There, its really important to maintain that humility, to be focused on your privacy, but not trying to one-up other people. Relatedly: Americans place a high value on being consistent across different situations. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on . And the research subject explained to him that, Oh, I feel so bad for you that you cant afford pants without holes in them that I cant take the money from this poor American kid. And it struck me as a way in which this experiment could be perverted. The converse, which is what Anglo societies are high on, means you dont care about ambiguity. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. NEAL: So its always evolving, its always developing, but theres some core principles. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Part of the Freakonomics Series) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J . Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. And thats going to cultivate certain tonal abilities, which could feed into certain kinds of music, and things like that. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. GELFAND: Ill just say that there are also other contexts where we naturally tighten. 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. Heres how it works. But somehow, that diversity and that early celebration of permissiveness has overridden that. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. Our theme song is Mr. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. OLIVER: When was that moment when America became the most American America it could possibly be? DUBNER: I remember once, years and years ago, when I was reading this research that you were doing, speaking with Francisco Gil-White, who was then at Penn, and he told me that when he was running this Ultimatum experiment, I dont remember where I want to say Mongolia. Follow. If youre an economist, you might think that offering even $1 out of the 100 would be enough. GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. The spirit of competition of what Michele Gelfand calls vertical individualism seems to permeate every corner of American society. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better). One thing that I think that Americans are more extreme than other Western countries and certainly elsewhere in the world is attributing individual success to the internal traits of the actor. 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? They make sure that there is no violation of any ritual. Some of the countries with high power distance: Russia, China, and Mexico. Thats my idea. Rich. Most sociologists agree that individualistic cultures value individual choice, personal freedom, and self-actualization (Kemmelmeier 2002). But its important to acknowledge that no culture is a monolith. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Replay) According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better). DUBNER: These are the two lines that are the same. GELFAND: Weve had our share of threat, but just not chronic threat. Heres how he describes himself these days. 470 Replay) Freakonomics Radio Documentary According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes . There is no evidence for convergence other than if countries become equally rich, they all go to more individualistic. And we did find a number of learned people who had data to back up the hypothesis. We just need to do it. Joe Henrichs research into national psychologies led him to an even more fascinating conclusion. If youre a constrained sort of person, you wont go far in the U.S. Stephen DUBNER: Im curious whether youve ever been accused of political incorrectness in your study of national cultures. John OLIVER: When was that moment that America became the most American America it could possibly be? Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. Its waiting to happen because people in this individualistic, indulgent society, they want to be merry. And when I started to work with Harry Triandis, who was one of the founders of the field, I thought, Wow, this is a super-interesting construct. HOFSTEDE: If you are, lets say, a toddler, what do you get to decide for yourself? We bring in neuroscience to understand all things cultural. Gert Jan Hofstede is a Dutch culture scholar whos been walking us through these dimensions. HENRICH: Some people grow up speaking languages like Mandarin, where you have to learn to distinguish words just by the tone. 470. His ideas, along with others, are credited with . thats always there. GELFAND: The next day, I booked a trip to Egypt. . Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . And it was like, This stuff is really lousy. Historically, politically, and yes culturally. And a lot of those presumptions come from how men function within the context of various religious practices. GELFAND: And it caused a real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic punishment, which was caning. He takes on questions like: Why do kids with summer birthdays get the flu more often? 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. But the big C in my mind is very different than the little c.. And he tried all kinds of categories and groups. The first one measures the level of individualism in a given culture, versus collectivism. And then in a third condition they were wearing just their face. GELFAND: And there was discussion in the cross-cultural psychology community about how James Bakers unemotionalcommunication style was received as This is not so serious, in terms of Tariq Azizs understanding of Americans intentions. In 2016, Henrich published a book called The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. 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. 