Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. But if you want to talk about humans, Homo sapiens, then you have a generalization problem. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. Theyre longing for it. HENRICH: This probably wouldnt be in a psych textbook, but something like the Ultimatum game. And that really can help explain some variation not all, but some variation in norms and values. 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. And democratic. 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. Now, California is a real interesting exception because it has a lot of threat. Ambiguity is good. What was in these surveys? When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York: Colgate University. 1424 Words. But the big C in my mind is very different than the little c.. And it drives us crazy. BERT: Ernie Ernie, dont eat those cookies while youre in your bed, huh? Gert Jan Hofstede - Freakonomics. You can think about it at the household level. The comedians John Oliver, Hannah Gadsby, and Kumail Nanjiani all grew up outside the U.S. GELFAND: In the U.S., various newspapers covered the story. Good on you, I say. 1 in individualism. HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. Were trying to buy time, save time. GELFAND: They were trained to ask for help in city streets and in stores. But Im Dutch, of course. And what does he have to say about American culture? Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. Tightness may create compliance; but looseness can drive innovation and creativity. And she doesnt love to exercise. The second one measures whats called power distance. (Dont worry, well explain the name later.) Go out there and make it happen. The first one measures the level of individualism in a given culture, versus collectivism. We should note that Bert and Ernie, despite their differences, are very dear friends! The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that increasing socioeconomic development is an especially strong predictor of increasing individualistic practices and values . Im like, Were going to go to Singapore if you people dont behave.. When Americans did this experiment, a third of them conformed and gave an obviously wrong answer. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; were also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on uncertainty avoidance, if that makes you feel better). Sinopsis. If they reject, both players get zero. And by the way, in that sense, the U.S.A. is also a huge laboratory of society formation, hopefully, which is by no means finished. Thats Mark Anthony Neal of Duke University. NEAL: Were a country that presumes male leadership. Subscribe for more videos like this: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=92YplusThe Best of Freakonomics with Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, m. playlist_add. You can never admit weakness or failure. One of the defining features of Americanism is our so-called rugged individualism. You might even call it wild individualism. The negotiations didnt work out. So that can be very beneficial. More feminine societies tend to have less poverty and higher literacy rates. Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. Im a professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Rich. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. 470. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt's own peer-reviewed research. Scholars in this realm have a general agreement on what culture is and what its not. In a more masculine society, men and women adhere to the gender roles you might think of as patriarchal: fathers, for instance, take care of the facts, while mothers handle the emotions. GELFAND: In cross-cultural psychology, we study how ecological and historical factors cause the evolution of differences. And also, of course, people listening to this: Make it happen, come on. Levitt's research on teacher cheating using Chicago Public Schools data.Clip from the 2010 documentary "Freakonomics: The Movie". The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism Freakonomics Radio. Documentary. Season 10, Episode 49. You may have noticed that Hofstede neglected to mention a certain country that we Americans tend to care about quite a bit. Its all the levels in the organization. HOFSTEDE: This is not about a homogenous soup, but its about the power of the millions versus the individual and the power of ostracism. NEAL: We realized that the grind is unsustainable. 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. Capital W-E-I-R-D, which stands for: HENRICH: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. And life is an adventure. So why did someone succeed? There are plenty of looser people in tight countries and vice versa. He wrote a paper about it. So its not necessarily the case that my country is better. "The conventional wisdom is often wrong.". But Joe Henrich wanted to see how the Ultimatum experiments worked when it wasnt just a bunch of WEIRD college students. Freakonomics Quotes. GELFAND: When we ask people, What does honor mean to you? in the U.S., a lot of people talk about work. Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. HOFSTEDE: And blue-collar. Heres another example: HENRICH: People from more individualistic societies tend to focus on central objects. The sixth dimension is called indulgence vs. restraint.. GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. So after we ran that first project, we redid the entire project, and we took concerns like the one Francisco had. It was freedom from hunger. They want to be happy. Another one: impatience. Freakonomics Radiois produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. Australia and Brazil are also loose. This would never happen in a society of large power distance. Heres how he describes himself these days. 702 Episodes. HOFSTEDE: Look, guys, we can do it. Europe has very strong gradients between very individualistic Nordic and Anglo and Germanic countries; Germanic is a little bit more collectivistic. Tight cultures, she writes, are usually found in South and East Asia, the Middle East, and in European countries of Nordic and Germanic origin.. Lets flip it for a moment. Paperback - April 22, 2020. Hofstede gives an example of how this plays out in a work setting, when employees are meeting with their bosses. . employees spread across the globe. 6 Pages. And then in a third condition they were wearing just their face. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. Public school quality B. Level of inequality C. Family composition D . Were realizing that part of that push forward theres a toxicity to that in terms of how you treat other people, how you think about institutions. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Read the excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. Heres another culture metaphor another watery one from the Dutch culture scholar Gert Jan Hofstede. Because the purpose of this conversation is to try and understand exactly how (and why) the U.S. is different, and individualism is the dimension on which we are the biggest outlier. HOFSTEDE: Okay, no, I was just being naughty. And I think that America has wonderful things happening to it. But oh, the places you'll go! So if you only want to talk about American psychology, youre fine. 