Credit: OLI SCARFF/Getty
It’s surely unfair to expect a brilliant scientist to also be a brilliant author. Some of the most valuable books I’ve encountered in my research have been the dreariest to read: repetitive, dense and joyless prose turning what could have been a fascinating journey through a world of ideas into an after-school detention. Psychology professor Michele Gelfand, though, manages to put those books to shame with the lucid and fascinating Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, which achieved that clichéd goal of popular science books: truly changing the way a reader see the world.
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers explores Gelfand’s research into differences between cultures. Specifically, she describes cultures that are (using terms invented by Finnish-American anthropologist Pertti Pelto) “tight” and “loose”. Tight cultures are conformist “rule makers” while loose ones are creative “rule breakers”. According to Gelfand, tight nations include India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, China and Portugal; loose nations include Spain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, the Netherlands and Ukraine. (The UK sits somewhere towards the middle, and is slowly becoming looser.)
Life in tight nations can be strict compared to looser places, which have weaker social norms and a more permissive way of being. Gelfand contrasts tight Japan where “trains almost never arrive late” with loose Brazil where “clocks on city streets all read a different time, and arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. If Brazilians want to insist on timeliness, they will ask you to arrive “com pontualidade britânica” (“with British punctuality”). In notoriously tight Germany there are “mandated quiet hours” on certain days, during which lawn-mowing, loud music and washing machine use is forbidden. “After one Cologne resident complained about a yapping dog, a judge allowed the dog to bark for only 30 minutes a day in 10-minute intervals.”
What makes all this especially powerful is Gelfand’s understanding that we absorb the rules of our time and place, internalising them so that, to an extent, we become them. The halting but demonstrably true fact is that certain cultures produce, on average, certain kinds of human. We’re a tribal species and our brains are programmed to learn local norms, to follow them and to judge others by how closely or otherwise they conform to them. We need rules in order to live successfully in co-operative groups; they are our “cure for chaos”. And we love our rules. Gelfand quotes the Greek adventurer Herodotus who, in roughly 450 BC, observed our ethnocentric nature: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”
It’s not that loose nations don’t have any rules at all, then, but that they take them marginally less seriously than the tight. And so sometimes dramatic differences arise between people of different cultures. Loose types, raised in a more laissez-faire environment, tend to possess less self-control than the tighties. “People in the United States, New Zealand, Greece and Venezuela weigh much more than people in tight countries like India, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore, even taking into account a country’s wealth and people’s average height,” writes Gelfand, adding that, in the US, “over 50% of dogs and cats are overweight or obese, including my own dog, Pepper”. Similarly, loose countries such as Spain, Estonia and New Zealand are some of the booziest in the world, while tight Singapore, India and China are among the most abstemious.
In cultures that have “little tolerance for deviance”, though, life can get rather hatey. Tight nations are often not welcoming of outsiders. China reportedly “ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners”, while in Japan “many landlords have a ‘no foreigners’ policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants and hotels deny entry to foreign customers”. Closer to home, surveys show that “almost 30% of Austrian citizens hold anti-Semitic attitudes”. Research by Gelfand and her team, involving more than 33,000 people in 19 countries, found loose nations to be the most tolerant, being “much more willing to live next to a wider range of people, including homosexuals, individuals from a different race or religion, foreign workers, unmarried couples and those who have AIDS”.
In an especially fascinating passage, Gelfand examines the causes of tightness. Her conclusion is straightforward: it’s a response to trouble. When the going gets tough, groups get tight. Each tight culture her team looked at “had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature and her constant fury of disasters, diseases and food scarcity, or from human nature and the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts”. Take China: here is a nation that borders 14 countries, each of which it has fallen out with at some point. As well as experiencing “massive conflict throughout its history”, internally and externally, China has suffered terrible assaults by nature, having lost 25 times more lives to natural disasters, over the past 50 years, than the US. It also has relatively few natural resources, when compared with looser nations, and suffers from poor access to safe water and significant food deprivation. (It’s worth noting here that tight and loose differences can also be found across individual states of the US, with looseness found more in the north, and tightness down south.)
