Preface.  A must-read book for those who want to understand themselves, their family and friends, their culture and the world.  A new framework that gives clearer vision, rather than muddying it up by giving false understandings like astrology or seeing the world from economic and political rather than ecological and resource awareness.

Gelfand’s book about loose versus tight cultures has real world, life and death consequences.  She wrote an article in The Guardian about covid-19,  Why countries with ‘loose’, rule-breaking cultures have been hit harder by Covid, that says: “Back in March, I started to worry that loose cultures, with their rule-breaking spirit, would take longer to abide by public health measures, with potentially tragic consequences. I was hopeful that they would eventually tighten. All of our computer models prior to Covid suggested they would. But they didn’t. In research that tracked more than 50 countries, published this week in the Lancet Planetary Health, my team and I show that, taking into account other factors, loose cultures had five times the number of cases that tight cultures did, and more than eight times as many deaths.  Our  analysis of data from the UK revealed that people in loose cultures had far less fear of the Covid-19 virus throughout 2020, even as cases skyrocketed. In tight nations, 70% of people were very scared of catching the virus. In loose cultures, only 49% were.  Reality never bit in these populations in part because people in cultures that are adapted to low levels of danger didn’t respond as swiftly to the “threat signal” embodied by the pandemic when it came. This can happen in nature too. The most infamous case is the fearless dodo bird of Mauritius, which, having evolved without predators, became extinct within a century of its first contact with humans.”

In this book, Gelfand points out that “Singapore’s response to the 2003 SARS outbreak is a case in point. Soon after SARS hit, the Singaporean government quickly implemented strict rules and restrictions on people’s movement and somewhat intrusive early-detection measures, such as monitoring people’s temperature at schools, work, and households (thermometers were distributed to over a million people). Webcams were even installed in the homes of quarantined citizens, who were phoned at random points during the day and required to present themselves in front of the camera to ensure they didn’t leave home” and Singapore is among the best at reducing covid-19 deaths.

In light of the treasonous violent insurrection Trump set off in the Capitol in 2021, Gelfand is also prescient about Trump and how he manipulated the tight, conservative portion of the American population:  “…While Trump isn’t a cultural psychologist, he possessed an intuitive grasp of how threat tightens citizens’ minds and leads them to yearn for strong leaders who’ll combat these threats. He masterfully created a climate of threat: At campaign rallies throughout 2015 and 2016, Trump warned his ever-growing crowds that the United States was a nation on the brink of disaster. He cited mounting threats from Mexicans bringing violence across the border, global trade agreements and immigrants taking away jobs, radicalized Muslims plotting terror on American soil, and China “raping” the country. Throughout his campaign, he sent a clear message—that he was capable of restoring social order. “I alone can fix it”.   Perceptions of threat have led some in the working class to prefer populist leaders who promise to dismantle the social structures that have left them behind and restore traditional order. These leaders run on promises of delivering more tightness. Trump vowed to “restore law and order” to the American political system, tighten borders, keep out immigrants, and crack down on crime.

Months before the 2016 election a nationwide survey was conducted to peer into the minds of Trump supporters.  They answered questions about how fearful they felt about various external threats to the United States, such as ISIS and North Korea. They also responded to statements aimed at gauging their desire for cultural tightness. Those who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism. Concern about external threats also predicted support for many of the issues that Trump has championed, such as monitoring mosques, creating a registry of Muslim Americans, and deporting all undocumented immigrants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump had the most support in tight states—where citizens felt the most threatened.  Threats lead to desire for stronger rules, obedience to autocratic leaders, and—at worst—intolerance.

What follows are notes from my Kindle.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Gelfand M (2018) Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. Scribner.  

We may tease Germans for being excessively orderly or Brazilians for showing too much skin, but we rarely consider how these differences came about. Far beyond dress codes and pedestrian patterns, people’s social differences run deep and broad—from politics to parenting, management to worship, and vocations to vacations.

The diversity of human behavior is astonishing, especially since 96% of the human genome is identical to that of chimpanzees, whose lifestyles, unlike humans, are far more similar across communities.

Behavior, it turns out, largely depends on whether we live in a tight or loose culture. The side of the divide that a culture exists on reflects the strength of its social norms and the strictness with which it enforces them. All cultures have social norms—rules for acceptable behavior—that we regularly take for granted. As children, we learn hundreds of social norms—to not grab things out of other people’s hands; to walk on the right side of the sidewalk (or the left, depending on where you live); to put on clothes each day. We continue to absorb new social norms throughout our lives: what to wear to a funeral; how to behave at a rock concert versus a symphony; and the proper way to perform rituals—from weddings to worship. Social norms are the glue that holds groups together; they give us our identity, and they help us coordinate in unprecedented ways. Yet cultures vary in the strength of their social glue, with profound consequences for our worldviews

Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The former are rule makers; the latter, rule breakers. In the United States, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to dog waste. By contrast, in Singapore, where norm violations are rare, pavements are pristine, and jaywalkers are nowhere to be found.

In Japan, a tight country, there’s a huge emphasis on punctuality—trains almost never arrive late. On the rare days that delays do occur, some train companies will hand out cards to passengers that they can submit to their bosses to excuse a tardy arrival at work.

We’re a super-normative species: Without even realizing it, we spend a huge amount of our lives following social rules and conventions. Studies show that even babies follow norms and are willing to punish norm violators even before they have formal language.

After being taught a certain arbitrary behavior and then witnessing a puppet incorrectly imitating it, three-year-olds vigorously protested. Quite clearly, children learn not only to interpret social norms from their environment, but also to actively shape and enforce them.

There’s no evidence so far that animals copy others for social reasons such as simply fitting in and belonging.

Social norms are far from random. Rather, they evolve for a highly functional reason: They’ve shaped us into one of the most cooperative species on the planet. Countless studies have shown that social norms are critical for uniting communities into cooperative, well-coordinated groups that can accomplish great feats. Social norms are, in effect, the ties that bind us together, and scientists have collected evidence to prove it.

Unable to control their employees’ behaviors, companies would quickly go out of business. Without these shared standards of behavior, families would splinter apart. Clearly, it’s in our interest to adhere to social norms.

Ignoring social norms not only can damage our reputations, but also may result in ostracism, even death. From an evolutionary perspective, people who developed keen abilities to follow social norms may have been more likely to survive and thrive. This powerful fact has made us a remarkably cooperative species—but only so long as the interactions are between people who share the same basic norms. When groups with fundamentally different cultural mind-sets meet, conflict abounds. Thus the paradox: While norms have been the secret to our success, they’re also the source of massive conflict all around the world.

In New Zealand, people can drive with open bottles of alcohol in their cars as long as they remain within the legal blood alcohol limit. Women have the highest number of sexual partners in the world—an average of 20.4 during their lifetime (the global average is 7.3). Prostitution has long been decriminalized; according to the unique “New Zealand Model,” anyone over age eighteen can engage in it, complete with workplace protections and health-care benefits.

Over one-third of popular music videos portray at least one incident of violence, whether it be fighting, gunshots, battles, suicides, murders, or bomb explosions, and at least one-fifth include examples of antisocial behavior, from vandalism to littering

“Kiwis,” as New Zealanders playfully call themselves (after the flightless bird), tend to become acquainted very quickly, and they eschew formal titles. People are known to walk barefoot on city streets, in grocery stores, and in banks. Public dissent and protests are frequent.

