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academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org and for more conversations including videos transcripts and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com [Music] I'm here today with Michelle galand who is a professor of psychology at the
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University of Maryland and she has a very interesting new book out called Rule makers rule Breakers how tight and loose cultures wire our world welcome Michelle thanks for having me now in one of your ratings you mentioned that New
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Zealand is arguably the loosest country or culture on this planet why does New Zealand qualify in that regard well I would say it's of the the loosest not the loosest in our study we measured perceptions that people had of the
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strength of the Norms in their cultural context and new zealanders like many people around the world agreed they shared perceptions about the strength of norms and they they categorized their culture as being relatively loose and permissive and having a wide range of
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behavior that was permissible but can we trust what Kiwi say so I think of New Zealand as a place where Conformity is relatively strong there's a norm phrase cutting down tall poppies you don't stand out too much they may might
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deviate a lot on Small Things uh but there's oddly little radicalism there and to me they seem a bit cautious they have lots of impulse control and they're extremely polite does that make them loose or tight it's a really great question you know all cultures have
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tight and loose domains and New Zealand is a is a place like you said that has some domains that are pretty tight and some of these domains evolve for good reasons the value of egalitarianism is really important in New Zealand so tall
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poppies are cut down because that threatens that value and in all cultures I would argue that some domains evolve to be tight because they're really important in that culture United States is a great example privacy is a very important domain here so we tend to be
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pretty regulated about it if I just show up at someone's house even if it's close friend unannounced I'll get some pretty strong feedback so even in the United States which is relatively loose we have some domains that are tight so what
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would be a social phenomenon that the degree of tightness or looseness in a culture or country might explain uh many things actually in the book I talk about the trade-offs that tighten loose provide for human groups tight groups
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tend to have a lot of synchrony a lot of coordination a lot of self-control loose groups generally speaking are very disorganized and they have self-regulation failures problems with self-regulation but on the flip side tight cultures tend to struggle with
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openness they have more ethnocentrism they're less creative and they're less open to change and that's where loose cultures have a market they're very open even if they're slightly disorganized in one of your papers you give some 2011
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rankings where if I recall the three tightest cultures were in this order Malaysia Pakistan and India and they don't seem very orderly when you go there so what makes them tight isn't it the case that they in some regards maybe
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have oppressive Norms but they absolutely fail at regulating behavior in some regards if you try standing in a Queue at least say in India uh it's a highly disorderly experience that's right I mean these are very crowded places that are relatively poor and so
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those domains in terms of things like traffic or coordinating uh like you said in cutting lines these are things that there tend to be loosened but in many domains they tend to be very tight in the domain of marriage and the domain of
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sexuality in Authority in language these are very strong rules that people have to abide by and if they deviate then there're strong punishments so I think these are really important observations every culture has some tight domains and some loose domains and it's really
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helpful for people to develop cultural intelligence not just emotional intelligence or general intelligence when they're traveling and understand and anticipate what domains are going to be tight and loose Japan's another
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example it's really tight but there's some domains that become totally Loose tekashi Street I talked about it in the book you know it's a place where anything goes after hours and organizations anything goes you need in a very tight culture some places that
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you can let off some steam and become quite loose any culture needs both tightness and looseness and I would argue and I talk about the goldilock principle that any culture that gets to extreme in terms of looseness or tightness has a lot of problems
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in that 2011 rating if the three most tight are listed as Malaysia Pakistan India and then the three next most tight are Singapore South Korea and Norway uh might we infer that there are two kinds of titaness somehow that Malaysia
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Pakistan India belong together but Singapore South Korea and Norway deserve a separate Dimension and that tightness looseness is too few Dimensions there ought to be three four maybe more Yeah in our data it's a great question we
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didn't find any multi-dimensionality to the scale in terms of factor analysis but also when we look at banding we statistically group cultures those groups actually banded together so in our data they they pretty clearly fall together uh even if they uh appear very
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different there's a really interesting reason why cultures evolve to be tight or loose and maybe that could help to explain why some of these cultures that seem so different they're actually are quite similar in terms of the strength
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of norms tight cultures both in modern day and an ancient history from our research um with Anthropologist archaeologists they don't share a similar religion they don't share the same location they don't share the same language but they do share one
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fundamental aspect of their sociality which is that they experience generally speaking a lot of threat and threats can be varied from ecological threats to man-made threats and that might help to explain some of the ranking that you see
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now as you know it's a common distinction in cross-cultural analysis to call some cultures individualistic and others collectivistic how does tightness and looseness differ from that distinction what do you pick up that say the work of triandis does not yeah
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actually tranis is my mentor and I went to Champagne to work with him and actually I did a lot of research on collectivism individualism and at for a long time that was the kind of one dimension that we really looked at in cross-cultural Psychology it's almost
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akin to in personality psychology only studying extroversion uh to the neglect of other dimensions like neuroticism so in crosscultural Psychology we kind of got a little bit narrow in what we were studying collectivism individualism is
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related to tightness but distinct and part of the problem we've had is we've confounded cultures in our research we've been studying East Asia which is both tight and collectivistic with the United States and other Western cultures
