Michele Gelfand: belief

Transcript context

…My colleague, Garett Jones, is a big fan of what he calls the deep roots literature, namely the notion that cultural traits are extremely persistent, possibly even for centuries, but at least for generations. Your notions of tightness and looseness — how much do they persist over time? At least assuming the set of people living in a given territory is staying more or less the same. I think that tight-loose is a dynamic construct that . . . what we can see, and I’ve collected data after, for example, the Boston bombing. After that event happened, we could see immediate tightening in Boston. People wanting stronger rules. People starting to get skeptical of outsiders. We’ve seen this in the laboratory. I can convince people at Maryland that they’re living in an environment like Singapore that has 20,000 people per square mile. That activation of threat can make people immediately tighter and wanting stronger rules, wanting stronger leaders. But if the threat is not chronic, if it’s not perpetuated, then we go back to the attractor that we’re used to in dynamical systems theory. It’s not as though it can’t change, but in order to actually have a gigantic change in tightness, you need to have either a very strong, top-down threat that’s persistent or different people that have now entered the system. That’s something that doesn’t happen that much. That’s why I think it’s relatively stable. 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?…

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