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. HOFSTEDE: Oh, no, thats something for academia. And then he decided to go to academia. Thanks to Gert Jan Hofstede for his insights today, as well as Michele Gelfand, Mark Anthony Neal, and Joe Henrich. And for me, its hard to divorce the toxicity of the grind from the toxicity of masculinity, when you always have to dominate. What was I.B.M. How do racial and ethnic minorities fit into the American looseness? (Ep. I think the models dont account for that because you cant account for that, right? Neal is a professor of African and African-American studies. Ambiguity is good. And this is what Europe has. Well call it The U.S. Is Very Different from Other Countries So Lets Stop Pretending Its Not. Its the first in a series of episodes where well look at different pieces of that difference. DUBNER: Can you give me a good example of an idea or a theory that I might come across in a Psych 101 textbook that would just be so American that it wouldnt really be useful if you actually care about humans? If someone acts in an inappropriate way, will others strongly disapprove in this country? Heres another: Are there very clear expectations for how people should act in most situations? In 2018, Gelfand published a book of these findings called Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. Like, you saw in the U.S. trying to locate Covid in sewage. GELFAND: The U.S. is one of the most creative places on the planet. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. Individualism once . Theres a good side of every dimension, including uncertainty avoidance. Next on the list: what Hofstedes late father, the originator of this culture model, called power distance. Thats the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations or institutions be it society at large or just a family accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.. Why the business school? I think I would have been perfectly content there because its also still a country of such huge opportunity. Individualism has had a tremendous impact, not only on culture, but on social theory as well, and political philosophy in particular. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. But its also a tremendous outlier. Culture is about, if you are a part of a society, youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. And democratic. Our theme song is Mr. Wade meant that these unwanted children were not being bornthus, they could not grow up to be criminals. Open Document. In the N.F.L., the long snapper is . The first is that a model of anything even nearly as complex as a national culture is bound to miss a lot of nuance. We even walk faster. Oh say, can you see, the home run I just hit. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. At school in the Netherlands, Ive seen a mother ask her two-year-old, Shall I change your nappy? And then the child gets to decide whether its nappy gets changed. The final dimension on the Hofstede model is called indulgence versus restraint. But thats only the first study. Factor analysis being a way to distill a large number of variables into an index, essentially a ranking. We do this on vacations with my siblings. Whereas if you have a state religion, it tends to get tired and old and boring. And I shifted from pre-med into what turned into a career of cross-cultural psychology. And I was like, This is every day in America! Okay, you get the gist, right? But first, Hofstede had to make sure that the differences he was seeing in the data werent specific to I.B.M. So they might offer, say, 10 out of the 100. Joe HENRICH: Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. 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. But relatively speaking, we have more tolerance. We see them as individuals with whom we are in competition. Why arent all national cultures converging by now? NEAL: As someone who specialized in the African-American experience, and is African-American myself, I often fall back on the way the late Amiri Baraka described Black culture as a changing same.. So, yeah, that is WEIRD. In one experiment, Gelfand sent a bunch of research assistants to different places around the world. HENRICH: So, Francisco is a good pal of mine and hes also a very charming fellow. The same experiment was done in other, non-WEIRD countries, like Ghana and Zimbabwe. Another one: impatience. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. In case you missed it, thats Western. Heres another example: HENRICH: People from more individualistic societies tend to focus on central objects. Because when youre living inside a culture well, thats the culture you know; it is what it is. By this time, Hofstede the Elder had already gotten a Ph.D. in social science. In a large power-distant society, you have autocracy. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertain. after? employees spread across the globe. We need to have different types of leadership. We visit the world's busiest airport to see . Individualism is thought to be on the rise in Western countries, but new research suggests that increasing individualism may actually be a global phenomenon. And she doesnt love to exercise. It is that the wealth comes first, and the individualism follows. Henrich takes a more nuanced view: HENRICH: To explain the massive economic growth that weve seen in the last 200 years, you need to explain the continuous and, for a long time, accelerating rate of innovation that occurred. One of the defining features of Americanism is our so-called "rugged individualism." You might even call it wild individualism. Innovation requires coming up with a lot of ideas. Im a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. The best thing you can become is yourself. And so