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Subscribe“It’s possible that all this pressure will tighten us up on a national level, as it did in the Second World War, and we’ll all move closer together”
I can’t see that happening. During WWII there was indeed a common external enemy. Today I can see the working-class communities of Britain holding the political and media classes responsible for the accelerating decline in their quality of life. The real problem is that it is a plausible point of view.
It’s only an assumption that the British were closer during the war.
Well, no – they wouldn’t have been on the winning side, otherwise.
Loved this article. As someone who was raised in a “looser” society (UK) but spent my entire adult life in a “tight” society (Austria), I can fully get behind a lot of what is being argued here. To stick with the language of the book/article despite the inevitable innuendo, my integration in Austria has entailed becoming “tighter”, stricter about compliance with rules/standards, and having less tolerance for those who I think are overstepping the line.
20 years ago, if something wasn’t working properly (the train service) or wasn’t 100% clean (pub toilets) then I probably wouldn’t have bothered about it that much. I was very much a British “musn’t complain” kind of person. Now I can’t stand any kind of sloppy service, people chatting in the quiet zone of the train, or things being grubby when they could so easily be clean if someone applied a smidgen of attention and 5 minutes of elbow grease. And I am unafraid to admit it: other immigrants who behave poorly, don’t bother doing the hard yards of learning the language and generally don’t make much effort to integrate are also a source of great annoyance. You can have a very nice life here, but you have to play the game – and as an outsider coming in, you don’t get to dictate the basic rules. And the rules in Austria are – compared to other, more easy-going nations – pretty specific and strict.
Part of this is surely the process of getting older and having higher standards than I did when I was younger, but it is also the difference in culture of the place I’ve spent the last 18 years.
I’m in the US South after living in the Netherlands. As much as I love it here, I do sometimes miss the pragmatism of the Dutch.
What the article — an obvious pitch for the author’s own book — doesn’t dwell on much is that degrees of ‘tightness’ or ‘looseness’ in a nation change over time, thus creating differently-minded generations. I came from the Netherlands, which in the 1950s was a rather tight place. And after living in the US for over 50 years it still bothers me when people come to church in shorts and flip-flops, and pray with their hands in their pockets. I halfway expect them to be struck by God-sent lightning … And yet, at the same time the social thought control in leftist, non-churchy circles is as rigid as it was in America’s ‘fifties — only for opposite causes.
I love the Netherlands. A great mix of liberal, outward-looking openness with discipline and financial common sense. I went to Utrecht earlier this year and was bowled over by it.
loathed the place…
Thought-provoking response to an interesting article, thanks.
Yes, but it can work the other way, as well.
A friend tells of her German daughter-in-law who – after living in Engand for several years and having returned to live in Berlin – now finds the German insistence on rule-enforcement unnecessary, intrusive, petty, humourless, and just plain annoying.
I have a dear ( one and only) German friend who escaped to Ireland in her late teens, to work in racing, breeding and bloodstock, and returned 18 years later… and now cannot stand Germany…
why one visit to Austria and Germany was enough for me.. but I had to go back for business, so ensured that I left in the morning and came back in the evening: to me, both countries felt like an alien planet, and I just could not keep my mind from thinking about Hitler, Concentration camps, and that these people enabled, wanted and after the war benefitted, and most were never bought to justice.
I’m fifth generation aussie. My family ( from Ireland and Lancaster) helped build Australia in the 19th century. Since a lot of Asians and Europeans especially Brits of a certain Marxist disposition ( including the progressive Australian Marxists have taken control in the last 25 years, it’s become somewhat of a facist state controlled shithole..tbh.
I do major mechanical repairs on my fine well built German tractor ( fendt 712) and a lot of other mechanical work on machines. It’s a mechanics truism ( generally) “righty tighty, lefty loosey”! Unless it’s reverse thread..Haha.
