Culture as the menacing force behind today’s crazy politics
A book excerpt and interview with Michele Gelfand, an author and psychologist at the University of Maryland
By N.B.
The influence of culture on politics is profound, explaining the rule-bound Japanese, orderly Swiss, laissez-faire French and gun-totin’, freedom-lovin’ Americans. That, at least, is the thesis of Michele Gelfand, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland. In her book, “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World”, she sets out how deep cultural codes drive human behavior, and how they affect the strength of social norms.
Ms Gelfand differentiates between tight cultures, which have strict norms and punishments, from loose cultures, which are more permissive. This distinction, she argues, helps us to understand differences across nations, social classes, organisations and families. As part of The Economist’s Open Future initiative, we asked Ms Gelfand several questions about her ideas. Her replies are followed by an excerpt from her book, on the “Goldilocks Principle” of balancing both sorts of cultures.
* * *
The Economist: Tight and loose cultures seem irreconcilable. Are they destined to be in conflict with one another?
Michele Gelfand: Tight and loose are actually compatible—each of their strengths is the other’s liability. Tight cultures have a lot of order; they have less crime, more uniformity and more self-control. Loose cultures can be disorganised and have a suite of self-regulation problems. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. They’re more open to different people (immigrants, minorities, the stigmatised), different ideas and change—issues that tight cultures struggle with. Moreover, many complex tasks require both tight and loose cultural elements. Take organisational innovation. It requires looseness to come up with cutting-edge ideas but it requires tightness to implement them and scale up. The best leaders are those that are “ambidextrous”—they can find synergies between tight and loose cultural elements.
The Economist: Can tightness and looseness of societies really be measured?
Ms Gelfand: In our paper published in Science, we developed multiple measures of the strength of norms. For example, in our surveys, we’ve shown that people around the world share their perceptions of how strict or permissive the norms are in their society. These measures, in turn, are correlated with other indicators of compliance with norms and tolerance for deviance from other databases, such as measures of monitoring (using the number of police per capita), openness of the media, sexual permissiveness, and even the uniformity of clocks in city streets.
The Economist: How did these disparities between tight and loose cultures emerge and will the planet’s increasing interconnectedness eventually push us all towards a single equilibrium?
Ms Gelfand: There’s a hidden logic for why these differences evolve: groups that have experienced a lot of threat tend to be tighter. The threat can come from a variety of sources, such as a high level of natural disasters and famine, a scarcity of resources, the potential of invasions, a high population density, economic uncertainty, etc. It makes sense: Groups under threat need rules to coordinate to survive. Cultures that have less threat can afford to be more permissive. There are exceptions, but I’ve found that this general principle helps to explain tight-loose differences across nations, states, social classes, organisations and in pre-industrial societies.
It’s doubtful that there will be any single equilibrium of tight-loose in our increasingly interdependent world. High tech and the information age foster looseness. Threats from climate change and conflict can push us toward tightness. But I’m optimistic that as the world collectively deals with mounting threats, we may be able to harness tightness-looseness to improve collaboration, not just within cultures but between them. When we focus on developing strong norms that cut across ethnic and national lines—and build a larger global identity to deal with our planetary threats—cooperation can evolve at a much larger scale, to the benefit of all.
The Economist: Is globalisation pushing loose and tight cultures together in a way that makes both groups feel threatened?
Ms Gelfand: The tight-loose axis is clearly shifting with the advent of globalisation. We can see this divide increasingly separating tight, rural communities that relied on manufacturing from loose cities which are more diverse, mobile and that embrace globalisation—in countries all around the world. More and more, these groups are living in their own echo chambers, leading to extreme stereotyping and distrust. The need to promote acceptance and inclusion of others—and reduce feelings of threat—has never been more pressing. We need to find spaces for people from tight and loose cultures to interact in meaningful and positive ways.
Fortunately, this is already starting to occur. Research does show that when we can get people from different cultures to have meaningful contact, they see more similarities than differences. Leaders are also needed to bridge tight-loose divides, and help people to have empathy for those who are different from themselves.
The Economist: You’ve written about a so-called “Goldilocks Principle” of moderation between tight and loose cultures, but it seems like cultural and political polarisation is making compromises between ideas almost impossible.
Ms Gelfand: People often ask me “What’s better—tight or loose?” and I say: “Neither”. It’s all about cultural balance. Groups evolve to be tight or loose depending on their specific environmental pressures. But as they get extreme, they start having problems. Cultures that start getting extraordinarily tight tend to become repressive. But on the flip side, cultures that start getting really loose become unpredictable and chaotic. The same is true for companies, communities and even households. Parents that are too controlling or too laissez-faire produce poorly adapted kids.