often, theyll just point at some other country on the map. DUBNER: So does all the data come from workplace interviews essentially of white-collar and pink-collar workers, or does it go broader than that? Thats a crazy, creative solution to try to deal with the pandemic. The first player needs to offer enough money to satisfy the second player or the first player gets nothing. This suggests that every time a social scientist runs an experiment whose research subjects are WEIRD thats capital-letter WEIRD the results of that experiment may be meaningful in the U.S. and some other places, but quite likely not in others. That, again, is Mark Anthony Neal, from Duke. You had Woodstock, and youre going to have this kind of stuff happening again. Latin countries tend to be more collectivistic, especially Spain and Portugal not so much Italy and France. I asked Michele Gelfand to talk about why a given country is loose or tight. How much should we attribute that success to these very same factors that create chaos on other dimensions? BUSH: Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. We do lab experiments, field experiments, computational modeling. When theyre by themselves, the vast majority of people who do this experiment get the right answer, like in this archival tape of an Asch conformity test. (This is part of theFreakonomics RadioAmerican Culture series). It was freedom from hunger. So the Singapore government says, Look, this is our culture The rest of that sentence didnt have to be said. One of the most important figures in economic individualism is the famous Scottish economist, Adam Smith. Categories like age, gender, job type, job seniority, and so on. Am I really going to tell my kid how special they are about everything?. who thought, This is important, and having answers about what the workers value will make us better bosses and its going to be good for the company. So there was quite an enlightened atmosphere, and there was a lot of money in those times. Anyway, in this episode of No Stupid Questions, we'll be talking about how our surroundings can make us smarter and maybe happier too. 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. Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. This failure leads to confusion at the very least, but quite possibly deeper misunderstandings, perhaps all the way up to hatred and violent conflict. Really? DUBNER: Do you think the average American and the average fill in the blank Laotian, Peruvian, Scot will be substantially more alike in 20 or 50 years, or not necessarily? Kumail NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. SuperFreakonomics was the follow-up in 2009. Hes horrified by my dishwasher-loading behavior. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more.. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet.With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and . The U.S., according to this analysis, is comparatively a short-term country. The U.S. is just different from other places in a variety of ways that we often dont stop to think about. In restrained societies, people tend to suppress bodily gratification, and birth rates are often lower; theres also less interest in things like foreign films and music. You want to know where you stand which is, for instance, what diplomats know very well. Better Essays. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. Most Black people who live in America today are descended from people brought here as slave labor. And it got the attention of President Clinton: Bill CLINTON: Its the first Ive heard of it, Ill look into it. 1424 Words. In our . The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dateslike socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century. you ask. Australia and Brazil are also loose. Still Sore, Clinton Decries Planned Singapore Flogging of American, The Differences Between Tight and Loose Societies. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better) He contrasts places like Egypt, that had strict rules for authority and gender and purity, with the Persians who, using my terminology, he would have said that they were quite loose. 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. When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness. If basic things like visual illusions are not universal, what about other phenomena? It was a collaboration between Hofstede the Elder, his son Gert Jan, whod begun working with him by now, and a Bulgarian linguist named Michael Minkov, who had been analyzing data from the World Values Survey. I came back to Colgate. Everybody gets tickled until they laugh. He came to consider a company "honest" if its payment rate was above 90 percent. Geert Hofstede ( 2 October 1928 - 12 February 2020) was born in a peaceful country, but his teenage years saw the second World War rage across Europe. So were all constraining one another through our collective culture. Individualism, Modern Capitalism, and Dystopian Visions Introduction to Heritage and Multicultural American Identities: Contemporary Voices (1970-2000) Introduction to Contemporary Literature of the Twenty-First Century The Poetry of Physics RL.CCR.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text. . Theyre what we call tight cultures. Ultimatum Game Bargaining Among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon, U.S. Student Tells of Pain Of His Caning In Singapore, Singapores Relations With U.S. 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. He was a professor in both the economics and psychology departments, which was weird in its own way lower-case weird since Henrich had never taken a course in either subject. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. employees. DUBNER: I find that people who dont load dishwashers carefully are usually pretty loose with the planning. HENRICH: So Americans tend to be more work-obsessed than other people. Thats the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. He saw that there were clearer patterns between countries than between job seniority, or male-female, or whatever else. HOFSTEDE: Yes, especially by people from Anglo countries. The five loosest countries according to this analysis were Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, and the Netherlands. HOFSTEDE: This is a very American question, Stephen. If you dont feel that, then you will be an unhappy person. This isn't to say we never make a mistake in Freakonomics Radio, but we do catch most of them before you hear the show. 534. So, again, if you want to talk about Americans, youre okay. GELFAND: Exactly. Its focus on individual behaviour also lends itself to a preoccupation with manipulating individual choices. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. Like, the military should be tighter than tech. GELFAND: I was planning to become a cross-cultural trainer to work at the State Department and train people to understand culture. Henrich says yes. We are acronymically WEIRD. Compared to other countries including places like Japan, Singapore, Germany we can afford to be more permissive. And we can see a strong trend that looseness has increased over the last 200 years. But remember what Hofstede told us: HOFSTEDE: Youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. Subtitles in: English Portugus Espaol Italiano Romn Polski Slovenina Freakonomics: The Movie is a 2010 American documentary film based on the book Freakonomics by economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. Levitt's research on teacher cheating using Chicago Public Schools data.Clip from the 2010 documentary "Freakonomics: The Movie". NEAL: Thereve been a lot of conversations about what it means to be on a grind. Now, lets pull back and make an important point: labeling a given country tight or loose is an overall, aggregate measurement. HENRICH: You want to be the same self, regardless of who youre talking to or what context youre in, whereas in other places it seems to be okay to morph and shift your personality, depending on your context. Shes not very disciplined. So then he really knew this is not an artifact of this particular company this is real. GELFAND: Were trained from a very early age not just to be independent, but to be better. 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. His late father was a social psychologist who devised a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism versus collectivism. The Hofstede scale puts the U.S. at 62 out of 100 on masculinity relatively high but substantially less masculine than China, Mexico, and much of Eastern Europe. OLIVER: Baseballs were hit from the deck of a warship from a needlessly inflatable batting cage. But no. So that leads to justifying more inequality. In other words, Americans dont just see other people as individuals. For the last few months, the city-state has seen just a handful of Covid-19 cases. So, today on Freakonomics Radio: can we really build a model that explains why the American psyche is so unusual? HOFSTEDE: There was a Quaker at the head of I.B.M. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". HOFSTEDE: In an individualistic society, a person is like an atom in a gas. The authors seek to find simple answers to complicated world problems. People get less interested. We may not be the very loosest culture; but we are No. GELFAND: We have a lot of work to do, theres no question. Is that the case? When you have teenagers, youre tight, at least for me. Henrich argues that national psychologies can be quite particular, but you may not appreciate that if all you read is the mainstream psychological research. And in one condition, I had them wearing these fake facial warts. The reason we reached out to Michele Gelfand is that I want to understand this stuff better, too. GELFAND: Its like that story of two fish where theyre swimming along. Why not? on one axis and religiosity on the other axis, the U.S. is a clear and distinct outlier with high G.D.P and high religion. Yes, the United States of America. Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. And life is an adventure. HOFSTEDE: Because its true: the very same dimensions under different circumstances, can work the other way. BERT: Ernie Ernie, dont eat those cookies while youre in your bed, huh? In Brazil and Greece, youre not entirely sure what time it is. Although it is more self-help than traditional economics it shares many of the weaknesses of more serious works in the discipline. This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. So yeah, the U.S. has that assignment ahead of it. Greeks are very strong on that. GELFAND: In the U.S., various newspapers covered the story. Citation styles for Freakonomics How to cite Freakonomics for your reference list or bibliography: select your referencing style from the list below and hit 'copy' to generate a citation. She says these are merely visible indicators of a countrys tightness or looseness and its what you dont necessarily see that shapes a given countrys culture. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism av Freakonomics Radio direkt i din mobil, surfplatta eller webblsare - utan app. Freakonomics the film, like the book, is entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. HOFSTEDE: Yes, of course. making a claim about his individual experiences and looking for evidence. And I think that is a hallmark of African-American culture in this country. It means you really want to know and youre not satisfied until you know. 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