.
Speaker 1: In organizations, which domains can you give up a little
Speaker 1: slack and have a little bit more order when you're merging?
Speaker 1: And so I talk quite a bit about that in
Speaker 1: the book, that how a lot of these difference are negotiable,
Speaker 1: and that's the exciting thing is to think about how
Speaker 1: do you create this what I call mbidexterity. How can
Speaker 1: you have kind of both and adapt them as needed?
Speaker 1: And a lot of it just involves recognizing the constructs
Speaker 1: and talking about them and again getting to like this
Speaker 1: negotiation table when it comes to culture. Oh yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: this this idea of that neither is absolutely good or
Speaker 1: bad and context matters. And it sounds more like you're
Speaker 1: saying balanced matters. But are they are these two different
Speaker 1: Is it one continuum or are they two separate continuums
Speaker 1: that interact? This is what I'm trying to my head around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so in all of our data, they're typically unidimensional, and
Speaker 1: you kind of can think about strict and permissive norms,
Speaker 1: but they can also be You can also find in
Speaker 1: any social system some domains that are very tight and
Speaker 1: some that are loose. So, for example, Japan is a
Speaker 1: good example, I guess a pretty tight culture, but you
Speaker 1: can find pockets where there's a lot of looseness. And
Speaker 1: actually it's kind of funny, it's they're all usually organized looseness,
Speaker 1: like going out with your boss and getting drunk. It's
Speaker 1: pretty like And karaoke is even something one of my
Speaker 1: former students was telling me, like, it's pretty tight because
Speaker 1: in allowing people be loose in a tight way, you know,
Speaker 1: or you think about the US, it's pretty loose in general.
Speaker 1: But there's certainly domains that are tight. You know. For example,
Speaker 1: privacy is a very tight domain in the United States,
Speaker 1: where we don't just show up at each other's houses randomly.
Speaker 1: You could try that see how people react, right, But
Speaker 1: privacy is are really valued domain. And my theory would
Speaker 1: be that in any culture, the domains that are really
Speaker 1: important tend to evolve to be tight because we really
Speaker 1: cherish them. And New Zealand's another good example. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a pretty loose context. People walk in barefoot and
Speaker 1: banks and burning couches on university campuses. But there's some
Speaker 1: domains that are pretty tight. And one of them has
Speaker 1: to do with what people call the tall poppy syndrome,
Speaker 1: not trying to appear like you're better than others, or
Speaker 1: you'll be like kind of cut down. And that stems
Speaker 1: from the very strong value of egalitarianism in New Zealand.
Speaker 1: So there's a strict value around egalitarianism. So while it's
Speaker 1: a unit dimensional construct, we can find domains that are
Speaker 1: tight or loose. And the exciting thing for me is
Speaker 1: to kind of figure out why that is. I want
Speaker 1: to get back to something you said about balance. I
Speaker 1: think you know. For me, one interesting application of tight
Speaker 1: loose theories is what I call the Goldilocks principle. Remember
Speaker 1: that kind of book, that storybook about not too hot,
Speaker 1: not too cold, not too soft, not too hard, And
Speaker 1: I have a whole chapter on this, because the idea
Speaker 1: is that groups need to be a tight or loose
Speaker 1: for good reasons, but that the groups that get too
Speaker 1: extreme and either direction have a lot of problems. So
Speaker 1: you can imagine system to get too tight, like United
Speaker 1: Airlines is a good example. When that whole pr fiasco happened.
Speaker 1: Those organizations need to be your tight airlines. You don't
Speaker 1: want them making all sorts of weird decisions. But they
Speaker 1: arguably became too tight and they were just normalizing everything,
Speaker 1: and people I interviewed said, yeah, people were following the
Speaker 1: rules just blindly. They need to insert some flexibility, some
Speaker 1: looseness into that type system. It's something I call flexible tightness.