Tightt nations: Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, Japan, China, Portugal, and Germany (formerly East).  Tightness is highest in South and East Asian nations, followed by Middle Eastern nations and European countries of Nordic and Germanic origin.

Loose nations:  Spain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Venezuela, Brazil, the Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, Estonia, and the Ukraine.  Latin-European, English-speaking, and Latin American cultures are much less tight, with Eastern European and former Communist nations the loosest.

Figuratively speaking, in the tightest of cultures, people feel as though they’re in a library for a greater portion of their lives. But in the loosest of cultures, people feel as though they’re often at a park, with much more freedom to do as they wish. Of course, nations tend to fall between these two extremes. And where they fall, they don’t necessarily stay. Though cultural psyches run deep, cultures can and do change on the continuum.

The looseness of these contexts tends to be carefully designated. Take Takeshita Street in Tokyo. Within the confines of this narrow pedestrian shopping street, Japan’s cultural demands for uniformity and order are completely suspended. On Takeshita Street, people stroll and preen in zany costumes, ranging from anime characters to sexy maids to punk musicians.

There is no linear relationship between nations’ scores on tightness-looseness and their economic development. Singapore and Germany, both tight, enjoy significant economic success, but Pakistan and India, also tight, still struggle. The United States and Australia, both loose, are wealthy, but the Ukraine and Brazil, also loose, have comparatively lower gross domestic products. Tightness-looseness is also distinct from previous ways that scholars have compared cultures, such as whether they’re collectivist or individualist (collectivist cultures emphasize family ties; individualist cultures stress self-reliance). There are plenty of nations in each of the four quadrants: collectivist and tight (Japan and Singapore), collectivist and loose (Brazil and Spain), individualist and loose (the United States and New Zealand), and individualist and tight (Austria and Germany).

The daily life of Spartans likewise resembled life in a military camp. In addition to following highly regulated diets, men and women were expected to frequently exercise to maintain a fit physique. The Spartans found obesity grotesque, so those who were overweight were banished from the city-state. Men and women who failed to pass physical exams (along with those who engaged in illegal activity or didn’t marry) were shunned, lost their citizenship, or had to wear special clothing as signs of societal disgrace. Sparta’s cutthroat physical standards even applied to newborn babies: If an infant was deemed weak or deformed, it was left at the foot of a mountain to die. Spartans abided by clear-cut mannerisms taught in childhood. They were trained to wear solemn expressions and speak concisely. Children were disciplined to never cry, speak in public, or express fear.

Total uniformity in dress, hairstyle, and behavior was demanded. Foreigners and foreign influence were prohibited, and Spartan citizens were forbidden to travel abroad. While the tight lifestyle might sound rather austere, Sparta was a proud culture, and its practices paid off: The radical discipline of Sparta’s citizens enabled it to achieve military predominance across Greece.

Athens had permissive norms, with frequent gorging and drinking. Strolling the streets of Athens, you would have noticed a wide range of fashion styles, accessorized with jewelry pieces from the bustling Athenian marketplace, the agora. There you’d witness unbridled self-expression by artists, pastry chefs, actors, writers, and public intellectuals from different schools of thought.

Nahua, indigenous tribe of Mexico and Guatemala

From early childhood, the Nahua taught their sons and daughters to be obedient and abide by norms. By age six, children completed many of the family’s daily tasks, such as taking care of siblings, helping in the fields and around the house, and going to the market. By age 15, girls did all the housework of grown women, while boys drove plows, planted and harvested crops, and raised cattle. The Nahua placed a great emphasis on “good” behavior in children. Sexuality was discouraged from childhood on, and curiosity about bodily functions was forbidden. Parents in Nahua strongly believed that children lacking self-discipline would grow up to become poor workers and bring great shame to their families. To ward off this fate, children who fell short of their parents’ expectations were severely punished—whipped, beaten, kicked, ridiculed, or denied food or sleep for offenses such as losing things or grumbling. Later, marriageability depended on one’s willingness to follow the rules. If a young man’s mother learned that his intended was known for being lazy or disobedient, she would object to the union. In public, women and girls were expected to be demure and unassuming at all times, lest their behavior be labeled shamelessly flirtatious. Since women were expected to remain virgins before marriage, any appearance of a sexual drive could damage their reputations and was severely punished by their parents. Once married, wives were expected to be compliant and faithful. To ensure nothing could destabilize the new family structure, they were discouraged from keeping female friends, who might act as a go-between for a wife and her prospective lover. Men also discontinued their friendships with other men, lest intimacy develop between these men and their wives. Divorce was highly frowned upon. Community members reported on the wrongdoings of others, and appropriate conduct was maintained through unrelenting gossip, accusations of sorcery, and, in severe cases, expulsion from the community.

Copper Inuit children enjoyed an unstructured and informal lifestyle. The parenting style was laissez-faire to say the least. Diamond Jenness, a pioneer of Canadian anthropology, described children growing up like “wild plants” until puberty, roaming about on their own, roughhousing with peers, and not hesitating to interrupt or correct their parents. Children had total autonomy over their schedules, including whether to attend school. Parents rarely used any form of physical punishment with their kids; they mostly ignored misbehavior or briefly teased children who acted out of line.

Intercourse was fairly common among adolescents, who had sex even in their parents’ house. If and when couples eventually did get married, the process was rather informal: They established a separate home, but returned to their respective families’ homes if things didn’t work out. Open marriages were tolerated, including wife-swapping in some cases, which promoted alliances with members of unrelated families. Men and women had their own roles within the home, but these roles were flexible: women sometimes went hunting, and men learned how to cook and sew. Within the broader community, only “rudimentary law” existed, according to the legal anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel; there was no centralized power to resolve conflicts between community members. The fact that individuals were left to manage conflict on their own undoubtedly contributed to the high rates of homicide and blood feuds among the Copper Inuit.

Crime rates in Japan have fallen so low in the last 13 years that police officers are literally looking for things to occupy their time. According to the Economist, as of 2014, Japan had one of the lowest murder rates in the world, just 0.3 per 100,000 people. The streets of Japan are so safe that some police officers have resorted to prodding individuals to steal: Policemen in the southern city of Kagoshima started leaving cases of beer in unlocked cars just to see if passersby would grab them. But even this sting was underwhelming; it took a week before they could revel in the opportunity to punish a hapless offender.

Crime rates per hundred thousand people are all significantly lower in tight countries.

In looser countries, like New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United States, crime is much more common.

At least 16 crimes can result in a death sentence in Saudi Arabia, including drug possession, burglary, rape, adultery, and gay sex. Get caught drinking alcohol, and you may face jail time and even a public flogging.

Tight cultures tend to have more police per capita and employ more security personnel to check for inappropriate behavior in public spaces. Surveillance cameras are rampant in tight countries, reminding the public to behave themselves. In Saudi Arabia, high-tech cameras called saher, which translates to “one who remains awake,” dot highways, exit roads, and intersections. They capture images of drivers talking on the phone, texting, not wearing seat belts, and driving over the speed limit, as well as tailgating and changing lanes excessively. Similarly, Japan has millions of surveillance cameras on streets, buildings, store entrances, taxis, and train stations.

