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Raising Your Cultural Intelligence: Understand Different Populations Using the Tight-Loose Lens, with Michele Gelfand, Cultural Psychologist and Author, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
At the state level
How does tightness connect with “conservativism” or other constructs? And certainly they’re related. But the way I think about it is “conservative” is really about your attitude about change and the status quo, whereas tightness is about a state of culture, about the strength of norms and rules in your environment. And certainly conservatives are found a lot in “tight states”, and liberals in “loose states”, but there are plenty of contexts where conservatives live in loose states or vice versa. There are entire countries – for example, Iran, where there are very strong norms, but there’s a huge bastion of loose mindsets.
In tight states, people have more conscientiousness as a personality trait, we found. That just means more focused on rules and dutifulness. And they also have more order. They have less divorce, they have less mobility, they have less homelessness, less debt and less alcoholism. More self-control at the state level. On the flip side, loose states have a personality trait that we call openness: openness to experience, to differences. They tend to have a lot of creativity, they have less discrimination. The loose states are definitely more fun – in terms of art and film, there are more options of entertainment in loose states. At the same time, loose states tend to be more rude. We do have data that suggests that loose states tend to be more fun but more rude.
I think about tightness-looseness as much broader constructs that can help us to understand the social environment. And also, tightness-looseness can help us understand why states evolve to have strong rules or not, and what the trade-offs are at a much more broad level than just ideology alone.
At the level of social class
Tightness-looseness also differentiates social class with the same exact logic. Often we think about social class as just being about our bank accounts. We don’t think about, “How is class cultural, truly cultural in terms of differences in values and norms that are socialized in different groups for good reasons?” And what’s fascinating is when we ask people about rules – just tell us five words when you think of rules – we see that the working class sees rules very positively. Rules in the working class are important. They’re important for helping people to slide into “hard living”, as sociologists would call it – to poverty, to the dregs of poverty. Rules are helpful if you’re going to be going into occupations where there’s a lot of danger, where there’s less discretion. And for sure, the working class live in much more threatening environments when it comes to crime, unemployment; they report being subject to many more threats, and that is strongly correlated with their desire for tightness.
For the working class, rules are important for survival. For the middle class, there’s a safety net, so you can actually “afford” to be rule breaking in this context. The middle class and upper class saw rules more negatively. They saw it as “goody two shoes” when you’re following the rules.
We’ve seen this in studies outside of our lab where people at Berkeley were tracking cars, whether it was a plumber van or a Mercedes, to see who was more likely to cut off people in city streets. And actually the answer is that it was the upper class cars that are cutting off people, including pedestrians.