Speaker 1: And on the flip side, I talk about places that
Speaker 1: get entirely to loose, almost chaotic and disorganized what dirt
Speaker 1: Hin would have called anime. You know, these are contexts
Speaker 1: like for example, Tesla, I argue is getting into that
Speaker 1: kind of zone where it should be or loose. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a creative industry, you know, innovative company. But
Speaker 1: arguably that system was getting too loose where you know,
Speaker 1: it needed more structure, it needed more organization or coordination.
Speaker 1: I call that structured looseness. And so then by the way,
Speaker 1: the gold Ucks principle, I really had a good, great
Speaker 1: time like analyzing it from different perspectives. So it applies
Speaker 1: to or organizations, but and to nations. I found that
Speaker 1: nations that are two tight or too loose have higher
Speaker 1: suicide a being in general. And it applies to households.
Speaker 1: You know, parents that are too helicopter like or to
Speaker 1: lais a fair produce kids that are problematic. So the
Speaker 1: bottom line is that we need to kind of recalibrate
Speaker 1: norms in some context. We need to know when we
Speaker 1: need to loosen norms that are getting too tight, and
Speaker 1: we need to tighten norms that are getting too loose
Speaker 1: in other contexts, And of course it's not easy, but
Speaker 1: I find some I have some examples in the book
Speaker 1: of ways that this has been done in context that
Speaker 1: maybe we need to think about doing this in and
Speaker 1: be more mindful in a sense about culture. And so
Speaker 1: that's kind of part of the part of the story
Speaker 1: has to do with Yes, we need to stand and
Speaker 1: empathize with tight with differences, but we need to be
Speaker 1: mindful of when they get too extreme. Yeah. No, it's
Speaker 1: a really really good point. These you can kind of
Speaker 1: see these extremes playing itself out again on politics on
Speaker 1: both the left end the right. Extreme tightness and extreme
Speaker 1: looseness I think maps onto far right and far left,
Speaker 1: and in some sense, in some sense, you know, they're
Speaker 1: definitely correlated. I mean, I think from a political point
Speaker 1: of view. One of the things I talk about is
Speaker 1: how we need to understand that when systems get entirely
Speaker 1: loose and chaotic, or when people perceive a lot of chaos.
Speaker 1: This is something from talked about, you know, decades ago,
Speaker 1: when he perceived when people perceive disorder, they yearn for security. So,
Speaker 1: for example, I talk about something in the book that
Speaker 1: has to do with why people welcomed Isis in some context,
Speaker 1: and we have some data on this. You know that
Speaker 1: we look at this and think this is a random occurrence,
Speaker 1: and of course it's multiply determined. But the context where
Speaker 1: Isis was able to really take over. We're places that
Speaker 1: were totally normalless, where people are craving for some kind
Speaker 1: of order. Or you take someone like Dutarte, which Americans
Speaker 1: think is they think he's crazy and they don't understand
Speaker 1: why would the Philippines why would people have such positive
Speaker 1: feelings and attitudes about this guy? And again it through
Speaker 1: Tyler's theory. The idea is that in these contexts they
Speaker 1: were getting almost normalists and people yearn for the kind
Speaker 1: of security they're willing to give up freedom in these contexts.
Speaker 1: The samapies in Russia, the Pies in many contexts. And
Speaker 1: so one of these sort of policy implications is that
Speaker 1: we need to really be diagnosing contexts that are getting
Speaker 1: very disorderly and understand the human psychology that goes around
Speaker 1: that in terms of you know what type forces will
Speaker 1: take over those contexts. And one other example I talk
Speaker 1: about is I don't want to give too an examples
Speaker 1: and no one's going to read the book now, right,
Speaker 1: But the other better, The other context is Arab Spring.