Tight cultures also tend to rank higher on religiosity, cleanliness, and organization.  Even after factoring in national wealth, they found that tighter countries tend to have more cleaning personnel on city streets.

Japan’s obsession with cleanliness made international headlines after the nation’s defeat in the 2014 World Cup, when Japanese fans swarmed over Brazil’s Arena Pernambuco stadium with bright blue trash bags, gathering up litter to discard—a post-game tradition in their home country that they’d taken on the road.

By contrast, in an extreme show of loose behavior, when the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in 2011, the city transformed into a “drunken vomity hellhole” that cost around $4 million to repair, blogger Isha Aran reported. Slovenly behavior like this is generally more widespread in loose cultures.

In addition to generally being cleaner, tight cultures tend to have less noise pollution. Germany has mandated quiet hours on Sundays and holiday evenings. During these quiet hours, you’re forbidden to mow your lawn, play loud music, or run washing machines. Even libraries, which are supposed to be the quintessential haven for quiet, are rated as being much noisier in looser cultures.

If you live in a tighter culture, you’re more likely to be able to depend on the preset schedules of public transport.

People are more likely to dress the same, buy the same things, and generally downplay their uniqueness. Why? Because if everybody acts like everybody else, order and coordination become much easier. Take something as seemingly benign as which hand you use for writing. One of my studies found that there are far fewer “lefties” in tight cultures.

The tighter a country is, the more likely it is to require school uniforms. This uniformity even extends to the cars people drive. I had my team of research assistants also venture into parking lots around the world. We found less variation in the make and color of cars in tight cultures as compared with loose ones.

In the Middle East, the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, resonates through the streets five times a day, synchronizing individuals throughout the region.  The more people have to attune their conduct to others’, he argued, the stronger their ability to regulate their impulses. My research supports this argument: People in tight cultures do indeed show higher self-control. For example, people in the United States, New Zealand, Greece, and Venezuela weigh much more than people in tight countries like India, Japan, Pakistan, and Singapore, even taking into account a country’s wealth and people’s average height.

Some of the highest scores for alcohol consumption in liters per capita also came from loose countries such as Spain, Estonia, and New Zealand. Residents of tight nations such as Singapore, India, and China score low on alcohol consumption rates.

Residents of loose countries such as the United States, Hungary, and Estonia are more likely to gamble than residents of tight countries such as South Korea and Singapore. Loose nations also have lower gross national savings—a country’s gross national income minus public and private consumption—even when taking into account wealth and income distribution, suggesting that economies in loose cultures are spending more income than they produce.

Loose cultures have a significant edge when it comes to being open—to new ideas, different people, and change—qualities that tight cultures sorely lack.

“If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.” Herodotus illustrates his point with a story in which King Darius, the ruler of Persia, asks a group of Greeks who were cremating their dead fathers how much money it would take for them to eat their fathers’ corpses. The Greeks, shocked, reply that they’d never agree to do such a thing.  The king then asks the Callatiae, an Indian tribe, who were known to eat their parents, how much money it would take for them to cremate their corpses. The Callatiae cry out in horror and tell Darius not to suggest such appalling acts.

Generally, people in tight cultures are more likely to believe their culture is superior and needs to be protected from foreign influences.

China

• China ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners. And in Japan, where foreigners make up only 2% of the population, many landlords have a “no foreigners” policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants, and hotels deny entry to foreign customers
• In China, unmarried or divorced women in their late twenties are referred to as “leftover women,” or sheng nu, by the government and are mocked as being “a used cotton jacket” on state-sponsored TV programs.

Tight nations are more likely to have autocratic governments that don’t hesitate to forcefully crack down on any dissent or censor the media.

Population density

• People live in small spaces in close proximity to their neighbors, contending with packed streets and cheek-to-jowl buses and trains. Compare Singapore, with its astonishing population density of over 20,000 people per square mile as of 2016, with Iceland, which has only eight people per square mile.
• High population density is a basic human threat. In societies where personal space is hard to come by, there’s great potential for chaos and conflict.

Groups with many ecological & historical threats or depleted resources are tighter to create order in the face of chaos

• Though they were separated by miles and, in some cases, decades or centuries, the tight cultures of Sparta, the Nahua, and Singapore faced a common fate: Each had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature and her constant fury of disasters, diseases, and food scarcity, or from human nature and the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts. And when we look at the loose cultures of New Zealand, Athens, and the Copper Inuit, we see the opposite pattern: These groups had (or have) the luxury of facing far fewer threats.
• In his book The Revenge of Geography, Robert Kaplan reminds us that the United States—with its safe separation from other continents by two large oceans—has felt few threats from outsiders throughout its history. The same is also true of New Zealand and Australia.
• Conflict has been particularly prevalent in Asia. China has experienced massive conflict throughout its history, with an exceedingly long list of battles
• China’s location makes territorial threat a constant source of anxiety. It borders 14 countries, and has had disputes with each of them.
• Korea also has been repeatedly clobbered by its neighbors
• When nations face the possibility of invasion, they must strengthen internal order to ensure a united, coordinated front against the enemy. Tight social norms are essential to this defense.
• China, for example, has lost nearly 450,000 lives in the past fifty years to natural disasters (twenty-five times more than the United States), in part due to the typhoons that torment its long coastline.
• Japan has also been one of Mother Nature’s favorite targets throughout its history. A combination of cold weather and volcanic activity led to the Kangi Famine from 1229 to 1232. During the Edo Period (1603–1868), more than 150 famines hit Japan, leaving at least hundreds of thousands dead. In the modern era, Japan has suffered from several devastating earthquakes,
• Nations like Japan need stronger norms to provide the order and coordination required to recover from chronic natural disasters. Without strong norms, people would be tempted to go rogue in such dire circumstances—looking out only for themselves or their immediate family, for example, by engaging in looting—causing total chaos. But with strong norms and punishments for deviance, such nations are in a much better position to cope and survive.
• They often deplete natural resources, including arable land and drinking water supplies. Our data suggest that cultures that lack such resources are tighter than cultures that have them in abundance. The reason is simple: When cultures have few natural resources, managing them in a controlled, coordinated way is a matter of survival.  Of the nations I surveyed, Pakistan, India, and China, all tight, had the fewest natural resources within their territories, with high levels of food deprivation and low access to safe water.

Religion

• Religion tends to breed tightness, both today and in ancient history,
• Beyond the codification of right and wrong, the belief in the Almighty inculcates the same tight accountability that security cameras bring to public spaces.

Threatening events

• I set up a field study in Boston to test whether the city’s cultural norms had tightened in response to the event. People who reported being the most affected by the bombings were indeed more likely to report that the United States needed to have stronger social norms. They also reported that the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence, there should be more restrictions over people entering the country, and the United States is superior to other countries. These are all attitudes we see in nations that face chronic invasions.
• As threats crop up, groups tighten. As threats subside, groups loosen.
• Threats don’t even need to be real. As long as people perceive a threat, the perception can be as powerful as objective reality. In fact, long before Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, or Viktor Orbán, politicians have been hyping up threats to tighten groups for centuries.

