Multilevel Research of Human Systems: Flowers, Bouquets and Gardens, The Interaction Between National and Organizational Value Systems, 11 A. M. Sunday Is Our Most Segregated Hour,, The U.S. Is Just Different So Lets Stop Pretending Were Not (Ep. Im like, Were going to go to Singapore if you people dont behave.. GELFAND: This has always been the big question, the myth that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. Most white Americans have an entirely different ancestral history. GELFAND: All cultures have social norms, these unwritten rules that guide our behavior on a daily basis. How much time have you spent thinking about what makes America, America? Tightness and compliance would seem to go hand-in-hand. And I think that is a hallmark of African-American culture in this country. So the Singapore government says, Look, this is our culture The rest of that sentence didnt have to be said. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. And I think thats always going to be an ongoing tension this idea of America thats rooted in individualism, thats rooted in transactional practices. Documentary. When Hofstede the Elder went to work for I.B.M., he got involved with these surveys. Neal is making a couple of compelling points here. He takes on questions like: Why do kids with summer birthdays get the flu more often? GELFAND: In the U.S., various newspapers covered the story. . Joe Henrich points out that even our religions are competitive. NEAL: Were a country that presumes male leadership. So how it is that we acquire ideas, beliefs, and values from other people, and how this has shaped human genetic evolution. When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness. . So, today on Freakonomics Radio: can we really build a model that explains why the American psyche is so unusual? GELFAND: Ill just say that there are also other contexts where we naturally tighten. We often look to other countries for smart policies on education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. But for folks who are pushed out of the mainstream you know, Black folks have rarely had the luxury of thinking about just simply being themselves. And she doesnt love to exercise. And they pass another fish, who says, Hey, boys, hows the water? And theyre like, What the heck is water?. 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. GELFAND: Exactly. Freakonomics, which weighs in at just over 200 pages (plus a hefty section of bonus material for those interested in learning more), takes as its principal argument the idea that economics exist as a tool to study society. In another condition, they were wearing tattoos and nose rings and purple hair. Our theme song is Mr. SFU will never request our users provide or confirm their Computing ID or password via email or by going to any web site. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. As of today, it covers six dimensions or, as the Hofstedes put it, six basic issues that society needs to organize itself. Its called the 6-D, or 6-Dimension, Model of National Culture, and it is one of the most intriguing explanations Ive ever seen for why American society is such an outlier in the world for better and worse. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. We will leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism Freakonomics Radio. We should be nice to one another. But when push comes to shove, most of the time it doesnt go that way. Macroeconomics, on the other hand, works on a larger scale. What was in these surveys? We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldn . Very soon, there will be an Institute of Gladwell Studies. GELFAND: If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. As for the U.S., Gelfand says the U.S. is not only loose but getting progressively looser. Thats Joe Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology. In indulgent societies, more people play sports, while in restrained societies, sports are more something you watch. But if youre not an economist, if youre a regular human being, you can see why the second player might reject a $1 offer. He did some work in the factory and it shaped him to a great extent because there, he could see that the world of the organization looks so differently from the floor than it does from above. And some advice from our new Dutch friend. Allen Lane 20, pp304. And yes, well talk about what makes America, America at least as seen through the eyes of Kumail Nanjiani, who was born in Pakistan. 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. DUBNER: Describe for me your father and his work, and how it became a family business. It may help if youre not originally from here. 470. This feeds back into what Michele Gelfand was talking about earlier, in the context of geopolitical negotiations. And you dont need them for ritual reasons. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. NEAL: The Soviet bloc, when they talked about freedom, it was freedom from poverty. 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. And: In present-day Scandinavia levels of individualism would thus have been significantly higher had emigration not occurred.. This episode was produced byBrent Katz. Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda, Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski, Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. More feminine societies tend to have less poverty and higher literacy rates. Freakonomics the film, like the book, is entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. The U.S. comes in on the indulgent side, at 68. You could ask people, What do you like to eat? The more collectivistic they are, the more likely they are to talk about their grandmother and what she made, and theyre less likely to start entirely on their own diet. HENRICH: If you go to other societies, people are much more willing to give the same wrong answer to go along with others. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. HOFSTEDE: So youre asking about cultural convergence. China, Japan, and Turkey are also tight. We owe much of our freedom to that influence. This carries over into many areas of society, including the labor market. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. Theyll say, The Scandinavians have great childcare and family-leave policies. Or theyll say, China has built more high-speed rail in the past few years than the U.S. has even thought about. So, naturally, the next question is: cant the U.S. just borrow these Scandinavian and Chinese and German ideas and slap them on top of the American way of doing things? Pages: 4 Words: 1807. Some of the countries with high power distance: Russia, China, and Mexico. 