Speaker 1: You know, we were on the ground collecting data after
Speaker 1: mcbarrick was ousted, and you know, it's a really interesting
Speaker 1: phenomena of this kind of pendulum shift that we call
Speaker 1: kind of autocratic recidivism. You know, people were screaming freedom
Speaker 1: after they got rid of him, but then they started
Speaker 1: realizing this place is totally disorderly, like we can't even
Speaker 1: coordinate on any kind of basis. There was increases in
Speaker 1: crime and violations of norms and all sorts of contexts,
Speaker 1: and we found people who felt like there was a
Speaker 1: lot of looseness or extreme looseness desired the Musslim Brotherhood
Speaker 1: or the Salafi government again, and it's same kind of
Speaker 1: principle that we're putting in place from from just using
Speaker 1: modern cultural psychology theory to say that it's not too
Speaker 1: surprising in context where autocrats breed distrust among people. After all,
Speaker 1: people you know, trusted each other, they probably throw out
Speaker 1: the autocrat. So those contexts have very little trust. Then
Speaker 1: you throw out any kind of organizing power like the
Speaker 1: autocrat provides coordinating mechanism and you have chaos, you have normallessness,
Speaker 1: and so you kind of see this repeated pattern. We
Speaker 1: have some data, empirical data, but also some modeling that
Speaker 1: we've been doing on this computational modeling to try to
Speaker 1: understand how do we prevent that so in any event,
Speaker 1: that's kind of the broader principle that Goldilocks kind of invites,
Speaker 1: which is try to think about, you know, how do
Speaker 1: you anticipate these radical shifts around world world in ways
Speaker 1: that might have been predictable. I I think it's a
Speaker 1: great point, and I I just think about how some
Speaker 1: of this is in the eye of the beholder. Some
Speaker 1: people might what they may see is chaos may differ
Speaker 1: from what someone else sees his chaos. I keep thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, like kind of an elephant in the room here,
Speaker 1: like Jordan Peterson. You know, his whole mission is fighting
Speaker 1: defending against the chaos of the feminine. And I don't
Speaker 1: know about the I say that chicily, but defending against
Speaker 1: the chaos of the left of far left what we
Speaker 1: should say? And uh And and he has you know,
Speaker 1: a huge, huge following that that sees that problem as well.
Speaker 1: And and I can see some of the points he's
Speaker 1: making for for sure. But I wonder if you know,
Speaker 1: there's some people who who hate Jordan Peterson, but in
Speaker 1: their own view, they they they see him as the chaos.
Speaker 1: I just wonder if we're if so much of us
Speaker 1: are talking past each other in terms of like fighting
Speaker 1: over who who's the real chaos. You know, I'm not
Speaker 1: the real chaos. You're the real chaos, and you know,
Speaker 1: And I just wanted to bring that up because I
Speaker 1: like having honest discussions. Yeah, of course, I mean I
Speaker 1: think that chaos is when I talk about it, it's
Speaker 1: sort of like disorder, right, It's about like things are
Speaker 1: like unpredictable and you can't organize social action. And for
Speaker 1: some people, people like you said, have different tolerances of that.
Speaker 1: But in general, as it gets more extreme, I think
Speaker 1: groups really do yearn for a tighter social order, and
Speaker 1: I think the question is how to balance tight and loose.
Speaker 1: You know, we need each other, we need order, and
Speaker 1: we need openness. Right, So the question is in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, and of course I don't have the
Speaker 1: answer to this, but it is how do we accomplish
Speaker 1: that as nations, as in households, how do we sort
Speaker 1: of strike a balance where when we get tight, it
Speaker 1: helps us with order and coordination, but it also makes
Speaker 1: us lose out on creativity and tolerance. But when we
Speaker 1: get to loose, we are really creative and tolerant, but
Speaker 1: we lose out on some of the order needs that
Speaker 1: people have. And so part of it is trying to
Speaker 1: str that balance. Well, that would that he would say,
Speaker 1: that's that's his mission. Is that is that like our
Speaker 1: society has become too to this chaos thing, that he
Speaker 1: needs to restore the balance, the savior of the balance. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think a lot of people, including our politicians,
Speaker 1: are saying that, and I think the question is again,
Speaker 1: I'll sort of bring in some of the Stephen Pinker's arguments.
Speaker 1: Who I really I find that he is really hitting
Speaker 1: the nail on ahead that in many ways, and clearly
Speaker 1: there's some exceptions, but in many ways, we're much less
Speaker 1: threatened than we were as a species many many years ago.