Diversity can make a society looser: Israel

• When Israel was founded, its settlers faced rampant malaria, typhus, and cholera. The country has fought numerous wars, mostly due to territorial issues and the long-held animosity between Arabs and Israelis, which continues to this day. Yet Israel is relatively loose, with its high levels of informality and chronic attempts to circumvent rules. Why?
• One reason that stands out as especially compelling: Israel is highly diverse; 75% of the nation is Jewish, 20% Arab, and the remaining 5% a mix of non-Arab Christian and Baha’i, among other groups. The country has high levels of ethnic diversity, with significant percentages of the citizenry hailing from Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. With so many different groups with different coexisting norms, it is hard to agree on any one standard for behavior.
• Another possible explanation for Israel’s relative looseness is its fierce tradition of debate. Debate and dissent, which mandate the exploration of multiple perspectives, promote looseness and the rejection of dogma. 
• In addition, Israel is a young, exploratory “start-up nation” made up of settlers who had the chutzpah to dive into something new, risky, and unknown.
• Israelis are notably leery of being told what to do; they prefer challenging rules and guidelines over obeying them. “An outsider would see chutzpah everywhere in Israel,” explain Dan Senor and Saul Singer, authors of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, “in the way university students speak with their professors, employees challenge their bosses, sergeants question their generals, and clerks second-guess government ministers. To Israelis, however, this isn’t chutzpah, it’s the normal mode of being.

Too much diversity can lead to tightness though.  When diversity gets to be extreme, as it is in Pakistan, which has at least six major ethnic groups and over 20 spoken languages, and India, with its 22 official languages and hundreds of dialects, diversity can cause conflict, which, as we know, requires strict norms to manage. When diversity gets to be very high, tightness begins to increase markedly.

Tightness and looseness in the Netherlands And the United States

• Thanks in large part to its location and trading activity, the Netherlands has become home to an eclectic mix of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, which may have contributed to its looseness. For centuries, the Netherlands welcomed refugees from all over Europe, including French Protestants, Portuguese and German Jews, and English separatists, among many others. Today, over 20% of the population comes from abroad
• To quantify levels of tight-loose across the 50 states, Jesse Harrington and I scoured research institutes and the Smithsonian archives for data on each state going back to the early 1800s, including records on punishment methods, state restrictions, cultural practices, and ecological and historical events. The patterns we discovered were illuminating. Take, for example, differences in the harshness of punishments across states. Compared with Alaska and Maine, Indiana and Texas spank far more students, execute more criminals, and punish marijuana possession more harshly. In 2011 alone, over 28,000 students were paddled or spanked in Texas schools.  
• In states where children are more likely to be hit in school, there are higher rates of executions, more restrictions on alcohol, sterner views of marriage, fewer foreigners, and so on. These states are stricter—they’re tight, rule makers. Meanwhile, states with more lenient punishments also have fewer restrictions on alcohol and marriage and have more foreigners. These states have more latitude—they’re loose, rule breakers.
• Some of the tightest states in the country include Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. At the looser end of the spectrum are California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts. Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska, Florida, and Minnesota fall in the middle. From these rankings, regional patterns emerge: The South is tightest, the West and Northeast are loosest, and the Midwest is in the middle.

Conservativism, liberalism, religion and personality in the United States

• Conservatism reflects individuals’ emphasis on traditional values and often manifests as resistance to change, whereas tightness is a state of culture that reflects the strength of social norms in one’s environment. While tight states and countries have more conservatives and loose states and countries have more liberals, there are plenty of conservatives in loose regions and plenty of liberals in tight ones.
• People in tight states are more likely to have a personality trait that psychologists call “conscientiousness,” which entails self-discipline, rule following, and the desire for structure. These people report being more organized, careful, and dependable, and agree with statements such as “I see myself as someone who is a reliable worker,” as someone who “makes plans and follows through with them,” and as someone who “does things efficiently.” By contrast, people in loose states report having less conscientiousness. More disorderly and less reliable (and honest enough to be self-critical!), they’re more likely to agree that they can be “somewhat careless,” “disorganized,” and “easily distracted.” It’s true: If you spend time in states like North Carolina, Georgia, Utah, and Kansas, you’ll generally find people who are more cautious, thorough, and orderly relative to people in loose states like Alaska, Maine, Hawaii, and Rhode Island.
• In the South, home to the tightest U.S. states, strong rules about etiquette, hospitality, formality, and, above all, respect prevail. Children learn to say “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir” to adults and not to interrupt them.  Southerners reacted with a higher rise in cortisol, a hormone that indexes stress, as well as testosterone, a hormone that primes aggression in response to threat. It’s no small wonder that people in the South try to avoid this kind of rude behavior in the first place.
• Recreational marijuana use is now legal in nine states, all of them loose: Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and Nevada.
• More rurality and less mobility produce an interesting cultural cocktail: You can bet that outside your home, neighbors and acquaintances know what you’re doing, and they may have strong opinions about it. In these small, tight-knit communities, the neighborhood watch is on full alert. According to Southern Living, people in small towns often know whom every teenager is dating, which neighbors just made a large purchase, and even when the town mechanic has hired a new guy. The gossip mill, it turns out, has important social functions.  In towns where negative reputations can spread overnight, the fear of being bad-mouthed can help to deter bad behavior and promote cooperation.
• We’ve found that tight states tend to have more police and law enforcement officials, and citizens generally agree that the police should use strict punishment—including force—to keep the social order. Tight states also incarcerate a greater percentage of their populations. By contrast, in the urban and highly mobile areas common to loose states, you might pass thousands of strangers on your daily commute and find yourself living in relative anonymity, with little neighborly supervision. Other indicators of social disorder—such as higher divorce, single-parent households, and even homelessness—are higher in loose states.
• Among Americans in tight states there is a remarkably high percentage of religious believers—80% in Kansas, for example. In Mississippi and South Carolina, among the most religious states in America, 83% and 78% of adults, respectively, are Christian. “Megachurches” with huge congregations of over 2,000 people are found throughout the South. Christian doctrine often leaks into public schools as well. In Texas, public school students can enroll in elective courses that teach morality lessons directly from the Bible. 
• In Utah, over 60% of the population are Mormon, and strict regulations abound in their daily lives. Tea and coffee are banned at all times. Premarital sex is forbidden, as are pornography, masturbation, and homosexual acts. Sabbath Sunday is reserved for worship; working, shopping, eating out, playing sports, or other activities that may involve worldly temptations are not permitted. Bishops privately interview every adult Mormon to assess how well they’ve been adhering to the Mormon way of life and whether they’re worthy of entering the temple. Much like an intelligence-gathering agency, the Mormon Church’s Strengthening Church Members Committee (SCMC) keeps tabs on local Mormons to identify those who may be publicly criticizing the faith or its leadership. When it does, the SCMC promptly notifies the dissenter’s bishop, who may charge the member with apostasy—the abandonment of religious faith.
• People in loose states are more likely to view themselves as original, curious, deep thinkers, and imaginative—all indications of what is called “trait openness,” as seen below.
• Not only are loose states more fun, but they’re also more tolerant. Moral codes in loose states emphasize preventing harm to others—a universalistic code that applies to anyone, regardless of their race, language, religion, or creed. 