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which tend to be loose and individualistic so they've been confounded but when you think about sort of the off diagonals of that 2 by two you can imagine cultures like Germany Switzerland Austria that tend to be pretty individualistic they emphasize
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privacy they're not hugely group and family oriented but they're relatively tight they have strong rules and punishments for deviants or on the flip side you can think about Latin American cultures in our data that's Brazil or
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Spain that tend to be pretty family oriented and pretty pretty collectivistic but they're rather loose so in a lot of ways you can disentangle um that variation even if they're related they tend to be related about 04 and that's found both in modern Nations
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and also traditional societies at the state level they're also tend to be related but again distinct only in that case it's about Point 2 or three the correlation between tightness and collectivism with the Notions of tightness and looseness say predict Big
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Five personality variables like conscientiousness openness well these are different levels of analysis and I think it's really important to think about cultures as systems so you have very macro level factors like threat and
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then you have personality the individual level and the question is is how do those relate to each other in the science paper I tried to develop a multi-level model that specified different factors that help reinforce tightness at different levels and so
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certainly at the individual level I I would say that openness the big five dimension and conscientiousness are really critical for making up and reinforcing the strength of norms so loose cultures need people socialize people to be open because you need to
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actually tolerate a lot of ambiguity in loose cultures you're going to see a lot of weird stuff happening tight cultures which have stronger Norms like think about being in a library need people that had a lot of self-regulation and a
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lot of prevention focus in order to fit into those contexts and maintain them so I think there is a connection and you could start thinking about how norms and personality make each other up they can exist without each other in in a large
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extent now I'm from Northern New Jersey do you regard that as a tight or loose region I know you have state level variables but of course we can't count the South I'm from Long Island so we have a little bit of a rivalry although I will say that as I've grown older I
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think Jersey is definitely much nicer place than Long Island sorry for my Long Island friends out there New Jersey and our data uh at the state level Falls in a relatively loose category um when we rank order the 50 states we can see a
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new way to think about our variation in the United States not just red or blue but again tight or loose and um New Jersey tends to be on the looser side the coast tend to be looser the South tends to be tighter in our data we can
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think about this both in terms of again threat threat tends to predict tightness even in the United States if you look at the map that the New York Times published early this summer in terms of natural disasters it's very closely aligned with our map of tightness in the
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United States the South has been the victim of Mother Nature's Fury for years and it also has a lot of other threats there's also a lot of Founders effects that I talk about in The Book of the East Coast has been a diverse place for
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centuries uh as has been the west coast and Unity promotes looseness one of your ratings of the States has the five tightest as being Mississippi Alabama Arkansas Oklahoma Tennessee those strike me as some of the states where maybe a stranger is most likely to shoot you in
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a bar and I understand they may be tight as a kind of response to threat and danger but isn't this showing that there are always two Dimensions they have some Norms that are tight precisely because the places themselves are not tight and
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things can spiral out of control and be somewhat chaotic and disorderly and what you're measuring is always one side of the coin but it's exactly offset by other chaotic features of these places uh it's a great question I mean the
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south is both tight and it's also honor oriented the people who settled in the South were coming from contexts where honor was very important because of the weak institutions in that context so honor evolves when you need strong rules
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to regulate Behavior All honor cultures or many are tight but not all tight cultures are honor cultures so you can also separate out what's happening in the south from what's happening around the world I will say that the stranger getting shot in a bar is I would
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disagree with that because usually what's happening in these context is when you have a honor threat when you have an insult to someone we know from a lot of our evolutionary Game Theory models and other computational work that honor evolves in contexts where you need
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to defend your reputation so those kinds of contexts are places where people felt the need to defend themselves for survival so it's not that people just shoot each other randomly it's usually precipitated by some kind of threat does
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Silicon Valley have a strong honor culture I would say not no I think when you think about honor think about whether or not as Dove Cohen talks about your self-worth is negotiable with other people in honor cultures your self-worth
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is constantly negotiated with others when people insult you it's as if they've just stolen some of your self-worth in dignity cultures what Dove Cohen calls uh which I think characterize silkon Valley if someone insults you it's painful but it doesn't
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mean that you have just been your worth has been stolen and that's how our differentiate honor cultures from other types of cultures it's not as though people liked being insulted in any context but in some context that carries
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a lot of weight for your sense of self-worth now my colleague Garrett Jones is a big fan of what he calls the Deep Roots literature namely the notion that cultural traits are extremely persistent possibly even for centuries but at least for Generations so your
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Notions of tightness and looseness how much do they persist over time at least assuming the set of people living in a given territory is staying more or less the same same I think that tight loose is a dynamic construct that what we can
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see and I've collected data after for example the Boston bombing and after that event happened we could see immediate tightening in Boston people wanting stronger rules people starting to get skeptical of Outsiders we've seen this in the laboratory I can convince
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people at Maryland that they're living in an environment like Singapore that has like 20,000 people per square mile that activation of threat can make people immediately Tighter and wanting stronger rules wanting stronger leaders
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but if the threat is not chronic if it's not perpetuated then I think we go back to the attractor that we're used to in dynamical systems theory so it's not as though it can't change but in order to actually have a gigantic change in