Speaker 1: I've been reading some books about sort of the history
Speaker 1: of East and West Berlin recently and thinking, whoa I
Speaker 1: imagine being around in the fifteen hundreds, with chronic war,
Speaker 1: constant threats, constant pathogens, constant famines. You know, we are
Speaker 1: as a as a world much safer in many ways.
Speaker 1: And so this is where I think trying to discern
Speaker 1: and again it's no easy quest. What's real and what's
Speaker 1: imagined in terms of threat is really critical for not
Speaker 1: unnecessarily tightening. And that's such a good point. That's kind
Speaker 1: of our you know, our quest with trying to also
Speaker 1: develop some of these dictionaries to try to target and
Speaker 1: find out where are the places where people are feeling
Speaker 1: super threatened and what kind of consequences is that happening
Speaker 1: in real time so that we can and yeah, this
Speaker 1: stuff is so complex, doctor Shelton, because people, I feel
Speaker 1: like people different their perceptions of what's a threat and
Speaker 1: what's not a threat. I mean, look for some reason
Speaker 1: to Republicans, uh uh, snowflake liberals are threatening, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's threatening to them, you know, and on the
Speaker 1: on the left you know, of course very well, if
Speaker 1: I think for anyone, alt right is threatening, even for Republicans,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean one of the things that you know,
Speaker 1: and I read about this in the book is you know,
Speaker 1: and everyone talks about these echo chambers. Part of the
Speaker 1: problem is that it's not just that we perceive each
Speaker 1: other very negative. As you were saying, we sort of
Speaker 1: have these very extreme stereotypes, and partly that's because we
Speaker 1: don't have any real meaningful context where we're starting to
Speaker 1: interact with people on the other side of the aisle.
Speaker 1: One of the techniques that we developed recently that's coming
Speaker 1: out in Behavioral Science and Policy Journal is this thing
Speaker 1: called the daily diary technique, and we actually use this
Speaker 1: to try to help people understand each other better through
Speaker 1: daily diaries. So imagine you start reading someone's diary from Pakistan,
Speaker 1: or if someone in Pakistan reads an American diary for
Speaker 1: like seven days, And this is what we did. Actually,
Speaker 1: we have randomly assigned people to read real diaries versus
Speaker 1: diaries from someone in their own country or diaries from
Speaker 1: someone in a different country. And what was interesting is
Speaker 1: at the start of the study, Pakistanis didn't just see
Speaker 1: the US as loose. They saw the US as like
Speaker 1: extraordinarily loose, like people half naked all the time or
Speaker 1: calling the police and their parents for being too strict.
Speaker 1: And Americans, if they knew where Pakistan was, which was
Speaker 1: a big if, didn't think about Pakistani's playing sports and
Speaker 1: reading poet. They only saw them as being in mosques
Speaker 1: all the time. This is kind of a narrow situational sampling,
Speaker 1: and they had really negative stereotypes about each other, so
Speaker 1: we were targeting those negative stereotypes. The diaries were unedited.
Speaker 1: It was clear that the US diaries involved more looseness
Speaker 1: and the Pakistani diaries involved more tightness on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: But what was so remarkable was after this diary intervention
Speaker 1: that was my after New York accent, you see a
Speaker 1: big change and how people were perceiving each other. And
Speaker 1: they didn't see that they were so they were completely similar,
Speaker 1: but they saw that they were more similar than they
Speaker 1: ever had imagined. And we're now doing a study with
Speaker 1: the Dai diaries trying to also target Republicans and democrats
Speaker 1: to see can we actually get people, you know, to
Speaker 1: kind of see each other's worlds in a more realistic way. Yes,
Speaker 1: we differ in a lot of ways, but we encounter
Speaker 1: a lot of the same situations on a daily basis.
Speaker 1: So we're targeting what stereotypes they have of each other.
Speaker 1: You know, every de stereotyping endeavor would involve different focus
Speaker 1: groups and different stereotypes to target, but I think you know,
Speaker 1: in this world where we do tend to be in
Speaker 1: echo chambers. This is one technique of probably many, where
Speaker 1: we could try to get people to actually experience the
Speaker 1: situations and and similarity they have at a far deeper
Speaker 1: level than they'll be able to in otherwise in other contexts.
