Freakonomics Quotes. People who went out to California, I would say if we gave them the tight-loose mindset quiz, they were probably on the looser mindset. More feminine societies tend to have less poverty and higher literacy rates. You can never admit weakness or failure. And all those things need to be realigned when you really have a true culture change. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. That level of religiosity is very high for a wealthy country. In Brazil and Greece, youre not entirely sure what time it is. But its important to acknowledge that no culture is a monolith. And he tried all kinds of categories and groups. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, 55 percent pray at least daily, and 36 percent attend a religious service at least once a week. HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., individualism coupled with masculinity creates a society where if youre not a winner, youre a loser. to let him focus even more on this data. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. HOFSTEDE: Yes. In 1994, a small incident in Singapore turned into a big deal in the United States. This is the dimension based on data from the World Values Survey. Both are long-term oriented, so they see a lot of context around things. DUBNER: I like those rules. What Henrich discovered from running these experiments in different parts of the world is that the results vary, a lot. 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. Download Print. If you wanted to reduce this to a slogan of Americanism, it might be something like: I am me, deal with it. This fits quite snugly with the fact that the U.S. has been found to be the most individualistic culture in the world. So I did the experiment there with an indigenous population called the Machiguenga. Thats what we call tight-loose ambidexterity. That, again, is Gert Jan Hofstede. The final dimension on the Hofstede model is called indulgence versus restraint. You had Woodstock, and youre going to have this kind of stuff happening again. Whereas in countries that are bogged down in cronyism and corruption, it doesnt happen. DUBNER: So between not having been historically a terrible recipient of viruses and also by dint of having an ocean on either side of us, etc., and being a really big and really rich country, it sounds like the U.S. must have one of the lowest inherent threat levels. GELFAND: Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese. And when I started to work with Harry Triandis, who was one of the founders of the field, I thought, Wow, this is a super-interesting construct. In each chapter, the authors analyze a different social issue from an economic perspective. Ultimatum Game Bargaining Among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon, U.S. Student Tells of Pain Of His Caning In Singapore, Singapores Relations With U.S. And you need revolutions in order to change the government. HENRICH: Because Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. She sees the lack of self-control in loose countries as particularly worrisome. Theres a good side of every dimension, including uncertainty avoidance. And its another dimension on which the U.S. is a substantial outlier. Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. It means you really want to know and youre not satisfied until you know. But heres the thing about culture: it can be really hard to measure. And if you get crumbs in your pajamas, theyll make you itch. ERNIE: Oh, gee. Wed rather think about solutions temporarily rather than as, this might take some time. It means that we need to attract different types of people to an organization. So, yes, the same attributes that can be a big problem can also be a big boost. But even a loose country will tighten up when a threat arises. GELFAND: If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. 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. GELFAND: And it caused a real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic punishment, which was caning. People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. And so individualism, trust in others, leads to more rapid innovation. And how does this extraordinarily high level of individualism versus collectivism play out? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a . 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. 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. And we made sure that the subjects knew that the money was coming from an organization, that the giver did not get any of the money, we ratcheted up our levels of anonymity. The country that ranks highest in long-term orientation is Japan; also high on this scale are China and Russia. If you plot the U.S. on G.D.P. 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). Mobility also produces looseness, because its harder to agree upon any norm. So, Japan has been hit by Mother Nature for centuries. Our theme song is Mr. Freakonomics, M.D. Freakonomics Science 4.7 932 Ratings; Each week, physician and economist Dr. Bapu Jena will dig into a fascinating study at the intersection of economics and healthcare. Gelfand wanted to learn where theyd get the most help. Again, its worth repeating that no culture is a monolith. When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York: Colgate University. Paperback - April 22, 2020. HENRICH: This cashes out in an ability to make better abstract or absolute judgment. NEAL: We think about improvisation in the context, obviously, of creative and musical terms, but its also a way of always having to adapt to the changing political, social, and cultural realities. 1424 Words. Do you know what you are? And that happens a lot. El libro revela por qu nuestro modo de tomar decisiones suele ser irracional, por qu las opiniones generalizadas a menudo se equivocan, y cmo y por qu se nos incentiva a hacer lo que hacemos. So $10 in this case. The comedians John Oliver, Hannah Gadsby, and Kumail Nanjiani all grew up outside the U.S. HOFSTEDE: He did social psychological work on what it is to be a manager. Today, an overview of the cultural differences. That was our hypothesis, at least. 