GELFAND: Like during 9/11, during World Wars, we see increases in tightness. Later on, fast forward, Pertti Pelto, whos an anthropologist. The concept of incentives is a way of explaining why human beings do things. Thats John Oliver. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. NEAL: You have no real other example of a country that has brought together so many different national and ethnic and racial backgrounds. Freakonomics is a collaboration of authors Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, journalists and winners of numerous awards. Once he saw that differences were driven by nationality, Hofstede sensed he was on to something big. Once you begin looking for evidence, you see an almost infinite array of examples. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. For example, we asked bank managers some years ago to look through scenarios of people violating organizational rules, like coming to work late, staying on the phone too long, maybe checking their email. She argues that both styles have their upsides and their downsides. I must be American. Heres how he puts it in his latest book: You cant separate culture from psychology or psychology from biology, because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think. One example he gives is literacy. It is a small price to pay to punish the first player for being so stingy. As an Amazon Associate, Freakonomics may earn commissions from qualifying purchases made through links on this site. GELFAND: I would say it tends to be California. Weve interviewed dozens of academic researchers about lowering healthcare costs or improving access to childcare or building smarter infrastructure or creating a more equitable economy. And I think that America has wonderful things happening to it. HENRICH: And Americans have this probably worse than anybody. GELFAND: I grew up on Long Island. And in a restrained society, theres going to be suicide. Because if you try something new, you show to the people around you that you are an individual and you can make your own decisions. HENRICH: But if you want to talk about humans, then you have a problem. And we found the full spectrum of variation. Well go through the other five dimensions, much faster, I promise. Okay, it took half of this episode to go through just the first of the six dimensions of national culture individualism versus collectivism. But if you want to talk about humans, Homo sapiens, then you have a generalization problem. But if you look 100 years ago and you look at the cultural map of the world, you can read writers from different countries, you will see that there is astonishing continuity. Models couldnt capture the civil rights movement the individual genius that could emerge in any particular historical moment, whether its Ella Baker or Martin Luther King, and the idea that you have these individual moments of brilliance that then come together to create this just historically unique moment. We owe much of our freedom to that influence. If youre violating the social order, youre going to be punished.. Henrich and a couple of colleagues came up with the WEIRD label when he was teaching at the University of British Columbia. But first, Hofstede had to make sure that the differences he was seeing in the data werent specific to I.B.M. GELFAND: Its like that story of two fish where theyre swimming along. The second player is given a choice between accepting or rejecting. HENRICH: Theres something called the Asch conformity test, where you have confederates of the experimenter give the same wrong answer to an objective problem. HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. So rules for the sake of having rules are not good. You can never admit weakness or failure. "Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.". Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: None of it is intentional. There are plenty of looser people in tight countries and vice versa. Think Belarus, Myanmar, Russia, China. It is still the case that you did have the summer of love. DUBNER: So weve done a pretty good job of beating up on the U.S. thus far. We do lab experiments, field experiments, computational modeling. The two players dont know each other. And so individualism, trust in others, leads to more rapid innovation. Whereas looking away in a very egalitarian society is seen as a sign of deceptiveness. And: In present-day Scandinavia levels of individualism would thus have been significantly higher had emigration not occurred.. In the Germanic world, we have systems, which means that nothing stands alone. But its important to acknowledge that no culture is a monolith. I get these words out so I can get on to the next thing. NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. And this dynamic leads to a lot of fighting for the sake of fighting. Our theme song is Mr. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism: With Stephen Dubner. You could argue that Peppers owner is the one who isnt very disciplined. It has to do with conformity. Its waiting to happen because people in this individualistic, indulgent society, they want to be merry. Also, the people who settled in different areas in the U.S. brought with them their own cultural norms and values, and set the stage for different levels of tight-loose within the nation. And thats different than in Scandinavia and in New Zealand and Australia, which has much more horizontal individualism. Chronic threat meaning a country is prone to natural disasters, or disease, or hostile invaders. The incentives of just any regular person are greatly shown because money or personal gain can take over any man or woman no matter how old. GELFAND: And I thought, If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. He would spend the rest of his life building out the 6-Dimension Model of National Culture. But the Hofstede definition of long-termism is a bit more nuanced: it means seeing the world as being in a constant state of flux, which means always preparing for the future. He started working as an engineer during turbulent years of rebuilding, and soon became a personnel manager. All that it takes is to get out of their cages of bickering and anxiety. And this is what Europe has. Today, an overview of the cultural differences. As Hofstede the Younger remembers it, his father asked his bosses at I.B.M. Thats what we call tight-loose ambidexterity. In a more masculine society, men and women adhere to the gender roles you might think of as patriarchal: fathers, for instance, take care of the facts, while mothers handle the emotions. He saw that there were clearer patterns between countries than between job seniority, or male-female, or whatever else. This is the flip side of the idea we started out with in this episode that is, why its hard for the U.S. to simply import successful policies from elsewhere. In a society of small power distance, a lot. Im like, Were going to go to Singapore if you people dont behave.. I think the models dont account for that because you cant account for that, right? A child is a child, and a parent is a parent, and a parent decides for the child. Greeks are very strong on that. I have a professorship in Joburg in South Africa, too. Like, the military should be tighter than tech. During the Cold War. GELFAND: This has always been the big question, the myth that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. Life is going to be hard. My husband is an attorney. So its not necessarily the case that my country is better. HOFSTEDE: So in an indulgent society, theres going to be free love, theres going to be good music, theres going to be dancing, theres going to be violent crime. So this is quite a while ago. And you need revolutions in order to change the government. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. The final dimension on the Hofstede model is called indulgence versus restraint. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into . SFU users should ignore all messages requesting Computing ID and/or password information, no matter how authentic they may appear. The best thing you can become is yourself. But heres the thing about culture: it can be really hard to measure. Meaning, if you grew up in someplace like the U.S., when you look at an image youre more likely to pay attention to whats in the foreground, in the center. Why Does the Most Monotonous Job in the World Pay $1 Million? According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; were also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on uncertainty avoidance, if that makes you feel better). Its the tiny differences in sociality. Although the concept of an individual may seem straightforward, there are many ways of understanding it, both in theory and in practice. HOFSTEDE: If you are, lets say, a toddler, what do you get to decide for yourself? Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. 1424 Words. This failure leads to confusion at the very least, but quite possibly deeper misunderstandings, perhaps all the way up to hatred and violent conflict. This leads to less obesity, less addiction, and theres less crime in tighter cultures. The second one measures what's called "power distance." (Don't worry, we'll explain the name . Theyre able to make finer distinctions in terms of their olfaction. And I was interested in this, and I thought maybe it would tell us something about an innate human psychology for reciprocity or something like that. . we're looking out for the best interest of our individual pursuits. But its not only compliance. Because the purpose of this conversation is to try and understand exactly how (and why) the U.S. is different, and individualism is the dimension on which we are the biggest outlier. This is a summary of the book Freakonomics by Stephen DubnerJoin Reading.FM now: https://fourminutebooks.com/go/readingfm/register/Read more summaries: http. I personally expect at some point in the not very far future to have another wave of youthful optimism and find a way to say, Look, guys, we can do it, the future could be bright. In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. HOFSTEDE: But it turned out that lumping them by nationality was the best thing to do. It was: And your culture, your American culture, is very different. At this point, we should probably define terms. So if you base your understanding of a given culture on a body of research that fails to include them, youll likely fail to understand how that culture thinks whether were talking about another country or a group within your own country. And it produces this illusion. And that really can help explain some variation not all, but some variation in norms and values. It always was unsustainable, but was made even more acute to us during the pandemic. Henrich is saying that the export of American ideas isnt necessarily easier. Fascinated by the human in the system, he did a PhD in organizational behaviour. You always have to win. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. If you read the passage above and use a typical 6% agent/broker commission schedule, 3% seller and 3% buyer agent/broker, then the home owner/seller takes a $10K hit on the value of the total sale price where the agents/brokers only take a $600 hit. Really? HENRICH: We dont like people telling us what to do. A loose country, like the U.S., tends to do well in creativity and innovation; in tolerance and openness; in free speech and a free press. (That will also need some explaining.) He grew up in England. HOFSTEDE: Thats my idea. And so often, theyll just point at some other country on the map. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. making a claim about his individual experiences and looking for evidence. They are descended from people who came here of their own free will and in order to execute their own free will. This interest goes back to those negotiations between Jim Baker and Tariq Aziz. We said that a lot of good ideas and policies that work elsewhere in the world cant work in the U.S. because our culture is just different. Everybody gets tickled until they laugh. It could give you new occasions to gain status in an unexpected way. And all those things need to be realigned when you really have a true culture change. We need to change our practices. What is culture? Tom BROKAW:A young American has been sentenced to a caning for an act of vandalism. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity. NEAL: I often think about how the U.S. has historically thought about freedom and how, say, the Soviet bloc had talked about freedom. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. But one of the things thats happened, particularly in the context of social media in the last 10 years, is that people now can speak back to power and close the gaps in terms of where individual people see themselves in relationship to power. And there are other inconsistencies, especially in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. For instance, where you live. Kumail NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. Do you know what you are? 47 min. Investing, for instance: GELFAND: Theres some research coming from the University of Georgia that found that buying and selling of stocks was more synchronized in tighter cultures as compared to looser cultures. The ancient Romans. Whereas we usually describe a scent by saying something that it smells like.. She sees the lack of self-control in loose countries as particularly worrisome. And if there are crumbs in the sheets, theyll get in your pajamas. One of the areas of cultural study that first hooked her had to do with optical illusions. He interviewed people at I.B.M. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. Well find out what it means to be WEIRD although not weird in the way youre thinking. Employees were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements like Competition among employees usually does more harm than good. And, Having interesting work is just as important to most people as having high earnings., HOFSTEDE: Simple questions about daily things that people understand. When Americans did this experiment, a third of them conformed and gave an obviously wrong answer. The authors seek to find simple answers to complicated world problems. When most readers think economics, they think advanced math, complicated models, and subjects like unemployment, the stock market, and the trade deficit. So rules for the child probably define terms out the 6-Dimension Model of national.! This probably worse than anybody decides for the sake of having rules are good! Of American ideas isnt necessarily easier all that it takes is to get out of cages... To Singapore if you want to be merry than between job seniority or... So individualism, trust in others, leads to less obesity, less,! Our freedom to that influence lab experiments, computational modeling study that hooked. 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