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? Let me give a little background. 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. It means I did it my way.. Just like good science, good . Joe HENRICH: Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. HOFSTEDE: I like this question a lot. But Gelfand saw an even bigger question: How can you understand culture if you dont know exactly what it is? He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent . HOFSTEDE: Okay, well, dont. Gelfand would disagree. You might think that someone who studies cross-cultural psychology also grew up abroad, or at least in some big city with a melting-pot vibe. Better Essays. The Aztec, the Inca, and todays Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, are very collectivistic. FREAKONOMICS is the highly anticipated film version of the phenomenally bestselling book about incentives-based thinking by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.. But oh, the places you'll go! And the rest is history, if you like. So if you ask people to judge the absolute lengths of two lines, people in more individualistic societies tend to get that right. 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. Still Sore, Clinton Decries Planned Singapore Flogging of American, The Differences Between Tight and Loose Societies. In the N.F.L., the long snapper is . GELFAND: This has always been the big question, that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. Individualism is thought to be on the rise in Western countries, but new research suggests that increasing individualism may actually be a global phenomenon. As a result, the needs of individuals dictate social behaviors, rather than the needs of larger groups. 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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. Well go through the other five dimensions, much faster, I promise. In our . And in culture, uncertainty means not knowing the ritual, not knowing how status-worthy or blameworthy some action is. Long Island, New York, is thebirthplace of the American suburb. This is part of the history that made the U.S. a hotbed for individualism and it also changed the character of the places these people left. Or if it will change at all. But yes, its all workplace. And the Machiguenga were much closer to the predictions of Homo economicus, where youd make low offers and never reject. It was freedom from all these debilitating things because the state would be able to provide for you. Stay up-to-date on all our shows. GELFAND: Exactly. Freakonomics Summary. But Im Dutch, of course. They make sure that there is no violation of any ritual. We promise no spam. She did want to measure culture, and how it differs from place to place. Happiness is going to be lower, but crime, too. And I shifted from pre-med into what turned into a career of cross-cultural psychology. I asked Hofstede what he would advise if a given country did want to change its culture? You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. (This is part of the, competition amongst religious organizations. HENRICH: So, Francisco is a good pal of mine and hes also a very charming fellow. 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. And it got the attention of President Clinton: Bill CLINTON: Its the first Ive heard of it, Ill look into it. The Ultimatum game is famous among social scientists. And that is a status-worthy thing. So keep your ears open for all that. 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. One of the areas of cultural study that first hooked her had to do with optical illusions. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. But its also a tremendous outlier. Its called long-term versus short-term orientation. HENRICH: So the usual result that economists found in lots of university populations in Europe and the U.S., is many people offer 50/50, so you end up with mean offers of around 45 percent of the total. This individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy. There is some overlap between these six dimensions and some of the ideas we talked about in last weeks episode particularly the notion that some national cultures tend to be tight and others loose. HOFSTEDE: High individualism is correlated with trying new stuff. GELFAND: But when people were wearing those really weird nose rings or those facial warts, they got far more help in loose cultures. Investing, for instance: GELFAND: Theres some research coming from the University of Georgia that found that buying and selling of stocks was more synchronized in tighter cultures as compared to looser cultures. HENRICH: We dont like people telling us what to do. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. Can that possibly be trueour culture shapes our genetics? If it were, Afghanistan and Venezuela, even Iran might be U.S.-style democracies by now. And we see that the combination of high individualism, high masculinity, and high short-termism can produce some chaos, at the very least. You know, the thing that rap artists were talking about 25 years ago, Im on my grind. Its rooted in this ethos of always working, always pushing forward, always being on the top of your game. employees in more than 50 countries. And in this moment, we realized that the grind is unsustainable, right? Henrich has written about the notion of time psychology.. She likes to eat human food. The first ten amendments to the Constitution (collectively known as the Bill of Rights), for example, are all about protecting individual rights from government power. GELFAND: Sometimes people actually revert back into their cultural chambers. GELFAND: And that suggests that minorities, women, people of different sexual orientation, when they violate the same rule, might be held to higher accountability, to more strict punishment. HOFSTEDE: Thats my idea. 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. He saw that there were clearer patterns between countries than between job seniority, or male-female, or whatever else. Relatedly: Americans place a high value on being consistent across different situations. It suggests that as in most things in life balance is desirable. 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? 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. I get these words out so I can get on to the next thing. 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 . So, today on Freakonomics Radio: can we really build a model that explains why the American psyche is so unusual? BUSH: Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. Feb 15, 2023. So rules for the sake of having rules are not good. That was our hypothesis, at least. Oh say, can you see, the home run I just hit. The fifth cultural dimension is one that I think will resonate with everyone whos ever listened to Freakonomics Radio, since it is at the crux of problem-solving. You Arent Alone as Most Cats and Dogs in the U.S. are Overweight, The Loosening of American Culture Over 200 Years is Associated With a CreativityOrder Trade-Off, Speaking a Tone Language Enhances Musical Pitch Perception in 35-Year-Olds, TightnessLooseness Across the 50 United States, The Mller-Lyer Illusion in a Computational Model of Biological Object Recognition, Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types, Egypt: Crime Soars 200 Per Cent Since Hosni Mubarak Was Ousted, Status and the Evaluation of Workplace Deviance. The individual agents/brokers only take a $150 hit after their costs/fees. Bush made clear to Iraqs Saddam Hussein that this wouldnt stand. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. GELFAND: Exactly. Heres the dean of the National University of Singapores school of public health: YIK-YING TEO: We have a tradition of having national campaigns to galvanize people to proceed in a common direction. (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better) And not attending enough to contextual factorsopportunities that presented themselves, being in the right place at the right time. But Bush also wanted to avoid going to war with Iraq. On many Freakonomics Radio episodes, well hear about some idea or policy that works well elsewhere in the world but hasnt taken root in the U.S. Freakonomics the film, like the book, is entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. Thats a crazy, creative solution to try to deal with the pandemic. As Hofstede the Younger remembers it, his father asked his bosses at I.B.M. Culture can be quite an offensive concept, particularly to people who project it onto an individual characteristic, as if it was about an individual. We just need to do it. This does not mean that no one in a loose culture, like the U.S., is stigmatized or mistreated. Do you know what you are? It always was unsustainable, but was made even more acute to us. But then the experimenters confederates come in. I think those fundamental religious beliefs extend to the American view of what leadership should look like outside of the church in the corporation, in the legislatures, and what have you. Thats Joe Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology. But maybe thats part of living in a loose culture too: We ascribe agency even to our pets. I know that wasnt your intention. I do think that humanity as a whole is sort of evolving to being more reflective. If you plot the U.S. on G.D.P. But when you use data to measure the specific dimensions of a given culture, and compare them to other countries, you see some stark differences. There is a strong desire to be more feminine. When you have teenagers, youre tight, at least for me. Hannah GADSBY: Have you ever noticed how Americans are not stupid? This really contrasts with lots of places where there are legitimate traditional authorities and people tend to defer to those authorities. This individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy. We put in a bunch of other checks and controls. HENRICH: I was doing research in the Peruvian Amazon. We need to have different types of leadership. His late father was a social psychologist who devised a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism versus collectivism. But the Chinese, even rich, will be a lot more collectivistic and a lot more long-term-oriented than the Americans. Share. Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. Macroeconomics, on the other hand, works on a larger scale. His father was Geert Hofstede. But, lets look at the pandemic from a different angle: which country produced the most effective Covid-19 vaccines? Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. 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. But somehow, that diversity and that early celebration of permissiveness has overridden that. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. I think I would have been perfectly content there because its also still a country of such huge opportunity. It is a small price to pay to punish the first player for being so stingy. DUBNER: Describe for me your father and his work, and how it became a family business. GELFAND: They talk about individualistic accomplishments. And we found that people from minority or even women backgrounds were seen as violating something more severely and were subject to higher punishment without even people realizing this. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. Theyre really hard-working. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: This American teenager from Ohio, Michael Fay, was in Singapore and was arrested and charged with various counts of vandalism and other shenanigans. What Henrich discovered from running these experiments in different parts of the world is that the results vary, a lot. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on . This episode was produced byBrent Katz. That would be very beneficial because now you might be going down the path of civil war, really. But some cultures strictly abide by their norms. Mobility also produces looseness, because its harder to agree upon any norm. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as supremely WEIRD) as America? And that happens a lot. Stay up-to-date on all our shows. Its hard in either direction not just because some cultures are tighter than others. You had Woodstock, and youre going to have this kind of stuff happening again. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if we wanted to. You want to know where you stand which is, for instance, what diplomats know very well. Culturally maybe more than anything! And how does this extraordinarily high level of individualism versus collectivism play out? HOFSTEDE: And his special methodological trick was not to do what is now called a pan-cultural analysis across all the respondents, but first to lump them into groups. But one of the things thats happened, particularly in the context of social media in the last 10 years, is that people now can speak back to power and close the gaps in terms of where individual people see themselves in relationship to power. Someone raised in an Eastern culture might focus more on the image as a whole and less on the central object. What we saw in Egypt was very similar. He veers tighter. That, again, is the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. And I think that is a hallmark of African-American culture in this country. We had a very tight social order. And we found the full spectrum of variation. Because if you try something new, you show to the people around you that you are an individual and you can make your own decisions. 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. Why not? Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda,Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski,Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. thats always there. Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism: With Stephen Dubner. 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? DUBNER: I like those rules. Steven D. Levitt, the self-described "Rogue Economist" of the title, uses this tool to analyze a random assortment of . Neal is making a couple of compelling points here. And how does a scholar like Neal think about culture per se? You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. This is a pretty interesting result: one stranger giving away roughly half their money to another stranger when, theoretically, 10 or 20 percent would keep the second player from rejecting the offer.
