Michele Gelfand: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s say China does not, in a major way, threaten Japan, and the Japanese population continues to shrink. You end up with 50 million people living in what we now call Japan. What’s your sense of the speed of adjustment? Japan will then become a much looser culture? How long does that take? Is it more like 20 years, 200 years? How do you think about that? I think that someone like Joe Henrich might argue that it would take a long time, several hundred years. I think that people, through socialization, through social learning, are trained to follow the norms of their previous generations. Ron Inglehart also talks about — change takes a long time in his data, over years and years to happen. This is not something that we can witness, change happening overnight. You mention in your book that population density in the year 1500 has fairly high predictive power. What does it predict?…

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