The Deep South of the United States

• Differences in tightness-looseness across the 50 states were set in motion by the cultural characteristics of those who settled in different parts of the New World. In the 1700s, when large waves of migrants from northern Ireland and lowland Scotland began arriving in America. These migrants established an early presence around Pennsylvania and then moved southward, settling in states like West Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas. There these pioneers unpacked their cultural suitcases, which were filled with the social norms and values of their motherlands. As descendants of Celtic herdsmen, they were known for their tight normative codes, which emphasized courage, strength, and a suspicion of outsiders—a combination of characteristics psychologists call a “culture of honor.” These cultural traits proved useful in the treacherous Southern environment they explored, where the threat of losing their livestock in raids from neighboring groups was constant. Given this danger, coupled with a lack of formal law enforcement, the settlers developed tight social norms to enforce cooperation and prevent pilfering. Norms for generosity and respect—which promoted group cohesion—were paramount. Settlers frequently entertained guests to showcase this generosity and to gain honor in the eyes of the community.
• Despite their generosity and cooperation, these early settlers were ready to inflict quick and violent retribution on wrongdoers. Such demonstrations of valor helped them maintain a reputation for strength that could deter further attacks. Even teasing was considered a major norm violation in the South and could lead to an eruption of violence, particularly if one was insulted in public. These honor cultures spread into the Deep South—areas now known as the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—and by 1790, Scotch-Irish settlers constituted the majority of the population of many Southern states. Today, these states are among America’s tightest; they’re where the culture of honor lives on. 
• Strict norms were designed to control slaves, who outnumbered their masters. Those who tried to run away were to be whipped after a first attempt; after subsequent attempts their punishments escalated to anything from having an ear chopped off, to castration, to having an Achilles tendon severed, to execution. 
• In the nineteenth century, the American South increasingly felt as though it was being “occupied” by “foreign” troops from the North, which had diametrically opposed views on how the nation should be governed. In 1861, the South and North entered into the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history with an outcome that only reinforced the South’s tight culture. Southerners saw a need to defend their region’s “peculiar institution,” a euphemism for slavery, as indispensable to their agrarian-based economy. Northern efforts to curtail slavery’s spread, they felt, threatened their lifestyle, and their survival. Clearly, the Southern states that relied the most on slavery had the most to lose from a Union victory. According to this logic, today they should be tighter than Southern states that were less dependent on slave labor. And they are. There is a strong correlation between the percentage rankings of slave-owning families from the 1860 census and state-level tightness today. The tightest Southern states, such as Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia, had much higher levels of slave-owning families than did loose states, such as Delaware and Maryland.
• The South continued as a predominantly agrarian region marked by close-knit tight communities. According to historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who authored Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, medicine, law, the clergy, and the military were the only tolerated non-agriculture professions in the South.
• Some of the least diverse places in the country today can be found in tight states.

The Northern states

• The settlers in the northern and western United States couldn’t have been more different. From the outset, the first settlers in these regions were known for religious pluralism and multicultural cohabitation, which we know pushes groups to be loose. Toward the beginning of the seventeenth century, a few decades before the Barbadians arrived in the Deep South, the Dutch (inhabitants of one of the loosest nations today) founded New York as a global trading hub that later attracted immigrants from Poland, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, and Portugal. The New York region attracted people who practiced many different faiths, including Catholics, Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, and Jews.
• This loose mentality was later reinforced with the rise of industrialization during the nineteenth century, which made the North more urban and diverse.
• California became a “start-up state,” luring risk-takers who were willing to make a treacherous journey for a better future on the West Coast. “Here were to be seen people of every nation in all varieties of costume, and speaking 50 different languages, and yet all mixing together amicably and socially,

Loose communities exist within tight states, and vice versa, and tight-loose theory can predict where they’ll take hold. In the tight state of Louisiana lies New Orleans, the historically diverse and cosmopolitan port city that is one of the most permissive in the country,

In tight communities in loose states, and they often display very low diversity. For example, the city of Colorado Springs, nestled in the loose state of Colorado, is almost 80% white.

When groups don’t have to worry about food, water, disease, or invasions, they don’t need as many strict rules to coordinate, and they evolve into more permissive societies. This principle clearly applies to nations, and it plays out in states, too. Mother Nature played a key part in perpetuating tight-loose differences across the U.S. states, and she continues to selectively cast her destructive spell over certain regions. Many of the states that rank high in tightness, for example, were marked by difficult ecological conditions early on. In the nineteenth century, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and several areas westward were inhospitable territories that experienced very little rain. There were few places where agriculture could survive without the help of extensive irrigation projects. The altitude was so high—even the plains and mountain valleys stood above the tallest summits of the Appalachians—that many familiar crops wouldn’t grow at all.

We also tracked where hurricanes hit with available data from 1851 to 2004. It’s clear that a disproportionate number of tight states have gotten clobbered. In the list of over 50 of the deadliest hurricanes that have occurred in U.S. history, around 85% have done their worst damage in the 10 tightest states.

Examining Centers for Disease Control data from 1993 to 2007, we found that vulnerability to common diseases (e.g., malaria, measles, tuberculosis, rubella, typhoid) predicted states’ tightness levels. While tight states such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina scored high on pathogens, loose states such as Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont scored low. Tight states exhibit higher rates of food insecurity, with fewer households having adequate access to food, and they also have less access to clean air. Tight Indiana, for example, has the poorest air quality in the country, followed by Ohio and Kentucky. By comparison, Oregon, Maine, and New Mexico—all loose states—are among the states with the clearest air. Summing up: Where there’s threat, there’s tightness.

Throughout American history, the state of California has been rocked by natural disasters ranging from earthquakes to wildfires to mudslides to heat waves. Yet California is a loose state, for reasons similar to an exception we noted when looking at individual nations—Israel. Thanks to the adventurous immigrants it’s drawn from all around the world, the state boasts tremendous diversity

Communism & the Red Scare.  The first Red Scare was ignited shortly afterward in 1919 by a series of bombs detonated across the country by a few anarchists. These events amped up public fear and paranoia of politically radical groups, and then fear of immigrants and minorities. Laws were passed to deport immigrants, limit free speech, and infringe on the civil rights of suspected communities. After the USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, Americans feared a nuclear war was imminent and that Soviet spies had infiltrated the U.S. government. A witch hunt against Communists ensued,

When such threats aren’t chronic, a country’s system of norms loosens again. All the restrictions, monitoring, and punishments of the 1950s, for example, gradually gave way to the extreme looseness of the 1960s. During this “decade of change,” the nation witnessed groundbreaking movements that sought to end discrimination toward traditionally marginalized groups—including women, African Americans, and gay Americans—and dismantle many of the country’s long-held social norms and values. As more households acquired television sets, more Americans were exposed to new ideas and places. The following decades ushered in unbridled permissiveness, including greater recreational drug use and sexual promiscuity.

9/11

Fast-forward to September 11, 2001, which unleashed another temporary wave of tightness. Congress introduced 130 new pieces of legislation, created over 260 new government organizations to secure the nation, and spent over $600 billion on homeland security from 2001 to 2011. The Patriot Act, hurriedly drafted and signed a month after the attacks by ninety-eight out of a hundred senators, law enforcement officers were given permission to search homes and businesses without owners’ or occupants’ consent or knowledge.