Speaker 1: So that's just to say that we are different and
Speaker 1: with different important ways, but that you know, having meaningful conversation.
Speaker 1: There's some examples of this happening across the left and
Speaker 1: right right that there was a faculty at Stanford that
Speaker 1: recently ran this big, you know, kind of de stereotyping
Speaker 1: intervention face to face and by the end of it,
Speaker 1: having brought in people from from Republican and democratic sides,
Speaker 1: they were able to see again there's how much more
Speaker 1: commonality they had. They were able to come all of
Speaker 1: them were able to come become more centrist. So, you know,
Speaker 1: I think there is hope. I'm not going to say
Speaker 1: I'm not terrified. I'm actually writing an article for the
Speaker 1: Guardian and right now they asked me to write an
Speaker 1: article and what did I change my mind on this year?
Speaker 1: And I thought, well, actually, one thing I've changed my
Speaker 1: mind on is how fragile democracy is like I used
Speaker 1: to just take it for granted, like of course, like
Speaker 1: and you know we're all talking about this, that you know,
Speaker 1: how it's becoming the norms of democracy are being shattered.
Speaker 1: But I actually started thinking about how unusual democracy is,
Speaker 1: just how crazy of an accident it is, and and
Speaker 1: how much you know, the psychology of the desire for
Speaker 1: order the fromin kind of sense is way more typical
Speaker 1: than the feeling of safety and so in any of it.
Speaker 1: But I do have hope again, based on some of
Speaker 1: these examples, that you know, this, this is something that
Speaker 1: we will look back on and feel stronger about. I hope.
Speaker 1: So do you do you find that with people understanding
Speaker 1: each other's perspectives more, they start to perceive them as
Speaker 1: less threatening. Do you think there's a correlation, there's a
Speaker 1: causation there. Well, I think that it's certainly the case
Speaker 1: that when you have such extreme stereotypes, you know, you
Speaker 1: feel this great distance from each other. So in the
Speaker 1: Pakistan American study, we measured cultural distance, like how much
Speaker 1: you perceived the nations to be really different, and that
Speaker 1: was the prime mover of differences and in targeting stereotypes.
Speaker 1: So at the end of the study, Pakistani saw and
Speaker 1: Americans that they had less cultural distance when they read
Speaker 1: each other's diaries that's commanded to what they read people's
Speaker 1: diaries from their own country, and that helped Pakistanis to
Speaker 1: see Americans as more moral. At the end of the study,
Speaker 1: they didn't see us as immoral or as aggressive, and
Speaker 1: Americans saw Pakistani's have more freedom than they ever would
Speaker 1: have anticipated. So we're trying to shift different stereotypes. But
Speaker 1: I want to mention that before we did this study,
Speaker 1: we did different technique I was really excited about, but
Speaker 1: it totally failed. This is kind of a shout out
Speaker 1: to all the people out there that have a lot
Speaker 1: of failed research. But you know, basically, I thought this
Speaker 1: is an awesome study. We prime people using contextual priming
Speaker 1: that's been used in other other contexts in Pakistan. We
Speaker 1: had people flat looking at pictures of Americans in tighter
Speaker 1: context like looking like they were at work or with
Speaker 1: their families. They were also seeing pictures of them at
Speaker 1: parties as and also but and at flip side, we
Speaker 1: showed Americans pictures of Pakistani's not just in mosque, was
Speaker 1: also dancing and reading poetry, playing sports and so forth,
Speaker 1: and We're hoping this contextual priming would shift stereotypes, and
Speaker 1: it did nothing, absolutely nothing. This is after we translated
Speaker 1: this in or do and that translated and et cetera.
Speaker 1: And what we found is that people just didn't believe
Speaker 1: these pictures, you know, they just found them to be incomprehensible.
