Michele Gelfand: belief

Transcript context

…In one of your papers, you gave some 2011 rankings where, if I recall, the three tightest cultures were in this order: Malaysia, Pakistan, and India. They don’t seem very orderly when you go there. What makes them tight? Isn’t it the case that they, in some regards, maybe have oppressive norms, but they absolutely fail at regulating behavior in some regards? If you try standing in a queue, at least, say, in India, it’s a highly disorderly experience. That’s right. These are very crowded places that are relatively poor. So those domains, in terms of things like traffic or coordinating, like you said, and cutting lines — these are things that they tend to be loose in. But in many domains, they tend to be very tight: in the domain of marriage, in the domain of sexuality, in authority and language. These are very strong rules that people have to abide by, and if they deviate, then there’s strong punishments. These are really important observations. Every culture has some tight domains and some loose domains. It’s helpful for people to develop cultural intelligence — not just emotional intelligence or general intelligence — when they’re traveling, and understand and anticipate what domains are going to be tight and loose. Japan’s another example. It’s really tight, but there’s some domains that become totally loose. Takeshita Street — I talked about it in the book; it’s a place where anything goes. After hours in organizations, anything goes. You need in a very tight culture some places that you can let off some steam and become quite loose. Any culture needs both tightness and looseness, and I would argue — and I talk about the Goldilocks principle that any culture that gets too extreme in terms of looseness or tightness has a lot of problems. In that 2011 rating, if the three most tight are listed as Malaysia, Pakistan, India, and then the three next most tight are Singapore, South Korea, and Norway, might we infer that there are two kinds of tightness somehow? That Malaysia, Pakistan, India belong together, but Singapore, South Korea, and Norway deserve a separate dimension? And that tightness-looseness is too few dimensions; there ought to be three, four, maybe more?…

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