Tightness-looseness can help account for the astounding political upheavals happening around the globe in the twenty-first century, including British citizens’ 2016 vote to leave the European Union and the success of the Law and Justice Party in Poland’s parliamentary election. Hungary has tightened considerably in recent years due to a different kind of “threat”—primarily Muslim refugees,

Perceived threat—often about terrorism, immigration, and globalization—tightens cultures and catapults autocratic leaders onto the national stage.

Class & Wealth

Class divides have become a front-burner political issue. A 2017 Pew Research survey found that almost 60% of Americans believe there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor, up 12% from 2009. Respondents ranked class conflicts ahead of those between the young and the old and city and rural dwellers. This chasm between the haves and have-nots exists around the world.

The chance of falling into destitution is a constant threat among members of the lower class. In her article “The Class Culture Gap,” legal scholar Joan Williams notes that “American working-class families feel themselves on a tightrope where one misstep could lead to a fall into poverty and disorder.” Losing one’s job and any semblance of security is a constant threat for the working class, who often live paycheck to paycheck. Author Joseph Howell similarly notes that slipping into hard living—a term he uses to describe the dregs of poverty—is a relentless preoccupation among the working class that motivates them to vigilantly guard their precarious status. Whereas upper-class individuals experience the world as safe and welcoming, lower-class individuals tend to view it as fraught with extreme danger. And because money can buy second chances, those who have it have a different attitude toward novelty and risk. Upper-class families know that they have a safety net if they run into problems and so they encourage their children to explore and take chances. Because lower-class families lack a safety net to offset the negative effects of careless mistakes and lapses in judgment, they tend to actively discourage this kind of experimentation.

In addition to facing economic uncertainty, the lower class is saddled with serious safety and health threats. Their jobs have much higher odds of injury, dismemberment, and death.  Poorer communities in the United States face more than double the rate of violent crime relative to higher-income communities.  They are also far more likely to be victims of gun violence, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and sexual assault and rape. The lower class also experiences greater health vulnerabilities throughout their lives relative to their upper-class counterparts, showing higher rates of illnesses such as coronary heart disease, stroke, chronic bronchitis, diabetes, and ulcers. In fact, there’s a staggering 10-15 year difference in the life expectancy rate between the top and bottom 1% in the U.S.

The combination of high threat, low mobility, and low exposure to diversity is a perfect recipe for the evolution of tightness in the lower class.

Lower-class adults were more likely to indicate that they faced stronger rules, harsher punishments, more monitoring, and fewer choices in their childhood home, current workplace, and lives more generally. They also reported that the situations they encounter on a daily basis are much tighter, with fewer behaviors that are deemed acceptable. What’s more, the lower-class participants were more likely to desire a tighter society, as evidenced by their strong agreement with statements like “a functioning society requires strong punishments for wrongdoing.” Put simply, they live in a tighter, circumscribed world, while the upper class experiences considerable looseness. Just like citizens of tight nations and states, the lower class see the world through a prism of threat: They’re more concerned with paying the rent or mortgage, losing their homes and jobs, obtaining proper medical care, and having enough food to eat. They also live in more dangerous places.

The predominant upper-class view of rules is that they’re made to be broken.

For members of the lower class, rules are critical for survival. In communities where teens may be tempted to turn to drugs and gangs, strict rules laid down by authority figures are essential to keeping kids on track. And for people in low-wage, routinized jobs where creativity is discouraged, rule breaking can lead to getting fired.  For the lower class, rules are meant to be followed, as they provide moral order in a world of potential turmoil.

Those in the lower classes were more likely to endorse survey items such as “I like order” and “I enjoy having a clear and structured mode of life” and to report that they “don’t like change” and “prefer to stick with things that [they] know.” They had lower openness to experience, and yearned for the “good old days.” They had a strong distaste for morally ambiguous behaviors, such as euthanasia and drug and alcohol use, and were more likely to view homosexuality as immoral.

In an experiment, lower-class children were more likely to tell others that they were doing a task wrong or cheating.  By contrast, upper-class children appeared to be more understanding and accepting of violating the rules given, sometimes even laughing appreciatively. Even by age three, these more privileged kids thought there was nothing wrong with breaking the rules once in a while.

It turns out that children in different social classes are exposed to radically different types of socialization. The working class has what psychologists call “strict” or “narrow” socialization, and the upper class has “lenient” or “broad” socialization. Lower-class parents stressed the importance of conformity, wanting their children to be obedient and neat. Upper-class parents wanted their kids to have self-direction—to be independent. Kohn also found striking contrasts in parental attitudes about punishment of wrongdoing. Lower-class parents punished their children for disobedience and for the negative consequences of their behavior, regardless of whether it was intentional or accidental. By contrast, not only were upper-class parents less likely to punish their children, but they also chose whether and how to punish based on the intent behind their child’s behavior.

Knowing that their children will likely have to navigate a world of social threat—and work at jobs where they have little discretion—lower-class parents emphasize the importance of conformity to try to help them succeed. After all, not following protocol at work can get one fired or badly hurt. “In the working class, people perform jobs in which they are closely supervised and are required to follow orders and instructions, so parents “bring their children up in a home in which conformity, obedience, and intolerance for back talk are the norm—the same characteristics that make for a good factory worker.” In these contexts, self-direction is actually counterproductive, but it’s a necessary trait for those navigating loose worlds and occupations, hence a trait that upper-class parents foster in their children.

Bernstein also found a fascinating connection between social class and the way that people use language. The working class uses what he calls a “restricted code” form of speech defined by simpler and more concrete grammatical constructions with fewer counterfactual statements (like what if). Meanwhile, the middle class has an “elaborated code” of speech that is more abstract and complex and more flexible.

Children also encounter these structural differences in school. Metaphorically speaking, schools with a predominantly lower-class population are more likely to resemble the military, with their strong emphasis on rules and obedience, whereas schools with upper-class populations resemble universities, with their comparable freedom.

From a very young age, the lives of the children of the lower and upper classes begin to diverge—from the values their parents enforce, to the language they speak, to the structure of their households and schools, even to how they react to Max, the norm-violating puppet. These cultural differences have a profound impact on how these children behave as adults.  When given the opportunity to conform or stand out, lower-class individuals, this study showed, prefer to blend in whereas upper-class individuals prefer to be unique.

Beyond their more reckless driving behavior, people higher in social class take more liberty in violating conversational etiquette.  The loose behavior of upper-class individuals can even make them less ethical. Studies have shown that they’re far more likely to say they’d engage in unethical actions ranging from cheating on a test, to stealing software, to keeping extra change from a cashier. In our surveys of hundreds of people, working-class individuals were less likely to endorse unscrupulous actions like stealing supplies at work or cheating on tests.

We’ve seen that the lower class tends to be tighter—more conforming, norm-abiding, and cooperative—while the upper class is looser—more deviant, less cooperative, and even a bit more unethical.

Psychologist Murray Straus found discrepancies in creativity are inculcated early. He worked with families from different socioeconomic backgrounds and asked them to complete problem-solving tasks while an observer took detailed notes on their ideas. Among the sixty-four American families participating, those with higher socioeconomic status attempted many more creative solutions to the tasks than did families from lower-class backgrounds. The same results were found in India and Puerto Rico. In short, members of the lower class, while more likely to abide by rules and norms and even be more ethical, are less likely to think outside of the box.

