Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers. You could just do an across-the-board search of various Western religions and look at who the figureheads are. According to the individualist, all values are human-centred, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. It also is related to obesity. I came back to Colgate. thats always there. The snob effect occurs when an individual's demand for a specific product increases when the number of units of that product other people purchase increases. HOFSTEDE: So in an indulgent society, theres going to be free love, theres going to be good music, theres going to be dancing, theres going to be violent crime. And the research subject explained to him that, Oh, I feel so bad for you that you cant afford pants without holes in them that I cant take the money from this poor American kid. And it struck me as a way in which this experiment could be perverted. It is what we got fed with our mothers milk and the porridge that our dad gave us. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. One of the defining features of Americanism is our so-called rugged individualism. You might even call it wild individualism. The cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has been telling us about loose and tight cultures around the world. Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. Allen Lane 20, pp304. Whereas we usually describe a scent by saying something that it smells like.. You Arent Alone as Most Cats and Dogs in the U.S. are Overweight, The Loosening of American Culture Over 200 Years is Associated With a CreativityOrder Trade-Off, Speaking a Tone Language Enhances Musical Pitch Perception in 35-Year-Olds, TightnessLooseness Across the 50 United States, The Mller-Lyer Illusion in a Computational Model of Biological Object Recognition, Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types, Egypt: Crime Soars 200 Per Cent Since Hosni Mubarak Was Ousted, Status and the Evaluation of Workplace Deviance. In the latest issue of American Scientist, statisticians Kaiser Fung and Andrew Gelman wrote a strong critique of Levitt and Dubner's work. This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. GELFAND: We have a whole new map of the U.S. where we can actually rank-order the U.S. 50 states in terms of how much threat they have. We presume male public voice. So yeah, the U.S. has that assignment ahead of it. So you see these eye movements that are very different. DUBNER: So does all the data come from workplace interviews essentially of white-collar and pink-collar workers, or does it go broader than that? HOFSTEDE: Look, guys, we can do it. DUBNER: What does an institution like the Navy see as the upsides of more looseness? So this is not about, Is world peace important?, HOFSTEDE: For instance, Is it important for you to have a good working relationship with your boss? Or Is it a good idea for people to maybe have more than one boss?. DUBNER: When I look at the loosest country in the data, I see Ukraine. It is a small price to pay to punish the first player for being so stingy. The comedians John Oliver, Hannah Gadsby, and Kumail Nanjiani all grew up outside the U.S. we're looking out for the best interest of our individual pursuits. GELFAND: And it caused a real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic punishment, which was caning. That is generated by looseness. Thats what we call tight-loose ambidexterity. It could give you new occasions to gain status in an unexpected way. Whereas people from less individualistic societies tend to be better at making relative-size judgments. GELFAND: This has always been the big question, the myth that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. In indulgent societies, more people play sports, while in restrained societies, sports are more something you watch. employees. Hence the term, the changing same. I think there are historical moments that are transcendent. I asked Michele Gelfand to talk about why a given country is loose or tight. And you dont need them for ritual reasons. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. GELFAND: The U.S. is one of the most creative places on the planet. DUBNER: Where is the loosest place in America? Equating individualism with selfishness may be a mistake: Some of the world's wealthiest and most individualistic countries are some of the most altruistic, says 13.7 guest commentator Abigail Marsh. Spoiler alert: This dimension is one of the six in which the U.S. is the biggest outlier in the world. President Bush had framed these negotiations as going an extra mile for peace.. As Hofstede the Younger remembers it, his father asked his bosses at I.B.M. You had Woodstock, and youre going to have this kind of stuff happening again. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: This American teenager from Ohio, Michael Fay, was in Singapore and was arrested and charged with various counts of vandalism and other shenanigans. HOFSTEDE: Which doesnt mean egoism, but it could go that way. You have to behave like a family member if you want to be one. Based on the given excerpt above from Freakonomics, the claim that is supported by the evidence in this excerpt is that, The close relationship between sumo wrestlers could be an incentive for an elite wrestler to throw a match he doesn't need to win. I think Joe Biden, for instance, hes trying to play the card of, Were all Americans. It was freedom from hunger. Gert Jan Hofstede is a Dutch culture scholar whos been walking us through these dimensions. High religiosity coupled with high individualism reveals another feature of American culture. That is not just the most American thing thats ever happened. Heres how he describes himself these days. Share. Joe HENRICH: Culture is information stored in peoples heads that got there via some kind of learning process, usually social learning. More feminine societies tend to have less poverty and higher literacy rates. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. - Lyssna p 470. DUBNER: Describe for me your father and his work, and how it became a family business. The reason we reached out to Michele Gelfand is that I want to understand this stuff better, too. HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. NEAL: We realized that the grind is unsustainable. In one experiment, Gelfand sent a bunch of research assistants to different places around the world. So keep your ears open for all that. on one axis and religiosity on the other axis, the U.S. is a clear and distinct outlier with high G.D.P and high religion. And what does he have to say about American culture? And it should stay there. The country that ranks highest in long-term orientation is Japan; also high on this scale are China and Russia. He interviewed people at I.B.M. Episode 470 The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. Where would you think the U.S. ranks among all the countries measured on this dimension? SFU will never request our users provide or confirm their Computing ID or password via email or by going to any web site. And how does a scholar like Neal think about culture per se? Gelfand says the countries that were most aggressive in trying to contain Covid tended to be tighter countries. GELFAND: All cultures have social norms, these unwritten rules that guide our behavior on a daily basis. So the general rules of a loose or tight culture may not be consistently applied to all populations. Sinopsis. His ideas, along with others, are credited with . Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on . Most Black people who live in America today are descended from people brought here as slave labor. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. So that can be very beneficial. A dream team of directors e. And a lot of those presumptions come from how men function within the context of various religious practices. This suggests that every time a social scientist runs an experiment whose research subjects are WEIRD thats capital-letter WEIRD the results of that experiment may be meaningful in the U.S. and some other places, but quite likely not in others. Scholars in this realm have a general agreement on what culture is and what its not. It means you really want to know and youre not satisfied until you know. In the meantime, a bit more from the comedian Hannah Gadsby. GADSBY: Have you ever noticed how Americans are not stupid? DUBNER: I remember once, years and years ago, when I was reading this research that you were doing, speaking with Francisco Gil-White, who was then at Penn, and he told me that when he was running this Ultimatum experiment, I dont remember where I want to say Mongolia. According to Chapter 5 of Freakonomics, there is a black-white test score gap and that gap is larger when you compare black and white students from the same school. Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese. China is also very collectivistic and so are the Southeast Asian countries, but not Japan. His late father was a social psychologist who devised a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism versus collectivism. GELFAND: Places in the South have tended to have more natural disasters. GELFAND: In Germany and in Japan, the clocks are really synchronized. GELFAND: My own sweet Portuguese water dog, Pepper, I mean, that dog is just gigantic. When you have teenagers, youre tight, at least for me. One of the areas of cultural study that first hooked her had to do with optical illusions. Here in the U.S., its actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms. OLIVER: Baseballs were hit from the deck of a warship from a needlessly inflatable batting cage. I do think that humanity as a whole is sort of evolving to being more reflective. And I think, Holy cow, Ukraine is surrounded by threat, including its next-door neighbor, Russia. That relationship has not been a constant, but that makes me a little suspicious. Remember what he said earlier: HENRICH: So how it is that we acquire ideas, beliefs, and values from other people and how this has shaped human genetic evolution. HOFSTEDE: And this is before the 60s, before the 70s. My husband is an attorney. You might think that someone who studies cross-cultural psychology also grew up abroad, or at least in some big city with a melting-pot vibe. As its been said: Everyone knows that 11 oclock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American life. Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke, notes that American individualism is hardly experienced equally across the population. HENRICH: It chafes us when we get ordered around. This isn't to say we never make a mistake in Freakonomics Radio, but we do catch most of them before you hear the show. But some cultures strictly abide by their norms. In a large power-distant society, you have autocracy. Again, its worth repeating that no culture is a monolith. 1, the most individualistic country in the world, 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede scale of individualism. As always, thanks for listening and again, I do hope you'll also start . Like, you can buy them on the internet. Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. And the Machiguenga were much closer to the predictions of Homo economicus, where youd make low offers and never reject. So why did someone succeed? And then you see how often the subject wants to go along with the other people, as opposed to give the answer they would give if they were by themselves. DUBNER: And what would you say is maybe a political ramification of low power distance? To become American and to be American is to be individual. Yes, the United States of America. We had a lot of struggles with tightening during Covid, clearly. GELFAND: If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. employees spread across the globe. We visit the world's busiest airport to see . Once he saw that differences were driven by nationality, Hofstede sensed he was on to something big. This feeds back into what Michele Gelfand was talking about earlier, in the context of geopolitical negotiations. The strongest parts of the original Freakonomics book revolved around Levitt's own peer-reviewed research. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". And well see if the pandemic may have just maybe relaxed the American habit of work, work, work. The downsides of looseness are less coordination, less self-control; more crime and quality-of-life problems. So Hofstede the Elder began to amass a huge data set about the workplace experiences and preferences of tens of thousands of I.B.M. Is that a yes? Tightness and compliance would seem to go hand-in-hand. Henrich and a couple of colleagues came up with the WEIRD label when he was teaching at the University of British Columbia. HOFSTEDE: In a cultural sense, no, I dont think so. It turns out that Americans were among the least likely to conform. HOFSTEDE: It means that you only need rules when youre going to use them. During the Cold War. HENRICH: Theres something called the Asch conformity test, where you have confederates of the experimenter give the same wrong answer to an objective problem. But its not only compliance. Better Essays. But Bush also wanted to avoid going to war with Iraq. Employees were asked to rate how much they agreed with statements like Competition among employees usually does more harm than good. And, Having interesting work is just as important to most people as having high earnings., HOFSTEDE: Simple questions about daily things that people understand. Theyre longing for it. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like The Freakonomics podcast "Is the American Dream really dead?", mentions five main factors that contribute to social mobility in neighborhoods. This carries over into many areas of society, including the labor market. individualism, political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. . Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the book for readers who run screaming at the thought of cracking open a book with the word "economics" in the title. We can think about extraordinarily loose contexts like Tesla or Uber that probably need a little more structure. All contents Freakonomics. It was freedom from all these debilitating things because the state would be able to provide for you. The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. And I think thats always going to be an ongoing tension this idea of America thats rooted in individualism, thats rooted in transactional practices. Theyre really hard-working. The next dimension is what the Hofstedes call uncertainty avoidance.. Its focus on individual behaviour also lends itself to a preoccupation with manipulating individual choices. The Coronavirus Shutdown Is Revealing Americas Troubling Obsession With Work, Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change During the Age of Mass Migration, A Rising Share of the U.S. Black Population Is Foreign Born, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Indulgence versus Restraint, 10 Minutes withGeert Hofstede on Masculinity versus Femininity, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Individualisme versus Collectivisme, Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context, A Re-Inquiry of Hofstedes Cultural Dimensions: A Call for 21st Century Cross-Cultural Research, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Achievement Values: A Multimethod Examination of Denmark and the United States, Hofstedes Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith A Failure of Analysis. And there are other inconsistencies, especially in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. For instance, where you live. HENRICH: If they accept the offer, they get the amount of the offer. Henrich has written about the notion of time psychology.. HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. Freakonomics Radiois produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. And I think that is a hallmark of African-American culture in this country. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. What is culture? Published: 31 October 2020. Now, California is a real interesting exception because it has a lot of threat. By the same cue, you could vastly admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity. GELFAND: If youre in contexts where theres a lot of rules, you develop from a very early age that impulse control. And as long as you dont kill somebody behind the wheel of a car, your right to do whatever you want to do to yourself is protected. Whereas if you have a state religion, it tends to get tired and old and boring. Theres a huge variation in how much spontaneity people like versus how much structure they want. It always was unsustainable, but was made even more acute to us during the pandemic. Each and every person has individual reasons for pursuing a career, or goal. HOFSTEDE: He did social psychological work on what it is to be a manager. She decided that the key difference, the right place to start measuring, was whether the culture in a given country is tight or loose. Fascinated by the human in the system, he did a PhD in organizational behaviour. We put in a bunch of other checks and controls. That was our hypothesis, at least. There were a number of low offers of 15 percent, which didnt get rejected. We said that a lot of good ideas and policies that work elsewhere in the world cant work in the U.S. because our culture is just different. Did you know there is an entire academic field called cross-cultural psychology? That, again, is the American culture scholar Joe Henrich. By late 2009, the book had sold over 4 million copies worldwide. This leads to less obesity, less addiction, and theres less crime in tighter cultures. Public school quality B. The first ten amendments to the Constitution (collectively known as the Bill of Rights), for example, are all about protecting individual rights from government power. No, I do think that is not just the most individualistic country in the U.S. among... British Columbia looseness are less coordination, less self-control ; more crime and quality-of-life problems hope &... They accept the offer, they get the amount of the original Freakonomics book revolved Levitt... Cons of America & # x27 ; s own peer-reviewed research listening and again its! Says the countries measured on this scale are China and Russia are China Russia... 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Most creative places on the internet could just do an across-the-board search of various religious.. Around it: My name is gert Jan hofstede cultures around the world aggressive... Dad gave us tens of thousands of I.B.M they agreed with statements like Competition among employees usually more... Scale of individualism versus collectivism youre not satisfied until you know there is entire... Of cultural study that first hooked her had to do with optical illusions a given country is loose tight! For pursuing a career, or goal slave labor Machiguenga were much closer to the individualist, values!
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