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Michele Gelfand on Tight and Loose Cultures
12 Sept 2018 26 published claims 1 attributable person
Speakers in the public record
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belief 14evaluation 7prediction 2preference 2observation 1
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26 published records
“I would say someone like Joe McGrath. He is deceased. He was a big groups researcher at Illinois when I was there.”
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“I just don’t think it activates disgust. I would say the same thing with natural disasters.”
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“I think that people, through socialization, through social learning, are trained to follow the norms of their previous generations.”
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“To some extent, that’s OK here in the US, but it doesn’t work so well in other places.”
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“I’m proud that my kids are in a context where they’re learning about different cultures. Now, I think you also learn a lot of other cultures in Bethesda as well.”
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“I think that there’s some really smart, accessible types of papers that come out in HBR that help people to understand human behavior, give real-world examples of how they apply.”
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“I think that because of the tenure process, because sometimes the demands of the task can actually cause tight or loose to evolve.”
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“I would say that we’ve learned that culture is not random, that it evolves for semi-adaptive reasons, given the kinds of environments that people place.”
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“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.”
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“I would say that wealth is obviously very important. It predicts, in the collectivism literature, high levels of group orientation.”
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“Part of the problem is that a lot of people get these dos and don’ts — superficial aspects of culture — when they’re being sent on an expatriate assignment.”
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“Oh. [laughs] I would say the politeness. In our research, loose states are very rude.”
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“I would say that economics can be somewhat atheoretical in the sense that psychologists are concerned with mediating mechanisms.”
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“As a result, it produces the desire for stronger rules and strong leaders. I think that looseness ebbs and flows.”
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“I think that there are certain threats like violence that have been dramatically reduced, but there’s other collective threats that we have to be mindful of.”
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“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.”
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“My group at Maryland is really fiercely interdisciplinary because we want to bring in methods that can help us replicate theory.”
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“I think that in the past we’ve thought about power as allowing people to violate norms and to have a lot of latitude.”
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“I feel like being paid to do what I do is an unbelievable feat because I love what I do.”
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“I don’t know where that comes from because meta analyses would say that when there are gender differences, they tend to be pretty small.”
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“Certainly, at the individual level, I would say that openness — the big five dimension — and conscientiousness are critical for making up and reinforcing the strength of norms.”
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“The reason why cross-cultural psychology developed in the first place is because people were really concerned that American psychology was based on very strange samples, ignoring 70 percent of the world.”
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“” There’s a reason why these things work here, but they might not work in Egypt or in Japan. It’s really important because we’re training our students, our MBAs, our political scientists, our lawyers to adapt a certain style of negotiating that just doesn’t work in other parts of the world.”
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“In all cultures, I would argue that some domains evolved to be tight because they’re really important in that culture.”
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“I would say that cross-cultural psychologists are not too unfamiliar with this kind of replication crisis because for years and years, we know that when you try to replicate something, even in a different state, let alone another country, you are going to be dealing with hundreds of rival hypotheses.”
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“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.”
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