In loose nations and states, there’s a high degree of openness and tolerance of individuals who are different, including immigrants, while in tight nations and states, people react more negatively to those who threaten the social order. Remarkably, the same tight-loose signature applies to social class: Studies show that, in general, members of the lower-class report more negative attitudes toward homeless people, homosexuals, Muslims, the disabled, and even people with tattoos.  Women, minorities, and homosexuals have less power and less latitude, and are subjected to stronger punishments, even for the same norm violations. They, in short, live in much tighter worlds.

When women and minorities were said to engage in norm-breaking behaviors, managers thought they warranted more punishment than when the same behaviors were done by majority males. Similarly, a study looking at the financial advisor industry found that although misconduct is more frequent among male employees, women are more likely to be punished, and more severely so [my comment: yea, like Martha Stewart nabbed for insider trading when thousands of men are who usually do this].

African American criminals are punished more harshly and sentenced to more time behind bars than white criminals with comparable histories. In the United States, African Americans are imprisoned at a rate that is five times the imprisonment rate of whites. African Americans are also far more likely to be targeted, brutalized, and killed by police, a phenomenon that prompted the Black Lives Matter.

The pattern is clear: People with different levels of status and power—whether that status and power are based on income, race, gender, sexual orientation, or another individual characteristic—live in different cultural worlds.

While you might expect an American moving to Japan or a German moving to New Zealand to experience culture shock, it may be less evident that someone moving between classes might have just as much trouble adapting. This is particularly the case for members of the working class, who are typically ill-prepared to cross into upper-class schools and workplaces that have been effectively designed to promote looseness. Though it’s often not obvious, the working class is inadvertently put at a cultural disadvantage in these spaces.

One reason poor students do less well in college: The loose norms and openness of many college campuses are comfortable for upper-class students, but they can be disorienting and alienating to students from working-class backgrounds.  Lower-class children, who have grown up in tight environments that emphasize conformity over independence, structure over creativity, and obedience over deviance, are more likely to struggle. For them, attending college, even one close to home, can feel like traveling to a foreign country. By the end of their first semester, lower-class students felt less academically prepared, less successful at making friends, and more stressed out. These students were overwhelmed by the complexity of college life, and yearned for clarity and simplicity. Lower-class students’ alienation on campus translates to a higher likelihood of dropping out.

Class differences are deeply cultural, and the world urgently needs greater cultural empathy across class lines. Arguably, we need this now more than ever. People from different social classes are increasingly isolated from one another, as seen in the growing urban-rural divides around the globe. We tend to further compartmentalize ourselves on social media and follow different media outlets (e.g., Fox News versus MSNBC) as well. As a result, we are left with little understanding of each other’s cultures, which can lead us to form negative stereotypes about one another.

Many of the differences between the lower and upper classes have an underlying logic. Lower-class occupations, including plumbers, butchers, factory workers, janitors, and prison guards, require sophisticated technical and physical skills. They also require the ability to be dependable and follow rules. A tight mind-set is critical for success in these contexts. Meanwhile, upper-class jobs, such as those in law, engineering, medicine, academia, and management, among other white-collar professions, are built on alternative strengths, such as creativity, vision, independence, and even breaking from tradition. These strengths necessitate a looser mind-set. Neither set of strengths should be viewed as superior.

While we may never agree with others’ voting choices, once we know that they stem from our cultural codes, we can at least begin to understand them.

Corporate culture

In 1998, two auto industry giants, Daimler-Benz and Chrysler Corporation, tied the knot. Both companies were deeply enmeshed in their own way of doing business, and their cultural incompatibility soon became apparent. American employees were taught German formalities, such as keeping their hands out of their pockets during professional interactions. German members of Daimler’s team felt uncomfortable when their American counterparts called them by their first names, rather than by their title and last name. And while the Germans wanted thick files of prep work and a strict agenda for their team meetings, Americans approached these gatherings as a time to brainstorm and have unstructured conversations.  Daimler had a top-down, heavily managed, hierarchical structure devoted to precision. As a result, the company’s manufacturing operations were rigid and bureaucratic.

Chrysler, on the other hand, was a looser operation with a more relaxed, freewheeling, and egalitarian business culture. Chrysler also used a leaner production style, which minimized unnecessary personnel and red tape. As these company cultures collided, Daimler faced a decision: compromise or cannibalize. It chose the latter. Daimler CEO Jürgen Schrempp had promised Chrysler CEO Robert Eaton a “merger of equals,” but his actions showed this was an acquisition rather than a merger.

Over time, Daimler dispatched a German to head Chrysler’s U.S. operations, replaced American managers with German ones, and laid off thousands of Chrysler employees, moves that fomented talk of “German invaders.  Trust between these two foreign units became irreparable. Key Chrysler executives left, and after nine years of declines in stock price and employee morale, the transnational pair finally divorced in 2007.

People in loose cultures prefer visionary leaders who are collaborative. They want leaders to advocate for change and empower their workers. “The goal of a leader should be to maximize resistance—in the sense of encouraging disagreement and dissent,” explains Dov Frohman, founder of Intel Israel. “If you aren’t aware that the people in the organization disagree with you, then you are in trouble.

People in tight cultures view effective leaders as those who embody independence and great confidence—that is, as people who like to do things their own way and don’t rely on others.

Just as countries have practical reasons for becoming collectively tighter or looser, so do industries. Tightness abounds in industries that face threat and need seamless coordination. Sectors such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, airlines, police departments, and construction evolve into tight cultures due to their life-or-death stakes.

The military is the iconic example of tightness.  From day one, U.S. Marine recruits endure a punishing boot camp and indoctrination period that turn individual soldiers into one synchronous corps who, above all, respect their leaders.

Zooming in to any specific organization, we can see why certain units evolve to be tight versus loose even in the same organization. Some occupations are inherently more accountable to laws and regulations, even in the absence of physical threat—think lawyers, auditors, bankers, and government officials. These jobs are bound to high standards of professional accountability. As a result, their work unit cultures foster much stronger norms and compliance monitoring.

Without even realizing it, each of us has developed tight and loose mind-sets that effortlessly help us navigate our social surroundings. Far more than a mere mood or even an attitude, a mind-set is like the program we use to make decisions. The tight mind-set involves paying a great deal of attention to social norms, a strong desire to avoid mistakes, a lot of impulse control, and a preference for order and structure. Relishing routine, it requires a keen sensitivity to signs of disorder. The loose mind-set, by contrast, is less attentive to social norms, more willing to take risks, more impulsive, and more comfortable with disorder and ambiguity. These different mind-sets influence our daily lives and relationships in ways that we might not be fully aware.  Environments automatically change our mind-sets—constrained at the symphony; relaxed at the rock concert. Psychologically, this is your mind and body adjusting to the strength of social norms in your surroundings.

If you have a partner, you might see tight-loose tensions play out in different attitudes about religion, savings, or neatness.

Highly structured and rule-bound activities, like playing bridge or doing karate, foster a tight mind-set, whereas more spontaneous and open-ended activities, like painting or hip-hop dancing, foster a loose mind-set.