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tightness you need to have either a very strong top- down threat that's persistent or different people that have now entered the the system and that's something that doesn't happen that much so that's why I think it's relatively stable but say China does not in a major
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way threaten Japan and the Japanese population continues to shrink drink and you end up with 50 million people living in what we now call Japan what's your sense of the speed of adjustment Japan will then become a much looser culture
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and how long does that take is it more like 20 years 200 years or how do you think about that I think that someone like Joe Henrik might argue that it would take a long time several hundred years I think that people through socialization through social learning
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are trained to act as though to train to follow the Norms of their previous generations Ron inkhart also talks about change takes a long time in in his data over over years and years um to happen and that this is not something that we
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can witness change happening overnight so you mention in your book that population density in the year 1500 has fairly High predictive power what does it predict it predicts tightness so imagine you living in Singapore uh which
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I'm sure you've you've visited sure 20,000 people per square mile it makes sense to ban gum large quantities of gum in that context that's exactly what we leenu did he's kind of a brilliant cultural psychologist in my point of view he the level of threat the
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Singapore experienced both ecologically and in terms of diversity having many different cultural groups and he decided we have to have tight rules here he actually talks about it in his autobiography and the gum issu is very
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interesting it he basically saw people in this very crowded context were taking their gum throwing on the ground and was causing a national mess so overnight he sort of said guys we got a ban gum you wouldn't find that New Zealand that has
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50 people per square mile when you have a lot of people per square mile you need rules to help you coordinate to avoid chaos isn't Singapore evidence of low assistance though because in the 1950s sanitation levels were pretty low in
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Singapore early in the 20th century it wasn't even that well populated so lewu comes he makes a lot of big changes it seems to show you can change the equilibrium pretty readily if you do the right things well that's right he did he was a very good example of a top- Down
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influence that was very much deliberate and it was very systematic so in that particular case I think he's a good example of when cultural change can happen when it's deliberate when it's top down and when it's necessary I mean
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in Singapore there's good reasons why you have to sacrifice Liberty for security given the context one of my readers wrote to me and suggested correctly or not that about 70% of the variation in a people's values can be explained by wealth do you agree just
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this one variable wealth much more important than anything else true or false um I would say that wealth is obviously very important it predicts in the collectivism literature high levels of group orientation in our data we don't find any direct connection between
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GDP per capita and tightness you have very tight cultures that are wealthy like Singapore and Japan and you have very loose cultures that struggle so in our data actually um what we can see is that there's no real main effect of GDP
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on the strength of norms but doesn't that mean though if there's no correlation that both tightness and looseness in some way they don't work so looseness doesn't get you more Innovation tightness doesn't get you more order so are they then a kind of
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epip phenomenon sort of how people answer questions or how they set their clocks and synchronization but they don't really Drive what people actually care about in the country which is wealth yeah I think actually what we find in our data is a curval linear
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effect of GDP so extremely loose and extremely tight cultures both have low GDP they have low happiness they have higher instability this kind of Goldilocks principle is very important when it comes to the strength of norms that groups might need to Veer tight or
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loose based on their ecologies but as they get more extreme and for different reasons they wind up being unsuccessful both in terms of monetary wealth but also in terms of their happiness very very tight cultures tend to be very
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oppressive and what durkheim would say they they want to escape from this kind of Oppression but very very loose cultures those usually which are coming from very autocratic contexts that have dismantled like the Ukraine they tend to
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experience a lot of anemy as durkheim would say and total disorder unpredictability and they're not sustainable either this principle of um too much or too little constraint I think is applicable to many domains it relates to free speech it relates to the
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brain when the brain is too synchronized or too little synchronized it produces different brain disorders when we have too little choice or too much Choice it produces a lot of problems when we have too many rules or Too free rules when
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we're raising our children it produces problems so this principle of having a balance in terms of the strength of norms I think is important and that's why I think wealth is important but it's not determinate of human behavior your
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Broad View Norms are actually not very functional they may try to do certain things no no no but they fail no no no I saying the extreme nature of norms is problematic we need Norms we can't operate without Norms we wake up from the moment we get up in the in the
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morning to the moment we go back to to bed we have been following Norms thousands of norms oh sure you need some Norms but a particular pattern of norms as defined in terms of its tightness or looseness it won't make you wealthier it
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won't make you happier as long as you avoid the extreme So within a broad range the norm at the macro level it has particular effects but again the things people care about wealth and happiness it fails to deliver or not I think
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people don't just care well actually I'll say that again the extremes are what produce the problems but when we look at groups that are tight and that are not extreme they provide a lot of things that people need they provide a lot of order they provide a lot of
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synchrony synchron is really important as a very basic phenomenon feeling like you're aligned with others it produces a lot of cooperation but it also has a a detriment of creativity looseness when it's not too extreme makes people really
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creative uh it makes people really open and to different people so there are definitely huge advantages to both tightness and looseness depending on your Vantage Point now you mentioned Joe Henrik before he has this idea of what
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he calls weird psychology and weird is an acronym for Western educated industrialized Rich de Democratic and I think as I understand his view people who are weird are just fundamentally different in terms of their Norms there's not some kind of spectrum or
