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Raising Your Cultural Intelligence: Recognize the Essential Features of “Tight” and “Loose” Cultures, with Michele Gelfand, Cultural Psychologist and Author, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
Internal Group Logic
From the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, we’re following rules. Most of us put clothes on before we go out in the street. Most of us ride on the right side or the left side, depending on where we live. We say “hello” and “goodbye” on the phone. We follow these rules all the time. But some groups have very strong rules: they’re what I call “tight cultures” where there’s strong rules and little tolerance for deviance. And other groups – what I call “loose groups” – are much more permissive, and they have a wide range of behavior that’s seen as appropriate.
And one thing that really predicts whether groups are tight or loose is the amount of threat that they face. And threat can be from a variety of sources. It could be from Mother Nature. It could be natural disasters, famine, or it could be population density. It could also be manmade; it could be the number of invasions that you’ve had over the last couple of centuries. And so when there’s threat, there’s the need for strong rules to coordinate to survive. Loose groups, whether they’re nations or states or organizations, they face less threat, so they can afford to be more permissive. And so actually, tightness and looseness has a really important logic – a hidden logic that helps us understand why certain groups become tight or loose.
Cultural Trade-Offs
It’s really an interesting question, “Which is better – tight or loose?”. I get asked this a lot. And the answer is neither. Actually, both tight and loose cultures confer important strengths, but they also have some liabilities, depending on your vantage point. And I would summarize the principle really in terms of two words: order versus openness. Tight cultures have a lot of order. They have less crime. They have more monitoring. They’re even more synchronized. Synchronization is something you’ll find a lot in tight cultures; even stock markets are more synchronized in tight cultures, it turns out. And tight cultures also have another advantage: they’re more regulated in terms of debt, in terms of obesity, in terms of alcoholism. When you live in cultures where there’s strong rules, you tend to be more self-regulated. And loose cultures struggle with some of these issues. They’re more disorganized, they have less synchrony, and they have more self-regulation failures.
So tight cultures really corner the market on order, but on the flip side, loose cultures really have the market on openness. Across the board, from nations to social class and other levels of analysis, we know that loose cultures are more open to new ideas, they’re more creative, more patents per capita, more artists per capita. They have more openness to people who are different. There’s less discrimination in loose cultures, and they’re more adaptable. Actually in our U.S. 50 states, it’s really interesting. You’ll see that tight states are very polite, whereas loose states (unfortunately like New York) tend to be rated as very rude. But on the flip side, loose states are rated as very fun, and tight states are rated as quasi-boring. So you can see this kind of trade-off between order and openness. And again, it depends on your vantage point – which is better? But they both are important in their own right.
Mindsets
Each of us as individuals has a certain normative radar or lack thereof. Some of us are very attentive to social norms, we’re focused on preventing mistakes, and we have a lot of impulse control. And we like structure; we don’t like ambiguity. This is what’s defined as the “tight mindset”. “Loose mindset” is defined as people who are less attentive to norms. People who are more adventurous, more risk-taking, not as concerned about making mistakes, and who embrace, to some extent, disorder. And each of us is on a place on the continuum, depending on our upbringing, our life experiences, our culture, our gender, our occupational status. What’s really important is to recognize this mindset and how it’s affecting our everyday lives.
This lens is very powerful. It helps us to understand things from politics to parenting, from nations to neurons.