Rules and Rule Breaking
We're going to look at how nations and individuals think about rules both in moments of crisis and in everyday interactions. Cultural attitudes about rule following and rule breaking shape our lives in all kinds of ways, from the tidiness of our homes to our political preferences to our approach to stopping the spread of a pandemic.
Rules for:
Crossing the street
Dress codes
Littering/chewing gum
Wearing Shoes in Banks/Stores/Public places
Being on time for a meeting (In Brazil, when they want people to show up at the actual listed time, they say it's on 'British Time'.)
Cleaning up the stadium after a sports match
Two Types of people?
VEDANTAM: We are so familiar with these differences between groups that we have movies and television shows that are built around these themes. These differences also show up in our domestic lives and in workplaces.
GELFAND: You can think about how strict or permissive we are from many different perspectives - from national perspective, from organizations, even our own households. In the book, I talk about how we all have our own preference for the kind of Muppet we want to be. Some people are order Muppets.
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They really like rules. They manage their impulses. And they really like a lot of order and structure. And then on the flip side, some people are chaos Muppets.
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They tend to not really notice rules. They are more risk taking and impulsive. And they're more tolerant of ambiguity.
It causes a lot of conflict between people. Think about parents who are trying to raise kids, and they have different ideas in terms of how strict they should be or finances. Or even how you load the dishwasher, I found in my household, can get you a little flak. So I think it's important to really look at this as a aspect of culture that affects us all the time, from our nations to our households.
Domestic Differences
Dishwashers
Dish washing
Wet towels
Bed linens
Floors
Dust
Tidiness
Priorities
VEDANTAM: Because as you point out, there might be domains where, actually, it's perfectly fine to have fairly lackadaisical rules and other domains where it's actually catastrophic to have lackadaisical rules.
GELFAND: Yeah, that's exactly the point. So in our house, just to give you a sense of the negotiation and how it played out, we finally did agree that some domains, like our health and how much we work in terms of studying hard for the kids for school, are really important to be strict about. But other things, like your bedtime or how messy you are - that was a tough negotiation because the house is kind of a mess and drives Todd (ph) crazy - but those are domains that could be much looser. We have to give some domains where people can have freedom to just do what they want. But we need to know, which are the priority domains to be more strict in?
VEDANTAM: Especially in a country like the United States, which is built around the idea of freedom, rules can seem onerous. Why can't we just pick and choose the rules that work best for us? Michele says we might not like rules, but we would probably like a country with no rules even less.
GELFAND: Imagine a world without any kind of rules. Just do a thought experiment where you go outside, and people are driving on whatever side of the road they feel like. And they're ignoring traffic lights. Or think about going to your favorite restaurant, and people are chewing with their mouths wide open. And they're stealing food off of people's plates. That sounds like my New York family, actually.
(LAUGHTER)
GELFAND: Or imagine that you board a crowded elevator, and you find people facing backwards and shaking their umbrellas all over the place. I encourage the listeners to see what happens if you do something like that. What kind of responses do you get? Or imagine a world where people are having sex all over the place - on buses, airplanes and movie theaters. This is a world without social norms or any agreed upon standards for behavior. And luckily we have invented these kinds of rules to avoid these scenarios. In a way, you can think about it as societies would cease to function without these kinds of rules. They're the glue that bind us together.
VEDANTAM: What Michele is talking about is not just the rules we have but the rules we have about following the rules. Are we exacting about our preferences for order and structure? Or do we prefer to have wiggle room? When we come back, we dig into Michele's framework for understanding these preferences.
Tight Vs. Loose
Some cultures are tight, by which I mean that they have strict norms and punishments for people that are deviating from those norms. And other groups are loose. They have weaker norms. And they're much more permissive. And it's something that we can think about - this terminology tight and loose - that can help us understand nations and states and organizations and even our own households.
VEDANTAM: And so tightness and looseness is not about whether you have rules. But it's really about how much you follow the rules, how much you care about the rules, how important the rules are to you?
GELFAND: Tight cultures have a lot of rules. And they're very strict about the enforcement of those rules. Loose cultures have fewer rules that are actually much more ambiguous. And they're much more permissive. They afford a wider range of behavior as permissible, even in the same situation. Think about a library, which many of us, as soon as we get into libraries, we know this is a tight situation. You're not going to start singing and dancing and start, you know, playing your radio really loudly. And around the world libraries, are pretty strict everywhere. But what's remarkable - and this is what we can see in research - is that even in loose contexts, people are doing all sorts of weird things in libraries, compared to in tight cultures in the same situation.
Or take a city park, where it's much looser. There's a wider range of behavior that's permissible. We can see that in places like Pakistan, yeah, there's much more behavior that's permissible in this context, but it's still stricter in public parks than in the United States. So we all have a normative radar thinking about which situations are tight and loose. And we amazingly go through our days without even realizing it, that we're shifting our normative mindsets in these contexts. But nevertheless, we see wide variation in how people act in the same exact situations - libraries, public parks, elevators, even - around the world.
It's a continuum actually
GELFAND: In this study, we found that tight-loose was a continuum. Countries like Japan, Singapore, Germany and Austria tended to veer tight. And countries like New Zealand, Brazil, the Netherlands and Greece tended to veer loose. And, of course, all countries have tight and loose elements. In Japan, for example, even though it's pretty strict, there's designated times to kind of have fun and get drunk with your supervisors. And, you know, even in other contexts, like New Zealand, which veers loose in our data - where you see people walking barefoot in banks around the country, for example, there's also domains that are pretty tight in New Zealand that manifest itself when people are trying to stand out. They call them tall poppies. New Zealand's a place that's high on egalitarianism, so standing out is really violating that strong value. And that's why that's a domain that's pretty tight in New Zealand. My theory would be that any domain that's really super important in a country evolves to be tight. And so in New Zealand, we can see that when you break the rules of being egalitarian, you can get some serious negative feedback, whereas in many other domains, it's pretty loose.
The tight-loose framework gives us a way of thinking about the underlying preferences that shape the way we respond to the world.
