Michele Gelfand: belief

Transcript context

…But how do people respond to a pandemic when they come? It looks a lot like a war, right? You have quarantines. You have people band together. There’s a fair amount of central planning. I just don’t think it activates disgust. I would say the same thing with natural disasters. If we’re worried about a natural disaster happening at Maryland, we don’t start feeling disgusted. We feel fear. But they might both produce . . . and we have seen that pathogens produce tightness, both in the lab and also in the field. We see that other threats that require coordination also produce tightness, but they’re not mediated through feelings of disgust. How do the categories of loose and tight map onto traditional gender roles? Is there a gender-based difference, say, in how people respond to fear or a sense of threat?…

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