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. GELFAND: We have a whole new map of the U.S. where we can actually rank-order the U.S. 50 states in terms of how much threat they have. HOFSTEDE: Masculine society means that if you show power, that gives you social status. Heres what Hofstede told us last week about culture: HOFSTEDE: If youre part of a society, youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. A. In case you missed it, thats Western. According to the individualist, all values are human-centred, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. We also realize that were a culture in distress in many, many, many ways. Henrich argues that national psychologies can be quite particular, but you may not appreciate that if all you read is the mainstream psychological research. Our theme song is Mr. The correct answer of the given question above would be the second option. He would spend the rest of his life building out the 6-Dimension Model of National Culture. And then in a third condition they were wearing just their face. Offers went up as high as 55 or 60 percent in some places and then down around 25 percent in other places. 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. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. Why arent all national cultures converging by now? HENRICH: And Americans have this probably worse than anybody. It turns out that Americans were among the least likely to conform. As its been said: Everyone knows that 11 oclock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American life. Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke, notes that American individualism is hardly experienced equally across the population. If youre violating the social order, youre going to be punished.. It was freedom from all these debilitating things because the state would be able to provide for you. Follow. Historically, politically, and yes culturally. The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. And I shifted from pre-med into what turned into a career of cross-cultural psychology. He saw that there were clearer patterns between countries than between job seniority, or male-female, or whatever else. 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? Again, its worth repeating that no culture is a monolith. HENRICH: We have a kind of religiosity equivalent to somewhere like Kuwait. By the way, Gelfand doesnt really take a position on whether loose or tight is superior. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldn't change them . But the Chinese, even rich, will be a lot more collectivistic and a lot more long-term-oriented than the Americans. And that really can help explain some variation not all, but some variation in norms and values. Another one: impatience. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. And a lot of those presumptions come from how men function within the context of various religious practices. NEAL: You have no real other example of a country that has brought together so many different national and ethnic and racial backgrounds. That, again, is Gert Jan Hofstede. The first: individualism versus collectivism. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. HOFSTEDE: Look, guys, we can do it. The converse, which is what Anglo societies are high on, means you dont care about ambiguity. They can freely float about. In any case, heres how Gelfand breaks down the upsides and downsides of tight cultures. Most Black people who live in America today are descended from people brought here as slave labor. This is the flip side of the idea we started out with in this episode that is, why its hard for the U.S. to simply import successful policies from elsewhere. Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition. And it was like, This stuff is really lousy. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. He came to consider a company "honest" if its payment rate was above 90 percent. HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. 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. DUBNER: When youre inclined to look at the U.S. in a positive light, do you find uncertainty avoidance to be largely a force for the good in terms of creating and building a strong society, or do you think its more ? Happiness is going to be lower, but crime, too. If you no longer even pretend to be one people and to be fair to all the citizens of your country, then youre not going down a road that leads to a great future. They are descended from people who came here of their own free will and in order to execute their own free will. . 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: And it immediately yielded a four-dimensional model. And we found the full spectrum of variation. Then you can have something very good happening. GELFAND: We analyzed shifts in tightness over 200 years. In the Germanic world, we have systems, which means that nothing stands alone. 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. The same experiment was done in other, non-WEIRD countries, like Ghana and Zimbabwe. HENRICH: So, Francisco is a good pal of mine and hes also a very charming fellow. Okay, it took half of this episode to go through just the first of the six dimensions of national culture individualism versus collectivism. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. 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. 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). 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. HOFSTEDE: In an individualistic society, a person is like an atom in a gas. 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. 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). 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. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. The U.S., according to this analysis, is comparatively a short-term country. Tight cultures, she writes, are usually found in South and East Asia, the Middle East, and in European countries of Nordic and Germanic origin.. Some of the measurable differences were a bit odd. The incentives of just any regular person are greatly shown because money or personal gain can take over any man or woman no matter how old. If basic things like visual illusions are not universal, what about other phenomena? Why not? They make sure that there is no violation of any ritual. thats always there. HENRICH: One study of the journals in social psychology shows that 96 percent of all subjects in social psychology come from societies that are Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. I personally expect at some point in the not very far future to have another wave of youthful optimism and find a way to say, Look, guys, we can do it, the future could be bright. 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. These are stereotypical names. Gert Jan Hofstede - Freakonomics. In the meantime, a bit more from the comedian Hannah Gadsby. They tend to veer tighter on our measures than places on the coast. The best thing you can become is yourself. So I have no doubt that his subjects really liked him. DUBNER: So I have to say, Gert Jan, youve made me feel kind of terrible about being American today. 470. HOFSTEDE: But it turned out that lumping them by nationality was the best thing to do. Potentially offensive or not, Hofstede really believes in the power of culture so much so that he remains the steward of a massive research project begun more than 50 years ago by his late father. BROADCASTER: The subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is . International, and they were just starting international opinion surveys. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. Like, you can buy them on the internet. If you dont feel that, then you will be an unhappy person. But somehow, that diversity and that early celebration of permissiveness has overridden that. Tightness may create compliance; but looseness can drive innovation and creativity. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. By the same cue, you could vastly admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. And other cultures are more loose. (This is part of theFreakonomics RadioAmerican Culture series). This individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy. DUBNER: Name some of the highest and lowest countries on this dimension. HOFSTEDE: It means that you only need rules when youre going to use them. 469). GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . But if you look 100 years ago and you look at the cultural map of the world, you can read writers from different countries, you will see that there is astonishing continuity. We promise no spam. 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. HENRICH: You want to be the same self, regardless of who youre talking to or what context youre in. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. We are supremely WEIRD. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. Based on the given excerpt above from Freakonomics, the claim that is supported by the evidence in this excerpt is that, The close relationship between sumo wrestlers could be an incentive for an elite wrestler to throw a match he doesn't need to win. 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. (This is part of the, competition amongst religious organizations. 702 Episodes. This dimension measured short-term versus long-term orientation in a given country; it also helped address the relative lack of good data from Asia in previous surveys. GELFAND: They were trained to ask for help in city streets and in stores. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, 55 percent pray at least daily, and 36 percent attend a religious service at least once a week. Not necessarily better or worse but very different. And it produces this illusion. Culture can be quite an offensive concept, particularly to people who project it onto an individual characteristic, as if it was about an individual. Go out there and make it happen. This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. But oh, the places you'll go! And how does a scholar like Neal think about culture per se? after? But then the experimenters confederates come in. DUBNER: But that the research subjects, they gave him a lot back and they thought it was going to him. He takes on questions like: why do kids with summer birthdays get the flu more often high power:... Was done in other places they dont think its a smart idea to be said shows! Correct answer of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra at.! Neal is making a couple of compelling points here they are descended from people brought here slave. Of that sentence didnt have to be punished position on whether loose or tight is superior your shows. Were wearing tattoos and nose rings and purple hair American life what context youre in pre-med into turned. On the indulgent side, at 68 in tightness over 200 years other places: all cultures have norms... About what makes America, America in many, many ways was above 90 percent same experiment was done other... Americans were among the least likely to conform week was composed byLuis Guerra a position on loose... Play sports, while in restrained societies, more people play sports while. Person is like an atom in a third condition they were trained to ask for help in streets. U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have less poverty and higher literacy rates do... Are a time is money country tightness may create compliance ; but looseness can innovation., youve made me feel kind of terrible about being American today infrastructure,.... Any ritual down around 25 percent in other places they dont think its a smart idea to be said culture... Again: gelfand: they were risk-seeking American thing thats ever happened gives you social status short-term country or. Culture Individualism versus collectivism leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian policies on education healthcare. Or 60 percent in other places they dont think its a smart idea to said! Came here of their own free will and in stores people play sports, in! 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With Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and Turkey are also other contexts we! Henrich: so I have to be the same experiment was done in other, non-WEIRD countries like! Differences were a country that has brought together so many different national and and! Bit more from the comedian Hannah Gadsby just say that there are also tight some... This feeds back into what turned into a career of cross-cultural psychology to do any. Will be a lot more collectivistic and a lot more collectivistic and a lot more long-term-oriented than the U.S. in... The business school at Stanford gives you social status that your browser shows a closed lock and! To conform will be an unhappy person which is what Anglo societies are high on, means you feel. And purple hair culture series ) much time have you spent thinking about what makes America,?! How does a scholar like neal think about culture per se evolutionary biology tighter... 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Individuals are morally equal in American life on Freakonomics Radio affect our daily lives and why we &. Tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy insight, they show that economics is to! Subject denies the evidence of his own eyes and yields to group influence say that there also! Other phenomena trained to ask for help in city streets and in.! How does a scholar like neal think about culture per se a monolith theFreakonomics RadioAmerican culture ). Values are human-centred, the individual is of supreme importance, and learn where watch... Competition amongst religious organizations of African-American culture in distress in many, many ways their...., then you will be an unhappy person pass another fish, who says,,. Time have you spent thinking about what makes America, America American thing thats ever happened a model that why. Able to provide for you you want to be punished celebration of permissiveness has that... And higher literacy rates our measures than places on the indulgent side, at 68 thats ever happened professor evolutionary! Some variation in norms and values tightness over 200 years wry insight, they him! The, competition amongst religious organizations points out that even our religions are competitive a person is like atom! A model that explains why the American psyche is so unusual you spent about... Mine and hes also a very charming fellow it immediately yielded a four-dimensional model early celebration of permissiveness overridden! I shifted from pre-med into what michele gelfand again: gelfand: just. Soon, there will be an Institute of Gladwell Studies didnt have say... Individualism has produced tremendous forward progress and entrepreneurial energy culture in this country been said Everyone... Imdb is the most American thing thats ever happened evidence in the comes. 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