Speaker 1: So that's why we went out and we started doing
Speaker 1: some of the daily diary studies. She said, you know,
Speaker 1: let's just get right to the point and expose people to,
Speaker 1: you know, the real lives. And we told them it
Speaker 1: was a study about social memory, so they weren't primed
Speaker 1: to think this is about fostering into cultural understanding. But
Speaker 1: in any event, that's just kind of a story of
Speaker 1: science of you know, keep on, keep rocking on, even
Speaker 1: as there you expect something to work, but you know,
Speaker 1: there's always inter thing, you know, kind of reasons why
Speaker 1: it doesn't. Yeah, but you gave me hope and then
Speaker 1: you took the hope away there. I mean, I tend
Speaker 1: to be an optimist by nature. And as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: I think one of the things exciting about cross cultural
Speaker 1: psyche to me is that once we understand you know,
Speaker 1: kind of the cultural coach driving behavior, we can start
Speaker 1: negotiating them, looking out for them, using them I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: like in my own household, Like, so I veer loose.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be totally honest, you know. And my husband,
Speaker 1: he's a lawyer, he veers tighter. He's also from the Midwest.
Speaker 1: I'm a Jewish New Yorker, you know, and we tend
Speaker 1: to negotiate tight and loose, even with our kids. Like
Speaker 1: we sort of say, good guys, like what domains need
Speaker 1: to be tight, what domains need to be loose? How
Speaker 1: do we kind of negotiate that. What's our priorities? And
Speaker 1: that I study negotiations, so I mean it's all about
Speaker 1: what are your most important priorities? And so you know,
Speaker 1: for me, you know, I'm like, okay, well, and we
Speaker 1: came to an agreement. It's important to be strict in
Speaker 1: domains of school work and health and and how people
Speaker 1: treat each other, the two sisters. But you know, we're
Speaker 1: gonna give up a little more latitude in terms of
Speaker 1: like their bedtime and how messy they are. I don't
Speaker 1: think Todd's too happy about that. He's like, thous is
Speaker 1: a mess We have, you know, dog, two birds, two daughters,
Speaker 1: You know, but the house is kind of a mess.
Speaker 1: But I think that's the point, is that and we're
Speaker 1: actually now starting to develop tight loose domains, specific domains
Speaker 1: on which you can sort of negotiate this in households.
Speaker 1: And again, some groups need to beer tighter in the
Speaker 1: households than others, but nevertheless it's negotiable. Well that's good
Speaker 1: to hear. So how can modifying a nation's norms address
Speaker 1: protracted social problems? Well, you know, this is a really
Speaker 1: interesting question because you know, the national level is kind
Speaker 1: of tricky. You know, these are like norms require you know,
Speaker 1: they're slow to change. They're particularly slow to change when
Speaker 1: going from tight to loose than going from loose to tight.
Speaker 1: But I have some examples book of whole nations doing this.
Speaker 1: Iceland was a good example. Some years ago. It was
Speaker 1: just having massive problems with looseness, Like cities were unsafe,
Speaker 1: kids were out drinking constantly, like there was just a
Speaker 1: real problem with disorder. And there was this kind of
Speaker 1: realization that they didn't use the terminology, but they had
Speaker 1: to tighten up. They had to have more monitoring, they
Speaker 1: had to have more engagement and more accountability. And that's
Speaker 1: exactly what they did, and I talk about the story
Speaker 1: in the book so you can read it, but it
Speaker 1: does provide hope that there's a way to also kind
Speaker 1: of tighten up contexts that have gotten too loose in organizations.
Speaker 1: Provide some examples of that. Actually, Microsoft had some good examples.
Speaker 1: I interviewed Bob Herbolt who talked about in the early
Speaker 1: days that things were just totally unstandardized and they needed
Speaker 1: to tighten up a lot of their processes because as
Speaker 1: you scale up in organizations, you need to have more
Speaker 1: coordination and more standardization. And at first when they tried
Speaker 1: to implement more tightness, more coordination, more rules, more accountability,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of backlash. You know, it was
Speaker 1: threatening to needs for autonomy in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: But you know, he was able to negotiate with people
Speaker 1: and say, this is why we need to do this,
Speaker 1: this is why we need to tighten up these operations.
