Michele Gelfand: preference

Transcript context

…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. I’m from Long Island, so we have a little bit of a rivalry, although I will say that, as I’ve grown older, I think Jersey’s definitely a much nicer place than Long Island. Sorry for my Long Island friends out there. New Jersey, in our data at the state level, falls in the relatively loose category. When we rank order the 50 states, we can see a new way to think about our variation in the United States. Not just red or blue, but, again, tight or loose. New Jersey tends to be on the looser side. The coasts tend to be looser. The South tends to be tighter in our data. We can think about this both in terms of, again, threat. Threat tends to predict tightness, even in the United States. If you look at the map that the New York Times published earlier this summer in terms of natural disasters, it’s very closely aligned with our map of tightness in the United States. The South has been the victim of Mother Nature’s fury for years, and it also has a lot of other threats. There’s also a lot of founder’s effects that I talk about in the book. The East Coast has been a diverse place for centuries, as has been the West Coast. Diversity promotes looseness. One of your ratings of the states has the five tightest as being Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee. Those strike me as some of the states where a stranger is most likely to shoot you in a bar. I understand they may be tight as a kind of response to threat and danger. But isn’t this showing that there are always two dimensions? They have some norms that are tight precisely because the places themselves are not tight. Things can spiral out of control and be somewhat chaotic and disorderly. What you’re measuring is always one side of the coin. But it’s exactly offset by other chaotic features of these places.…

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