Michele Gelfand: evaluation

Transcript context

…Would the notions of tightness and looseness, say, predict big five personality variables like conscientiousness, openness? These are different levels of analysis. It’s important to think about cultures as systems. You have very macro-level factors like threat. Then you have personality, individual level. The question is, how do those relate to each other? In the Science paper, I tried to develop a multilevel model that specified different factors that help reinforce tightness at different levels. Certainly, at the individual level, I would say that openness — the big five dimension — and conscientiousness are critical for making up and reinforcing the strength of norms. Loose cultures need people, socialize people to be open because you need to actually tolerate a lot of ambiguity in loose cultures. You’re going to see a lot of weird stuff happening. Tight cultures have stronger norms — think about being in a library — need people to have a lot of self-regulation and a lot of prevention focus in order to fit into those contexts and maintain them. There is a connection. You can start thinking about how norms and personality make each other up. They can’t exist without each other in a large extent. I’m from northern New Jersey. Do you regard that as a tight or a loose region? I know you have state-level variables, but of course we can’t count the South here.…

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