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Continuum there's simply a fundamental break in human civilization do you agree with that or what's your perspective I I I would say that this idea of weird is you know predates years and years the of psychology the reason why crosscultural
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psychology developed in the first place is because people were really concerned that American Psychology was based on a very strange samples that's ignoring 70% of the world so this weird idea has been with us for a long time um I would say
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that no there's not you know kind of this discontinuous nature where there's one Society that's so unusual the difference in the United States from other cultures is in the type of individualism that we endorse we're not just focused on privacy and on
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Independence we're focused on what I call vertical individualism and that's competitive individualism that is different than other Western cultures like Scandinavia Australia that are much more horizontal in their individualism so the weirdness of the United States in
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many ways is its form of individualism and I think that there's a lot of ways we can examine cultural constructs and find variation around the world but we don't in this country actually seem all that rational to me in the way that that
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weird might predict general question about what we can ever know about culture so as you know a lot of people who work in areas with large numbers of data points and wellp specified models they're very critical of cross-cultural papers because they think we don't
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really know the true model we can't write it down there are all these big interaction effects at the macro level we're not sure how to trace them maybe the tests have low statistical power or it's hard to come up with causal tests
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at all I mean what what's your response to those kind of criticisms is your view well they're misunderstanding the econometrics this is actually as good as a lot of other empirical work or is your view well we know culture is important
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it's like either this or the anthropologists and this is telling us something how do you place yourself in this debate on crosscultural econometrics yeah it's a great question I think that every method that any of us use is very limited in what we can say
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about any particular study I've always been a big fan of theory is testing Theory and as with as many methods as humanly possible and that's how I sort of think about crosscultural psychology we can't take one paper that has you
22:06
know 35 Nations and come to any massive conclusion about that or strong conclusion about that we have to then try to replicate that theory with other methods whether it's using computational models using Neuroscience looking to traditional societies with totally
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different methods we just spent a couple years coding over a hundred uh samples in terms of the strength of norms in various different domains with ethnographies and I really curious to see with my work can I see the theory replicating with different types of
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methods my group at Maryland is really fiercely interdisiplinary because we want to bring in methods that can help us replicate Theory so that's my sort of approach to these issues given that any particular study is going to be flawed
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in many ways your own work aside what would be a few generalizations about culture that you think we've learned empirically and follow from theory that you more or less agree with or believe in I would say that we've learned that
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culture is not random that it evolves for semi-adaptive reasons given the kinds of environments that people place that doesn't mean all cultural traits values Norms have been adaptive but many are and that I think people don't realize that cultures are not just
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accidental that they um there's some rationale to cultural differences and actually once we realize that and we can start to document that I think it produces a lot more empathy when you're traveling when you're learning about other cultures when you start to think
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wait if I lived in that context whether it's the US south or whether it's in Sri Lanka or wherever it is or Japan that you also would likely support the norms and values that are being cultivated if they were helpful for your survival so I
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tend to uh think about cultures being quasi rational how bad is the replication crisis in social psychology it relates not so much to your work but it's become a big issue what's your view I'm actually really proud of what psychology is doing I think that
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transparency is really important I think best practices identifying them are important I I'm really excited about this revolution we would call it I would say that cross-cultural psychologists are not too uh unfamiliar with this kind
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of replication crisis because for years and years we know that when you try to replicate something even in a different state let alone another country you are going to be dealing with hundreds of rival hypotheses whether it's different
24:20
instructions uh interpretations of the instructions or different motivations of the subjects the interactions with the experimenter they're all things that can produce null effect effects or they can dramatically change your effects and
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we're in the business crosscultural psychologist of having problems replicating basic American findings for many many years and I think what's interesting is that what you see in the replication crisis and the recent pnas paper that the papers that didn't
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replicate very well were Red by other scientists as having a lot of contextual factors that might weigh in on them and so I think it's really important as we go through the replication crisis to kind of think about that we're trying to
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replicate things and we have to understand that if they're very much influenced by the social context there's a risk that they won't be replicated that doesn't mean that the theory doesn't matter I think the risk and I'll now talk a couple of seconds about the
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replication crisis risks is that people will throw out the theory with the bathwater whatever the metaphor might be that we're in this business now of just seeing can we replicate this in one other context as just an example there
25:21
was an attempt to replicate some kind of race relations uh question that was done in LA in Italy now that to me as a cross-culture psychologist is silly but it could also be that we try to replicate something in Kansas it might
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be different so people I think need to be collaborative as they seek to replicate to understand the social context in which the phenomenon has been tested and make sure when things don't replicate that there might be a good reason why it hasn't replicated as you
25:45
mentioned before in your work there's a notion that fear of Outsiders or natural disasters or a sense of threat it can make a culture tighter now Jonathan height and some other researchers they've talked about how a sense of disgust can make personal moral views in
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some way more conservative or arguably tighter do you think this is ultimately the same phenomenon or are they two separate mechanisms here I yeah I think that's a great question I think that there are two separate mechanism disgust