493 Update) Adam Smith famously argued that specialization is the key to prosperity. The United States, you may not be surprised to learn, is on the loose end of the spectrum although not in the top five. We had a lot of struggles with tightening during Covid, clearly. HENRICH: If you go to other societies, people are much more willing to give the same wrong answer to go along with others. The most indulgent country in these rankings is Mexico, at 97 out of 100; the most restrained: Egypt, at four. It was there, and later on in travels in the Middle East, and working on a kibbutz, and elsewhere, that I started recognizing this really powerful force of culture that was incredibly important but really invisible. Around this time, he started doing some teaching at the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Ep. Freakonomics Radio . Now that weve taken a top-down view of how the U.S. is fundamentally different from other countries, were going to spend some time over the coming weeks looking at particular economic and social differences, having to do with policing, child poverty, infrastructure, and the economy itself. The downsides of looseness are less coordination, less self-control; more crime and quality-of-life problems. GELFAND: If youre in contexts where theres a lot of rules, you develop from a very early age that impulse control. So you see these eye movements that are very different. Still, Gelfands horizons were suddenly expanded; and her curiosity was triggered. The correct answer of the given question above would be the second option. The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Needs to Become Less American, Measuring Inequity Aversion in a Heterogeneous Population Using Experimental Decisions and Subjective Probabilities, Westerners and Easterners See the World Differently, Economic Man in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies, Ultimatum Game with Ethnicity Manipulation: Problems Faced Doing Field Economic Experiments and Their Solutions, Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? So this is quite a while ago. Culture can be quite an offensive concept, particularly to people who project it onto an individual characteristic, as if it was about an individual. (That will also need some explaining.) Heres the dean of the National University of Singapores school of public health: YIK-YING TEO: We have a tradition of having national campaigns to galvanize people to proceed in a common direction. How much should we attribute that success to these very same factors that create chaos on other dimensions? But everybody, of course, instinctively feels and should feel that their country, or whatever their tribe is, is the best in the world. Industrialized. And heres one of the people who created the WEIRD designation. DUBNER: What problem was he, and later you, trying to solve by doing this work? I have a professorship in Joburg in South Africa, too. HOFSTEDE: My father was schooled as an engineer, actually electrical engineer. Spoiler alert: This dimension is one of the six in which the U.S. is the biggest outlier in the world. I hate to call out Michele Gelfand, but even in the loosest of cultures, dogs dont have unfettered access to food. GELFAND: I would say it tends to be California. And democratic. All that it takes is to get out of their cages of bickering and anxiety. This failure leads to confusion at the very least, but quite possibly deeper misunderstandings, perhaps all the way up to hatred and violent conflict. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. There is no evidence for convergence other than if countries become equally rich, they all go to more individualistic. And it was like, This stuff is really lousy. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. Most sociologists agree that individualistic cultures value individual choice, personal freedom, and self-actualization (Kemmelmeier 2002). GELFAND: I grew up on Long Island. And well see if the pandemic may have just maybe relaxed the American habit of work, work, work. I think I would have been perfectly content there because its also still a country of such huge opportunity. We are acronymically WEIRD. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt's own peer-reviewed research. GELFAND: Having more adaptability, more innovation. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. And we found the full spectrum of variation. 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. It means I did it my way.. Which is probably why we dont hear all that much about the science of culture. That, again, is the cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand. Michele GELFAND: The people that came to New York early on, they were from all sorts of different cultural backgrounds, and thats helped produce the looseness that exists to this day. We met him earlier, but just briefly; heres a proper introduction. 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. employees spread across the globe. Whether this means something brings you financial, emotional, or even community benefit. You have to behave like a family member if you want to be one. And then theres the big C, the stuff that we have these big conversations about, that we do these incredible studies about, which is really about the worldview of groups of people coming together, in a community, in a nation, in a family, right? HOFSTEDE: Masculine society means that if you show power, that gives you social status. He was a professor in both the economics and psychology departments, which was weird in its own way lower-case weird since Henrich had never taken a course in either subject. In the U.S., it was freedom to do whatever the hell that you wanted to. Theres far less stigmatization of people in terms of their race, their religion. This leads to less obesity, less addiction, and theres less crime in tighter cultures. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. And then I meet you all, and then youre not. Categories like age, gender, job type, job seniority, and so on. Those are the things you cant necessarily plan and account for in building models of how you expect people to react in different situations. If you no longer even pretend to be one people and to be fair to all the citizens of your country, then youre not going down a road that leads to a great future. Downloads: 18. 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. That, again, is the American culture scholar Joe Henrich. But a lot of the world is much more like a family. Majority of the people who created the WEIRD designation higher literacy rates really lousy youre a.... 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