The Goldilocks Principle is found on different levels and has the same implication: We should start diagnosing when groups veer too much in either direction and develop ways to have more balance. Not every domain needs to be tight or loose and we can negotiate that by developing “flexible tightness”—inserting more flexibility into a very tight system—or by developing “structured looseness,” by adding more structure into a very loose system.
In my book, I give specific examples of ways that nations, organisations and even parents have successfully negotiated tight and loose. Compromises are possible, once we recognise that we need elements of both order and openness in any cultural group.
The Economist: The tight-loose thesis is intriguing, but one reading is that it is a mere rehash of the old adage: “Everything in moderation”. The examples of parenthood and security v freedom sound familiar. What’s so original here?
Ms Gelfand: Scientists have long invoked the Goldilocks Principle of moderation—whether it’s climatologists’ “rare Earth hypothesis”, psychologists’ Yerkes-Dodson law of stress, or doctors who argue for the perfect balance within a drug. But we wondered: Does the Goldilocks Principle apply to the strength of social norms in human groups? While groups need to veer tight or loose for good reasons, we found that groups that got too extreme in either direction—too loose or too tight—were much more dysfunctional. You can also apply this principle to families, organisations and to many domains of life.
The Economist: Can a happy medium really be found? Wouldn’t the Goldilocks Principle just leave both sides unhappy?
Ms Gelfand: There is no “ideal” point for a society. Some societies will veer tighter than others for good reasons, such as threat—and thus would be seen as too tight for the loose groups who lack a threat. Think about a “normal distribution”: the middle here constitutes a range of scores. It’s the extremes that are problematic.
The Economist: Does culture have to change before politics can change?
Ms Gelfand: Culture certainly influences politics. For example, in our research in America and France, people who wanted a tighter culture—because they feel threatened—were supportive of politicians like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. But on the other hand, politics can also change culture. We’ve already seen how politicians both now and in history can exaggerate and amplify threats to tighten cultures. It works—at least for some time—because it taps into a deep evolutionary principle that when there is threat, people want strong rules and autocratic leaders. So the relationship between culture and politics can go in either direction.
* * *
The Goldilocks Principle From “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World,” by Michele Gelfand (Scribner, 2018)
What makes a society happy? Philosophers have been obsessed with this question since antiquity. The Greek philosophers Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato (circa 400 BC) considered happiness to be the ultimate purpose of human existence, echoing Buddha’s argument hundreds of years earlier that “contentment is the greatest wealth.”
Well-being is a crucial ideal for any society, but the question of how societies should be structured to maximize it remains a mystery. Long before I discovered the power of tight-loose to explain cultural differences between nations, many social scientists and philosophers were focusing on a crucial piece of the well-being puzzle: Should societies strive for maximal freedom or maximal order? Those who favored freedom claimed it allowed individuals to “self-actualize”—to realize their full potential—which, in turn, ensured societal well-being and economic progress. Meanwhile, those who emphasized the importance of order insisted that rules and regulations were critical for creating a secure and stable society that enabled prosperity.
After centuries of debate, the question remains unresolved: Which better promotes human welfare—freedom or constraint?
Could it be that the answer is neither? We theorized that both excessive freedom and excessive constraint would be costly to societal well-being. In particular, overly constraining or very tight environments severely limit individual choice and necessitate constant self-monitoring; on the flip side, overly permissive environments can promote normlessness and chaos. Either extreme—tight or loose—we reasoned could be damaging to societal happiness. In this view, it’s the balance of tight and loose—of constraint and freedom—that might be the critical societal ideal.
Avoiding extremes has actually been a popular topic for thousands of years. Writing about the “golden mean,” Aristotle argued that human virtues exist between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. In the second century BC, the Roman playwright Terence echoed this sentiment in his play Andria with the oft-repeated line “Not anything in excess.” We see a similar idea in the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang: Two opposing forces can reach a harmonious balance when brought together.
A less erudite text also teaches the value of moderation. In the endearing children’s story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” written by British writer Robert Southey in 1837, and since translated into over twenty languages, readers are transported to a magical world where bears live in their own houses, eat porridge, and speak. Now a common reference point in conversations about the value of balance and moderation, the folk tale has lent its name to a much invoked modern-day theory called “the Goldilocks Principle.”