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is not necessarily an emotion that relates to fear but both might relate to needing stronger rules in order to coordinate behavior in those context so disease threat or pathogen threat usually is something that could be
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related to disgust but that's different than the fear of Invasion Fury invasion is not activating disgust it's activating something that where you feel as a collective that you need to coordinate your action to face that threat but how people respond to a
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pandemic when they come it looks a lot like a war right you have quarantines you have people band together there's a fair amount of central planning yeah I just don't think it activates disgust I would say the same thing with natural
26:49
disasters if we're worried about a natural disaster happening at Maryland we don't start feeling disgusted we feel fear but they might both produce and we have seen that pathogens produce tightness uh uh as in the both the lab and also in the field we see that other
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threats that require coordination also produce tightness but they're not mediated through feelings of disgust how do the categories of loose and tight map on to traditional gender roles is there a gender-based difference saying how
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people respond to fear or a sense of threat I haven't actually seen many much evidence for gender differences in response to threat I will say that women minorities people of lower Social Power tend to live in tighter worlds so that
27:32
is how I think about the connection of of gender and race to tightness actually I think that in in the past we've kind of thought about power is allowing people to violate norms and to have a lot of latitude and that's a looseness
27:48
phenomenon people who are in high power positions live in looser worlds they're not as accountable whereas people in lower social statuses are much more accountable they have to be worried about rule violations to a much greater extent so that might produce more of a
28:02
prevention oriented mentality as mediated by having to survive those tight environments is Stephen Pinker correct that human progress is improving basic culture basically all the time I I agree with Stephen A Lot on sort of how much we've come in terms of threat if
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you compare you know hundreds of years ago the kinds of things we experienced I disagree with him though in the sense that I think that we have to be mindful of of looming threats things like climate change there are certain threats
28:29
uh like violence that have been dramatically reduced but there's other Collective threats that that we have to be mindful of are cultures in general becoming tighter or looser over time I mean many people would think that they're becoming looser but actually you
28:42
could see here in the US that lots of evidence that you know we see tightening in the United States I don't think it's a healthy tightening per se I think it's involving a lot of fake threat or exaggerated threat I think the
28:54
Confluence of leaders that are activating threat as as well as social media that amplifies threats and people pay attention to these threats this is the availability heris as you know in cognitive science when we hear about um an immigrant who's just shot someone
29:08
it's very Salient to us much more Salient than uh you know another person in another state who's an American citizen shooting their whole family and so we OV exaggerate these threats and as a result uh it produces the desire for
29:19
stronger rules and strong leaders so I think that looseness es and flows and I think it depends on the perceived or actual level of threat in the environment Geographic cross State Mobility is down about 50% from its post war peak in this country how is that
29:33
changing our culture I think Mobility is a really critical aspect of um of tight loose in the sense that when you have lower Mobility um you have less exposure to differences in opinions differences in Traditions and it tends to promote
29:46
tightness reinforces tightness lots of Mobility affords looseness and we've seen that empirically and we know that mobility in some of our computational models is really infecting ethnocentrism um in axelrod's famous paper on the
30:00
evolution of ethnocentrism he would argue that ethnocentrism is in inevitable but actually in our data we could see that high mobile contexts actually are much less ethnocentric so Mobility is really part and posle of looseness how much does it matter if at
30:14
all that so much of the western world is now post-christian for social norms such as tightness and looseness do we fear different things because we're not so religious anymore I can't really speak to the religious differences what can
30:27
say is that when people feel threatened they tend to desire different aspects of God from our research uh they want a more tight monitoring punishing God in our research U when they feel threatened by natural disasters or conflict so I
30:42
think that even religion is both a source of tightness but it could be affected by the ecology in which people are embedded what was it like for you when you moved from New York state to Champagne Urbana for your graduate work uh it was culture shock no question
30:57
about it I I went to a small school for undergrad Upstate New York at Colgate and I was really looking forward to being in a city and when I heard about Harry Tris and his work and I thought oh my gosh I'd love to work with him and
31:09
got in there it was devastating to have to go live in in another small town but I would say that it was the most amazing uh graduate experience mainly because of the interdisciplinarity of the of the context so I got over the the culture
31:22
shock relatively quickly but what surprised you the most about actually living in champagne or B um I would say the politeness uh in our research you know loose states are very rude and tight states are more polite more Norm Abiding and I'm someone who's
31:37
used to kind of flipping people off as a friendly gesture um and you know New Yorkers are known for interrupting people and uh I have a lot of relatives in the midwest so we've negotiated these these differences in culture over the
31:50
years but that was probably the biggest shock also the just the general geography it was very flat and you know very different than Upstate New York do tide or loose culture scapegoat more scapegoat in terms of take someone from within the community consider them to be
32:05
in some way at fault correctly or not treat them as a sacrificial victim which is done very often in American political culture and Anda an ongoing ritual through which that victim Falls and then the community feels cleansed as a result
32:18
allene Gerard I would suspect that tight cultures do have more of that kind of phenomenon because people who are different are seen as dangerous we actually have students go around the world in tight and loose cultures wearing even something as minor as a
32:31
facial stigma like wart I brought them warts to wear in their face or tattoos where they were wearing nose rings and we asked them to seek help in city streets or in malls and in the tightest of cultures people were helped much less
32:42
they were they were really much less friendly to them and much less helpful as compared to lose cultures and I think in small communities when someone is threatening the social order then scapegoating is possibly a response to that what do you think of five Factor
32:55
personality theory as a psychologist how good is it I would say it's a it's an approximation to try to explain lots of variation uh as a cross-cultural psychologist I would say that it's not necessarily the only uh personality
33:09
Dimensions that are are relevant around the world there's some researcher in uh China that suggest that there's a six dimension of interpersonal relatedness that hasn't been found with the big five Factor this is what's so exciting about
33:20
crosscultural research because when you generate Theory and research in one context it doesn't mean that you're not deficient in that theory and you have to go to other cultures to think well do we need a sixth factor or what might be
33:31
