Michele Gelfand: belief

Transcript context

…Are cultures in general becoming tighter or looser over time? That’s a great question. Many people would think that they’re becoming looser, but actually you can see here in the US lots of evidence that we see tightening in the United States. I don’t think it’s a healthy tightening, per se. It’s involving a lot of fake threat or exaggerated threat, the confluence of leaders that are activating threat as well as social media that amplifies threats. People pay attention to these threats. This is the availability heuristic, as you know, in cognitive science. When we hear about an immigrant who has just shot someone, it’s very salient to us. It’s much more salient than another person in another state who is an American citizen shooting their whole family. So we overexaggerate these threats. As a result, it produces the desire for stronger rules and strong leaders. I think that looseness ebbs and flows. It depends on the perceived or actual level of threat in the environment. Geographic cross-state mobility is down about 50 percent from its postwar peak in this country. How is that changing our culture?…

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