Speaker 1: And so I think there's a lot of examples that
Speaker 1: where you could see you have great leadership and you
Speaker 1: have ways to it and in tight context that's trying
Speaker 1: to loosen versus a loose context trying to tighten. You
Speaker 1: have different processes that you try to use and I
Speaker 1: have a whole sort of discussion around like, how do
Speaker 1: you engage in flexible tightness where you're trying to insert
Speaker 1: some more flexibility into that system, where you give people
Speaker 1: more room to explore, where you have less sensualization or
Speaker 1: flip side, how do you structure looseness when you're used
Speaker 1: to so much freedom. It involves more centralization, involves more monitoring,
Speaker 1: more benchmarking. So there's there's definitely ways to do it.
Speaker 1: It's going to depend on the context, of course, but
Speaker 1: either way, it requires good leadership and it requires, you know,
Speaker 1: an attention to culture. You know, that's the issue that
Speaker 1: I think a lot of us who study culture think
Speaker 1: is amazing because back to the fish story, you know,
Speaker 1: we kind of ignore it and we take it for granted.
Speaker 1: It's a really powerful force that affects everything from our
Speaker 1: politics to our parenting, but we don't think about it,
Speaker 1: you know. I have to say it wasn't always interesting culture.
Speaker 1: I was pre med when I was in college at Colgate,
Speaker 1: and I actually went abroad for a semester and I
Speaker 1: was totally like in shock. I mean I remember calling
Speaker 1: my father Marty from Brooklyn and confiding in him how
Speaker 1: crazy this culture shock was I was the first person
Speaker 1: to leave the country from my family, and I was
Speaker 1: telling him about all the culture shock, including that people
Speaker 1: from London would go to Paris or to Amsterdam just
Speaker 1: for the weekend, and I thought, I found that to
Speaker 1: be really puzzling. And so he said to me something
Speaker 1: that changed my life. He said, well, imagine like it's
Speaker 1: going from New York to Pennsylvania. And I'm like, Dad,
Speaker 1: that is such an awesome metaphor, and actually this is
Speaker 1: a true story. The next day, I booked a trip
Speaker 1: to Egypt, a low budget toward to Egypt, and I
Speaker 1: told him that. He was like, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: And I said, Dad, just think about it, like I'm
Speaker 1: going from New York to California. And you know, it
Speaker 1: was true, like I just want I realized how little
Speaker 1: I know about the world and about myself by extension,
Speaker 1: and so when I was trying, I went to Egypt,
Speaker 1: and I had a lot of time on my hands,
Speaker 1: and they're in the semester broad and it really changed
Speaker 1: my whole view of, you know, kind of how little
Speaker 1: I know about this important phenomenon of culture. And so
Speaker 1: when I got back to Colgate, I was lucky I
Speaker 1: took a human development class by Carolyn Keating, who has
Speaker 1: been studying visual illusions in Africa and showing that certain
Speaker 1: illusions like the Mueller Lyar illusion are not universal. And
Speaker 1: I was like, WHOA, Like maybe this is something I
Speaker 1: can actually study and and actually you know, research using
Speaker 1: scientific tools. And that's kind of what landed me working
Speaker 1: with Harry Transis in Shampan or Banna. I wasn't too
Speaker 1: excited about going to Shampan or Bana, but but you know,
Speaker 1: I went through triendous and you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of an exciting thing. You know. I
Speaker 1: always say, like finding your passion. It's trite, it's it's
Speaker 1: a you know, catch all Frae catch all story, but
Speaker 1: it is true that you'll never work a day in
Speaker 1: your life, you know. I I'm more excited about this
Speaker 1: field now having been in it for twenty five years,
Speaker 1: you know, even more excited than I ever was. So
Speaker 1: an that's kind of a long story about how I
Speaker 1: got it. That's great. That's a lot of people can't
Speaker 1: say that, so that's great. And also I'm hearing from
Speaker 1: you that it's it's very possible to harness the power
Speaker 1: of social norms. You know that that things things can change.