contaminating about those factors in other cultures maybe some of these dimensions are not as relevant in other cultures so the construct space itself is what we're trying to really look at in crosscultural research but I think the Big Five have been replicated I I do
33:45
think there's a lot to be said about it but I think that there's some variation around the world that would suggest additional dimensions are relevant if you could have data on something for your research that you don't have data
33:55
on right now to satisfy your curri curiosity what would that data be um I would say it would be data from thousands of years ago in terms of societal norms and ecology and in fact I'm teaming up with Peter churchin who I'm sure you know of who's developed
34:10
this fabulous database shat um and I'm trying to start to look at tit loo in the ancient record let's say you could go back in time A Thousand Years to any place on Earth there's no problem with disease and by definition you're fluent in the language for your own curiosity
34:26
and fun where would you choose I think I would go and hang out with Herodotus Herodotus why yeah I think I would just like to be traveling around with him and noticing what he's noticing I think the histories is one of the most fabulous
34:38
books that uh is really the first text in crosscultural Psychology uh and I would like to really witness what he looked at I would also say if I had another second place I'd like to go to Sparta because Sparta is a very fascinating place and even its neighbor
34:51
Athens at the time to kind of contrast uh the strength of norms that we see in those two contexts now in the middle of these discussions there's usually a segment overrated versus underrated and I'll toss out some names of things and
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you're free to pass on any one of them but please give us your opinion first and foremost Bethesda Maryland overrated or underrated I would say properly rated I think that Bethesda is a thriving place there's a lot of interesting restaurants
35:22
there's a lot of emerging culture Jazz and so forth um so I wouldn't say it's really over or underrated for me it's dull so I think it's overrated I would much rather live in Silver Spring or College Park or anywhere else in that
35:34
part of Maryland and Bethesda well I should say that as someone who lives in PG County near College Park that I do really love living in the extremely diverse environment of PG County I'm proud that my kids are in a context where they're learning about different
35:49
cultures now I think you also learn a lot of other cultures EMP Bethesda as well um I just think that you're more minority if you're a right Jewish kid when you're in PG County and the world looks very different and you're and the
36:01
way you think is affected by that and I'm glad that they've had that experience the TV show The Americans oh um it's probably underrated and I'm on episode 10 of season six right now and I'm not a big TV fan I don't watch a lot of Television but I started watching
36:20
the Americans this summer and I was hooked by the first episode and it's it's just phenomenal I I I think it's ated to the extent that everyone on this planet should watch that show what is interesting for the social scientist in
36:32
that show I would say it's the ability to be inauthentic all the time you know having to play a role not just a dangerous role but also just go against your your inner instincts at all times I think it's also extremely interesting to
36:47
watch the Dynamics of the couple on this show in terms of their loyalty it's a tight loose issue um I'm not going to get into details for the audience but you know you have one person who really wants to get rid of the allegiance who questions um what they're being told to
37:01
do and another that for a very long time thinks no we when we're given an order we we abide by it and that conflict is fascinating from a titw perspective overrated or underrated Staten Island uh I would say probably underrated um but that's because I
37:18
actually am familiar with Staten Island we've had relatives that live there I think it's probably the last undiscovered place around the city Brooklyn has become kind of a shishi place to live but Staten Island has not
37:29
and I think I mean there's great deli there there's I've I've spent some time there my my late mother is buried in Stanton Island so I I have a very fond feeling for that for that place direct talk in negotiations overrated why um it's works very well in certain
37:46
ecologies where cutting to the chase where time is money where you're taught to be authentic where face and honor are not that important as cultural construct trucks it's again it's important in certain context but it's very much um
38:00
backfires in context where trying to maintain phas trying to Signal respect to people is more important and therefore more indirect communication is is more relevant in those contexts so do Americans do too much direct talk when
38:13
they negotiate I would say as a generally speaking no no question about it one of the biggest problems in negotiation is again it's around cultural intelligence it's taking our ways of doing things and just applying them around the world without thinking
38:27
about do these Styles match the context there's a reason why these these things work here but they might not work in Egypt or in Japan and I think it's really important because we're training our students our mbas our you know political scientists our lawyers to
38:43
adapt a certain style of negotiating that just doesn't work in other parts of the world economics what's the biggest thing wrong with us you can be harsh I would say that economics can be somewhat a theoretical in the sense that psychologists are
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concerned with mediating mechanism what explains the phenomenon whenever I've given a talk to economists and I try to open up the black box of what I'm talking about they lose interest very quickly why do you need to understand the mechanism just give me the you know
39:12
kind of the what the effects are I'm not saying all economists are like this and I've spent quite a bit of time with people up at Harvard Nathan nun other people that really do care about these things so I don't want to overgeneralize
39:23
I also think experimental economics has another set of problems but no tell us please well I think that a lot of it again um is the strength to it I like I've always admired the lack of deception that's used in experiment economics and and and in Psychology for
39:38
a very long time people felt okay with deceiving subjects because we had new subject pools that wouldn't be spoiled by that deception nowadays when you use Mechanical Turk the same people are engaging in studies we have to be
39:49
concerned about this so I admire some parts of experimental economics and again on the theory side I'm a big proponent of theory and I think the Theory comes first and a lot of times we just see these kind of effects happening
40:01
that you can nudge people in this direction or that direction how replicable there are is a question but really what's the underlying Theory that's being tested I think sometimes is open to question other than yourself and triandis but who's a psychologist that
40:14
economists should read more of whom they don't not just economists but intelligent lay readers I would say um someone like Joe McGrath he's deceased he was a big groups researcher at Illinois when I was there and he really uh created many circumplex I'm always a
40:29
big fan of a circumplex whereby he can delineate what kind of tasks groups are engaging uh what kind of conflicts they might have I think he's a phenomenal theorist uh also wrote a lot about research methods that would be useful
40:42
the judgments we have to make in research that he wrote about in several books Jordan Peterson is trying to resurrect the reputation of Carl Young Who of course was a psychologist what do you think probably not a good idea why
40:54
not um maybe the ideas that he had but the methods or the test of those ideas would need to be really um approached very differently how much of Freud has held up um I would say not a whole lot although some of his very big Ideas really were not noticed as much um I
41:11
think his ideas about how societal constraints affect Psychopathology are really interesting and I write about it in the book could you give us an example of that um just the kind of neurosis he would argue when people feel that they