From enjoying porridge at the optimal temperature to living on a habitable planet, humans rely on the “sweet spot” that the Goldilocks Principle offers to improve societal happiness. We wondered: Is there also a Goldilocks Principle for the strength of social norms?
The Curvilinear Happiness Hypothesis All cultures evolve to occupy a particular place on the tight-loose spectrum in response to their unique ecological and historical circumstances—including threat, mobility, and exposure to diversity. Some groups have to prioritize constraint over freedom, while others can prioritize freedom over constraint. This makes perfect sense: Groups ideally need to lean in the direction that is more or less adaptive to their environments.
But sometimes, societies can lean too far in either direction— becoming either too tight or too loose—which can keep them from functioning well, both psychologically as well as economically. Jesse Harrington, Pawel Boski, and I discovered this by gathering and analyzing measures of well-being in more than thirty different countries. What we found was fascinating: The nations that were extremely tight and extremely loose had the lowest levels of happiness and the highest levels of suicide. By comparison, nations that were less extreme on the tight-loose scale exhibited higher happiness scores, and lower suicide rates. The same was the case for depression. Of course, many factors affect people’s happiness, but these data show a clear pattern in which both very tight and very loose nations have lower happiness scores and higher suicide rates. In statistics, this is called a curvilinear relationship. We also found it with data on physical health, wealth, and stability.
The Goldilocks Principle, when applied to tightness-looseness, can explain how everything from nations to neurons can achieve optimal levels of functioning. These insights can also inform how we might increase our day-to-day well-being. Whether we’re navigating our closest relationships, trying to perform well at our work, or making big and small life decisions, we need to balance our natural preferences for more constraint or more freedom to be at our best. This means not allowing either extreme to dominate.
Take parenting. In our comparison of the lower and upper classes, some parents need to enforce stronger norms to help their children cope with threats like poverty, violence, and unemployment. But as with honeybees and our brains, extreme constraint or extreme latitude in families can cause problems. For example, when parents are extremely overprotective, they may produce children who are obedient at home, but lack personal discipline and self-confidence when outside their parents’ fastidious oversight. The mothers and fathers who keep their children on a tight leash and micromanage their daily activities are what is commonly referred to as “helicopter parents.” They hover. While on the surface, children who are the objects of such scrutiny may seem to be functioning well, studies suggest that many suffer from depression, anxiety, and lower life satisfaction.
Of course, parents who are exceedingly lax, permissive, and indulgent can be equally problematic. Children raised with few rules in place and little monitoring can develop poor academic habits and self- regulation skills. In their teenage years, they’re more likely than other kids to engage in underage drinking, substance abuse, and other risky behaviors.
The parenting “sweet spot,” where children have limits but also the freedom to make their own decisions, can produce healthier children.
The tight-loose Goldilocks Principle also applies to everyday decisions in other areas of life. Is it better to have many choices when making decisions, or very few? Again, the answer is neither. Having no choice can be problematic. Decades of research have shown that having some degree of personal autonomy is a robust predictor of well-being. However, though it might not be obvious, the other extreme—having too many choices—is also highly problematic.
Moving to one final arena, the Goldilocks Principle helps inform political debates over national security. In the United States, the tension between liberty and constraint erupted after 9/11 with the Patriot Act and the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance techniques, both of which allowed the U.S. government unprecedented monitoring of its citizens. These constraints have been hotly debated: Proponents argue that expanded surveillance powers are necessary to protect the country and its citizens from terrorism. Detractors, on the other hand, insist that these expanded government powers overstate the threat of terrorist acts in the country, unnecessarily curtailing the freedom and rights of citizens.
The trick, of course, is to emphasize security without infringing on civil liberties. This challenge resonates in other countries as well. “Both [security and freedom] are vital to our nation’s well-being,” said David Cameron, who later became the British prime minister, in a speech to the Center for Policy Studies in 2006. “So we should be permanently vigilant. We should never stop thinking hard about how to protect our security and freedom as our society and our circumstances change.” As in other aspects of our lives, striving for a middle ground on these issues—the tight-loose sweet spot—can help guide us toward greater national well-being. The problem comes when groups lean too far in one direction—when a nation facing security threats starts turning toward totalitarianism and infringes on individual rights, for example, or a loose nation veers toward lawlessness and suffers an uptick in violent crime.
Each culture may well have its own optimal level of tight-loose given the demands of its environment. But one thing is for sure: Extreme levels of tightness and looseness aren’t optimal for any group. When governments and their citizens become aware of the Goldilocks Principle of tight-loose, they may be better positioned to guard against these developments.