Species such as bats, dolphins, and even rats use forms of radar to navigate their physical environment. Humans, too, employ a type of radar to detect the social norms and cues that surround them, whether they’re aware of it or not. In fact, a defining quality of tight and loose mind-sets is the strength or weakness of this normative radar. Some people just seem to be oblivious to social norms. We call otherwise intelligent adults who lack normative radar idiots, jerks, or comedians. We all know people who seem completely unaware of social norms. Perhaps it’s a friend who blurts out inappropriate thoughts. Maybe it’s an uncle who tells the same stories over and over.

People with low normative radar have difficulty understanding what is expected of them, and they tend to behave similarly across a wide range of situations. Paying no heed to situational requirements, they act primarily on their own beliefs and desires.

People with high normative radar are quite sensitive to the social norms around them. They’re what psychologist Mark Snyder calls “high self-monitors.” They’re very good at picking up on interpersonal and social expectations, and are likely to behave differently across situations in response to what is considered acceptable.

In a study, participants listen to 20 prerecorded sentences in which a trained actress conveyed different emotions by changing her voice intonations and inflections. The results were striking. People with high normative radar identified the different emotions with great accuracy. Meanwhile, people with low normative radar struggled with the task.

People in tight nations clearly possessed higher normative radar; they’re higher self-monitors and they excel at adapting their behavior to situational requirements. This is a learned trait. In tight countries dominated by strong rules with substantial constraints on acceptable behavior, a keen ability and desire to detect social expectations pays off—if only to avoid punishment. By the same logic, in countries where rules are weaker, and a wider range of behavior is permissible (as at a rock concert), people tend to possess a looser mind-set and lower normative radar.

Other vignettes described a person applauding in a concert versus at a funeral, shouting at the library versus on a city sidewalk, and so on. The brains of participants from both the United States and China registered the norm violations in the central-parietal brain region, which is responsible for processing surprising events. Yet individuals’ neural responses to norm violations varied dramatically. The neurons of Chinese subjects fired with great force in the frontal area of the brain, which helps us think about the intentions of others and make decisions about punishment. Americans, in contrast, showed little response to norm violations in the frontal region. Differences in normative radar, it appears, become deeply embrained.

When norms are strong, we feel a strong sense of accountability—we sense that our actions may be evaluated and even punished if they deviate. When that warning signal goes off, the tight mind-set takes over. Its prime motive is to avoid making mistakes by being vigilant, cautious, and careful. In situations with fewer normative requirements, we have fewer fears about doing the wrong thing. Rather than being driven to avoid mistakes, we set bolder, often riskier goals.

People in tight cultures who have to abide by strong social norms are socialized to be more cautious. They’re more likely to agree with statements such as, “I am very careful to avoid mistakes” and “I choose my words with care,” and they’re also more deliberate in their decision making.  These are learned differences, but they may also have at least some genetic basis.  

A graduate student of mine recalls encountering an arsenal of regulations at her childhood school in Taiyuan, Shanxi. Students had to sit at their desks with their hands behind their backs at all times, could only raise their right hands when they had a question, and had to be completely silent in the school’s corridors. Pupils who acted out faced a range of punishments, such as standing in front of the classroom for the entirety of the class, being excluded from fun school activities, or even being hit with a ruler. Many Chinese schools have strong monitoring systems. Some classrooms even have webcams that continuously broadcast how well children are behaved, with footage being shown to parents and school officials.

Greater activity in the parietal lobe predicted Chinese participants’ greater self-regulation of eating habits and ability to resist temptations such as alcohol, procrastinating, and playing video games.

People with a low tolerance for ambiguity have trouble dealing with people who are unfamiliar or different.  These traits of distaste for ambiguity and prejudice against other ethnic groups appears to be passed on from parents to children very early in life.

Several examples of how couples who have tight and loose tendencies manage to get along are given towards the end of the book.

She concludes that the best societies are a balance of tight and loose, of constraint and freedom, because the extremely tight and extremely loose nations had the lowest levels of happiness, highest levels of suicide, lowest life expectancies, and highest death rates from cardiovascular diseases and diabetes.  These most extreme nations also have higher levels of political instability and the lowest GDP per capita.

When you look at Egypt or the fallen Soviet Union, it seems incredible that ghastly autocrats like Putin took over.  But when a regime that tightly controlled society, no matter how bad, causes society to descend into chaos and crime, people seek security and become vulnerable to fascism and autocrats to restore order. Putin now rules with an iron fist, where protests, online criticism, or advocacy of political or human rights can result in jail or thousands of dollars in fines.  Putin partnered with the Russian Orthodox Church to rally to traditional and family values (my comment: See NOTE 1 at the end).  Many examples of other nations are given as well.

Most worrisome for the postcarbon future is the section titled:  When cultures collapse, Radicalization steps in. It seems like this is already happening in the U.S. (and elsewhere) with right wing extremists & militias, QAnon, hundreds of congressional leaders denying Biden won the election and that Trump was elected.

The book spends the next few pages explaining how ISIS came to be one of the most violent terrorists organizations.

The rise of populist politicians and movements can be explained by the rise of nationalist groups that long for tightness and fighting “loose” globalists.  Hence those who voted for Trump.  In 2016 over 900 hate groups existed in the U.S., a 17% increase over 2014, including neo-Nazi groups, KKK outposts, white nationalist groups, neo-Confederate groups, and skinheads.

NOTE 1

The book “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America” by Kevin Kruse, tells the history of how corporate America has tried to undo New Deal reforms since the 1940s by creating a new free-enterprise religion, and to erode the separation of church and state.  Corporate America’s creation of free-enterprise Jesus began in 1935 with the founding of an organization called Spiritual Mobilization. 

Some of the corporations who donated money to this and similar organizations include: 

American Cyanamid and chemical corporation, Associated Refineries, AT&T,  Bechtel Corporation, Caterpillar Tractor Company, Chevrolet, Chicago & Southern Airline, Chrysler corporation, Colgate-Palmolive Company, Deering-Milliken, Detroit Edison, Disney, DuPont, Eastern Airlines, General Electric, General Foods, General Motors, Goodwill, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, IBM, J. C. Penney, J. Walter Thompson, Mark A. Hanna, Marriott, Marshall Field, Monsanto Chemical Company, National Association of Manufacturers, Pacific Mutual Life Insurance, Paramount Pictures, PepsiCo, Precision Valve Corp, Quaker Oats, Republic Steel Corp, Richfield Oil Co., San Diego Gas & Electric, Schick Safety Razor, Standard Oil Company, Sun Oil company, Sun shipbuilding company, Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, United Airlines, US Rubber company, US steel corporation, Utah Power & Light, Warner Bros. Pictures, Weyerhauser.

In the 1930s, corporations were well known to have brought on the Great Depression with their tremendous greed and dishonesty.  The New Deal reformed the financial system, distributed wealth more evenly, provided a social safety net, protected citizens by regulating businesses to prevent them from selling unsafe food, drugs, etc., emitting toxic pollution, aided farmers in slowing soil erosion to prevent more dust bowls, the federal interstate highway system, and other infrastructure and public services that benefited everyone, especially corporations.

The New Deal embodied the ideals of the Social Gospel, a movement dedicated to the public good, economic equality, eradication of poverty, slums, child labor, an unclean environment, inadequate labor unions, poor schools, and war (Wiki Social Gospel).  Corporate America fought against these reforms and has been trying to undo the New Deal ever since then.