41:22
have to abide by a lot of strong Norms I think he was conflicted also about how do we create a balance between freedom and constraint and that kind of idea he picked up on in Civilization and its discontent but it hasn't been really
41:35
something that people talk about a lot in general in the history of psychology are there unmind insights in the history of psychological thought or is virtually all of it incorporated into the Contemporary wisdom that's a great
41:47
question I really think that there's so much about history that psychologists ignore and and this is not just psychologist it's it's it's in any discipline that if if anything our science should be more historical it should be trying to address questions
42:00
that are not just relevant right now but to the past and that it will form our methods now to think about history and evolution and that's why I start to team up with people who are studying history to try to test questions that are
42:12
informing now with previous Behavior we almost act as though life started here now in the 21st century one of the problems I think also in the science the sociology of Science and psychology is that we're getting much more a historical Even in our science the
42:25
length of journals makes it such that people don't review literature that happened 50 60 years ago even in the science and I think it's a big problem and that we need to make sure that our theories are not just getting rehashed
42:36
because people don't know what happened 60 years ago part of that is some of the practices in journals but part of is that that people want to create something sometimes that maybe is old wine and new bottles do social psychologists have anything to teach
42:49
CEOs About Management oh of course yeah of course I mean a lot of management you know PE people I teach Executives I teach negotiation mainly in Beijing for the Smith school and you know what what happens with MBA students in general is
43:03
that they want to learn about Finance and Accounting and it's only later when they become older that they realize you know what I really need to understand human behavior that's the stuff that's really difficult is how to manage how to lead how to motivate how to manage
43:16
conflict like these are the critical skills that managers need they can learn those other skills pretty easily but they need Psychology to understand how to actually deal with human behavior so say I'm a o and I want an entry point
43:27
into understanding academic psychology as a research Enterprise where and how should I start um I think in terms of your education even me how you would get educated well there's some great textbooks that you can learn and organizational behavior uh it's like
43:41
people don't respond well to textbooks which maybe I would say maybe Harvard Business Review um Harvard Business Review I think that there's some really smart accessible types of papers that come out in hbr that help people to understand human behavior give real
43:53
world examples of how they apply I've been just writing about for example Elon Musk and some of his problems and how they reflect his genius his looseness but how much you know he needs to tighten up that operation we write about
44:05
merges and Acquisitions and and how they uh succeed or fail and the kind of cultural factors that managers and CEOs should know about you would think that in those context they would understand and do cultural you know due diligence
44:16
before they sort of get married with other companies but they don't and so hbr helps people to understand the principles and scientific principles that inform management but in the context where they're they're given real world examples is Academia a tight or
44:28
Rel culture I would say that it's pretty tight IT the replication crisis a particular I think is making it even tighter that's another possible downside of the the movement in the sense that it got gets personal people sometimes are
44:44
accusing people of things that are you know reflecting their intent and this is making people more cautious or it might make people more cautious it might actually inhibit creativity if it's not something that we develop Norms of ility
44:56
for I've seen it happen with many people who um because of the loose nature of the internet which itself has a lot of advantages but also is a a cesspool of anti-normative behavior it promotes a lot of problems when it comes to
45:10
reputations and and therefore might limit creativity how did Academia become such a tight culture is it that it feels under threat does it have some notion of population density but in kind of intellectual space or what's the transmission mechanism um it's a great
45:24
question I wish said by the way I think disciplines vary in terms of their tightness so I wouldn't say that we can Define all Academia as tight but I think that because of the tenure process because of sometimes the demands of the
45:35
task can actually cause TI of lose to evolve when you um need to get tenure when you are being evaluated and monitored you know that tends to produce tip mentality it tends to produce some elements of risk aversion and that again could limit creativity I I tend to for
45:53
whatever reason and of course now I'm a full Professor but but even when I was assistant professor I thought if I'm going to be in this job I want to do something that's risky that's interesting that's and I try to encourage my students to do that to
46:04
think big to not be inhibited by the Journal space or what you know what might be expected um that incremental contributions are not nearly as interesting as as as big contributions even if you failed a lot which we all do now you're well known for your work on
46:19
negotiation why are women worse negotiators than men if indeed they are I never heard I I don't know where that comes from but uh cuz meta analyses would say that when there are gender differences they tend to be pretty small
46:30
that is to say that situational factors really do uh affect behavior and outcomes in negotiation a lot and so there's not huge differences in in gender what I do find that differentiates women and men in general but this is again delimiting it further
46:44
white women of a certain social class compared to white men is that women are less likely to get to the negotiation table so we can think about putting people in a lab and having them negotiate and setting their behavior but
46:55
we can think about who gets to the table in the first place this is what we call propensity to negotiate and we started this research program with Linda Babcock she's an economist at Carnegie melon and we can see that women actually are less
47:05
likely to ask for things than men men get to the negotiation table uh more often and so we've been studying that phenomenon why it's the case it turns out actually there's some kind of rationality to it other people have showed that when women do negotiate when
47:18
they do initiate negotiations they tend to experience a lot of backlash and I would argue that that would apply to other forms of lower status whether it's social class or minority status that there's some sense that if I do ask for
47:31
more things that I'm going to get some negative feedback tightness there's a frequently communicated result it may or may not be true but that women have a harder time asking for raises do you agree well that's an example of you know
47:42
in negotiation situations you don't get a memo that says it's time for you to do this they're very ambiguous weak situations is what we'd call them so you need to sort of perceive the opportunity then you need to feel comfortable and
47:54
and emotionally comfortable with with taking on that opportunity and so asking for raises is something that um involves all those processes you have to perceive that it's even possible most times when you're around people who are who are
48:07
very powerful they might tell you to do this mentors tell you it's time for you to do this I tend to I should say negotiate a lot so I'm not sure and that's always been the case I've never felt like it's it's a problem to ask for something ask and you receive or you
48:20
know you're not going to get something if you don't ask for it but there are some social consequences to asking for women so it's a delicate balance of of how you do that or Americans less patient as negotiators oh yeah and why
48:32