Speaker 1: I actually I like this quote from your book. When
Speaker 1: people have thrived in the face of adversity, they've done
Speaker 1: so because of other people and the social norms they've
Speaker 1: created together. Isn't that good? That's a good quote. Do
Speaker 1: you remember that? Does that sound familiar? Maybe you didn't, Actually,
Speaker 1: maybe you didn't. Maybe I'm making that up. You know,
Speaker 1: I think that at any change, you know, it requires
Speaker 1: a lot of negotiation, and it's not easy because people
Speaker 1: who are coming from the type you agree with that, right,
Speaker 1: you agree with it though, right, you know, when you're
Speaker 1: think under I needs. People who are going from tight
Speaker 1: to loose are threatened by autonomy and the lack of control.
Speaker 1: People going from loose to tight are threatened by a
Speaker 1: loss of autonomy. So it's really takes great leaders to
Speaker 1: kind of figure out how to make that balance and
Speaker 1: how to negotiate that. But I do think it's an
Speaker 1: important thing to to be mindful of, and that the
Speaker 1: more we recognize these codes and and talk about them,
Speaker 1: the better off we are than just having them remain invisible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you do talk about I hope I'm reading
Speaker 1: the same book now you talk about how recalibration can
Speaker 1: do things like reduce abuse and even in the even
Speaker 1: in the internet setting. You know, that's right, you're reading
Speaker 1: my book Attack, you know, No, I mean I talk
Speaker 1: about the Internet as a great example that needs tightening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's an interesting context because you know, in many ways,
Speaker 1: we again want to calibrate it so that we don't
Speaker 1: lose the benefit of looseness, lose the benefit of the
Speaker 1: connectivity and the and the creativity and the you know,
Speaker 1: great exposure. Sure we have too many things at the
Speaker 1: same time we're living our world's now online, you know,
Speaker 1: But evolution perspective, we were always in context where we're
Speaker 1: able to kind of recalibrate our social norms, and now
Speaker 1: we need to do that more deliberately. You see that
Speaker 1: happening bottom up. You see it on Reddit, for example,
Speaker 1: where people are starting to create ways to keep people accountable.
Speaker 1: Because that's really what this is about. I mean, we've
Speaker 1: known this for years, right in psychology, when you're not
Speaker 1: face to face, people do all sorts of weird things.
Speaker 1: You know, This lack of social presence makes people unaccountable,
Speaker 1: makes them more norm violating. So Reddit's developing mechanisms from
Speaker 1: the bottom up to try to avoid those scenarios, to
Speaker 1: have people feel like that space, they're in a living space,
Speaker 1: that where they're accountable for their behavior. I mean, of
Speaker 1: course there's also top down ways this happens, you know,
Speaker 1: through what we're seeing now emerging with you know, leaders
Speaker 1: on these social media platforms kind of stepping up and saying, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we were engineers, we didn't know this is
Speaker 1: going to happen. You know. I think you know, actually
Speaker 1: Kara Swisher I was on one of her podcasts and
Speaker 1: she's like, well, don't you think they're evil? These guys?
Speaker 1: You know, or maybe shouldn't say like that, but don't
Speaker 1: you think that they, like, you know, really are you know,
Speaker 1: should have recognize this? And you know, I think not necessarily,
Speaker 1: you know, because we know as psychologists that these contexts
Speaker 1: breed really negative types of behaviors. But you know the
Speaker 1: point now is to exert more top down control, more
Speaker 1: bottom up control, try to achieve the Goldilocks principle, you know,
Speaker 1: through these kinds of processes. Because it's definitely a context
Speaker 1: where we need to start being mindful about social norms. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: but you are hopeful. I'm going to end here on
Speaker 1: a hopeful message that we can recalibrate in a way
Speaker 1: we can cultivate greater social norms that facilitate greater cooperation
Speaker 1: among nations and ethnic groups. Yeah. Absolutely, I think we
Speaker 1: have religions and political persuasions. I think we have evidence
Speaker 1: for that. Again, it takes a lot of work, but
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I remain optimistic until proven otherwise.
Speaker 1: I love it. Thank you so much for appearing on
Speaker 1: the Psychology Podcast. They talking about your very original and
Speaker 1: important in the world today research. Thank you so much
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