Michele Gelfand: belief

Transcript context

…One of my readers wrote to me and suggested, correctly or not, that about 70 percent of the variation in a people’s values can be explained by wealth. Do you agree? Just this one variable, wealth, much more important than anything else. True or false? I would say that wealth is obviously very important. It predicts, in the collectivism literature, high levels of group orientation. In our data, we don’t find any direct connection between GDP per capita and tightness. You have very tight cultures that are wealthy, like Singapore and Japan. You have very loose cultures that struggle. In our data, actually, what we can see is that there’s no real main effect of GDP on the strength of norms. Doesn’t that mean, though, if there’s no correlation, that both tightness and looseness — in some way, they don’t work? Looseness doesn’t get you more innovation. Tightness doesn’t get you more order. Are they, then, a kind of epiphenomenon? How people answer questions or how they set their clocks in synchronization, but that don’t really drive what people actually care about in the country, which is wealth?…

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