to to toille uh really noticed this as an American trait years ago uh that Americans seem to be pretty impatient you know we live in a context uh I think an underrated Concept in Psychology is metaphor uh we live in a context where Sports metaphors game metaphors are
48:48
really guiding a lot of interaction in general but also in negotiation and in those contexts the clock is ticking people feel like they have they have to get things done quickly and that's where the impatience comes from it comes from
49:00
certain metaphors um when you're in a relationship metaphor the clock is not ticking the relationship metaphor is much more common in places like East Asia or the Middle East where reputation building and and and understanding one's honor and building trust is not
49:14
something that you could put a a time limit on so Americans tend to operate in certain metaphoric Frameworks and that guides their impatience and to some extent that's okay here in the but it doesn't work so well in other places
49:26
putting aside your political views but just If You observe Donald Trump as a negotiator as a psychologist what strikes you you know I think Donald Trump has a very classic negotiation style it's a Distributive negotiation style it's a win- lose style it works in
49:40
certain contexts especially context where there's one issue or when there's very little expected future interaction but what Donald Trump does is he takes that style to International politics where these context the structure of these situations is very different
49:54
there's usually many issues at the table there's expected future interaction Trump also not only you know uses this distributive tactics like threats he makes threats you know very easily and psychologists know that threats create a
50:07
lot of reactants when you threaten me I'm going to threaten you right back when I teach students how to negotiate and I train them if someone threatens you you go right back to interest you tell them I can threaten you but let's
50:15
go back to interest that's really where we're going to make a lot of action in this negotiation so his style is is really mismatched with the context that he's in I'll say one more thing as a crosscultural olist is that Trump as many negotiators need to do is to
50:28
develop cultural intelligence in our data cultural intelligence is just as important as general intelligence or emotional intelligence and that's one thing he really doesn't understand as the cultural context that there's so many ways you can violate someone's
50:41
honor in a negotiation I've studied this among hundreds of professional negotiators in the Middle East if I'm on my phone and negotiating with you that's a sign that I'm not respecting you enough to put my phone away if I wear
50:50
something that's not formal in a negotiation that's a sign of disrespect that could be as important as the economics of the negotiation so Trump needs to gain some cultural intelligence in my point of view how can people best
51:02
learn cultural intelligence say they're a prospective Diplomat or politician or CEO what's the path to learning cultural IQ yeah I think immersing yourself in different cultures I think it's studying crosscultural psychology because I think
51:14
part of the problem is that and anthropology and and other disciplines I think part of the problem is that a lot of people get these dues and don'ts very superficial aspects of culture when they're being sent on an expatriate assignment they're usually selected
51:27
because their technical competence not because they're culturally competent so you need to really see it as a lifelong at least I do um quest to understand what are the cultural differences and why why did they evolve I'll close with
51:38
a few questions about the Michelle galand production function which is a classic thing we do in these chats what's your secret to how you've been so productive so as to publish so much other than just hard work right that's obvious but what is it you can teach
51:52
other people about how to be productive well I would say that you know I think having a Passion it sounds pretty trite but having a passion means you'll never work a day in your life I feel like being paid to do what I do is an
52:08
unbelievable feat because I love what I do like I wake up and I'm just crazy curious about what I do and I think that when you're really curious and really passionate that it will just drive the rest it's you know work doesn't seem
52:20
like work uh I also think it's important I mean our group you know a good idea can come from anywhere it could come from you know a lab manager it doesn't have to be a postto and I think in our group you know we really try to practice no one's different it doesn't matter
52:34
what your level of education is you know it's matter a matter of just being engaged and I've had a lot of visitors comment on that practice in our group that anyone I like to tell people come up with the stupidest idea possible like
52:45
I want people to feel psychologically safe whatever they're rank to come up with ideas many of them like I have many ideas that are not good but some of them might be good now there's always a kind of implicit bidding for Quality co-authors a lot of
52:59
people will want to work with them so you're choosing co-authors they're choosing you in turn what is it you think you know about spotting talent in collaborators that maybe other people don't I think it's commitment I mean this again sounds pretty obvious but
53:12
it's commitment to you know and passion for similar questions but having very different perspectives on them so uh and these interdisiplinary collaborations are just when they can work and many of them don't they're just beautiful
53:26
because you have people who are interested in the same questions and yet we have such different complimentary expertise that it makes for like really interesting research I could say that with Dana now at Maryland and his students who have been trained in
53:39
evolutionary Game Theory collaborating with crosscultural psychologists we eat together breakfast every other week and maybe that helps we always are having our meetings at restaurants but we really are committed to the same
53:50
problems but we have very different perspectives on them uh some collaborations are harder I remember I was working uh as part of a murri grant with an Israeli computer scientist SQ clous really brilliant woman and she said to me Michelle when she came to
54:03
Maryland she was developing computer agents to negotiate and I wanted to use these computer agents um and and bring her work into our work on negotiation and she said Michelle I'm not interested at all about human behavior and I was
54:14
crushed at the time and I said to her you know what while we're being honest I don't really care about your computer agent and then we realized like okay we're going to have to start somewhere how are we going to integrate our
54:24
interests and turns out I said to her look your agent is going to be a better agent which is her her Quest if it understands culture and I can use your agent to collect data in a very standardized way in Lebanon in the US so I can actually benefit from your work we
54:37
never had a common problem per se but we were able to integrate our interest enough and get past the really do I want to work with you kind of stage so it takes a lot of commitment and those complimentary skills can help both parties Advance their research agendas
54:50
last question what is it that other academics don't know about teaching and mentoring um I would say it's like these are like your kids right I mean there're when you accept a student a PhD student like they're you're going to be
55:05
committed to them for not just five years but forever you know I feel like my students they'll write me emails when they're grow up for tenure or they're gr for full whatever and they're like I need some mentoring and I always tell my
55:16
students like once a mentor you're always a mentor these are going to become your family that's at least my Approach and I think I still rely on Harry trandis I've sent them every chapter this book He's 90 years old and you know we've just recently wrote a
55:28
paper together and I left champagne years ago so I think it's a long-term commitment and it's incredible to watch your students you know grow up it's painful when they leave always is Michelle gend thank you very much thanks for listening to
55:43
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show