Australia and New Zealand “loose”. you must be kidding, They are two of the most conformist bureaucratic subservient cultures in the world. Inundated with endless mindless rules the native compete to conform and to inform on those who ignore them.
All it takes is just walking/driving down any (sub)urban street in Australia to see the complete absence of looseness. Your eyes are assaulted with dozens of different signs instructing you on what you can’t do at any given time.
What country are you comparing New Zealand to exactly if you don’t think it’s a loose country? Living here I find it incredibly laid back, infuriatingly so at times if you need something done urgently, and there’s fewer rules and laws which aren’t particularly harshly enforced so I’m intrigued to why you think it’s uptight?
Australia I’ll grant you is much more strict. I’ve always found it much more Americanised in its attitudes
Is psychology really a science?
According to Karl Popper a science has to be falsifiable. So I would think that the field of psychology contains, at best, a lot that isn’t science.
That was the hope of its Victorian founders but it never came to pass. It is no more a science than philosophy or painting.
Yet too many people pretend it is.
It seems so, and then claim the authority of “scientists” to proclaim on matters of physics and chemistry.
Where did that come from! Your emotional state, that’s where.
Sorry Adrian, I don’t get what you mean.
No.
Er as an aussie who did psychology at a uni in East London 93 -96 then a masters in cognitive science at UNSW on my return, I can confirm that er most of it is not science and as I repeat ad infinitum tell to the progressives who have out populated me around where I live in the United socialist states of Byron Bay, most of psychology is simply stolen, sorry re worked, from judeo Christianity, which is why now, after the death of my beautiful stunning young wife from cancer in 2020, I turned to pentecostal Christianity and it’s been the most revealing most comforting thing I’ve done for a long long time. What a tolerant amazing kind funny gentle joyous family of souls.
I should add, I now drive a tractor and run 100 head of cattle with two limousine bulls ( black and an apricot in case you ask), and when I turn up at jobs here at the request of the well to do, jump from my tractor and unload on the social sciences and climate change, ( with ADHD, I get bored really easily) it sends my customers nuts as they peer down their noses at me, especially when they discover, I’m better educated and more qualified than they are and am the only tractor driver in new south Wales who worked with pink Floyd on their 1987 album or photographed a sitting prime minster in 10 downing Street (John major) haha..
Well, I did rather the reverse journey, from driving a tractor in rural Australia, when there were such things as family farms (i.e until the late 1970s) to working in UK. I have no regrets and no degrees but I manage people who do. I can’t afford anywhere nice in Australia now, let alone Byron Bay.
Surely the author could have suggested the EU as a major rule-making group that increasingly seems to turn on “others” ?
I suspect that the author’s choice of lumping Brexit in with Covid and the invasion of Ukraine explains the omission.
Maybe objectivity and “losers consent” are the first casualties of “tightness” …
Are you serious?
This place is very obsessed by the EU. The EU is less obsessed with Britain.
Sadly during the last century Europe has proved to be peopled by genocidal fascists and communists alike. If that were not bad enough, most of the place is also inhabited by people so irredeemably corrupt as to defy rational explanation.
‘We’ were extremely lucky to escape such a morally bankrupt cesspit don’t you think?
To not see the tightening up that has happened on both sides of the Brexit debate in the U.K. is to be wilfully blind.
“And they have certainly tightened up over the last 14 or so years, becoming more conformist and less tolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.”
Sure, UK has becoming somewhat more Americanised. That said, outside the distorting funhouse mirror world of social media, we have ‘progressed’ much less towards shrill intolerance than Progressive Activists like to imagine compared to USA.
What about the UK police who arrest folks for perceived ‘hate speech’. We read of the knock on the door when the police have arrived to question folks about their speech. So far, this is not happening in the USA.
Quite right. In the USA outspoken dissidents, say, in highly “woke” academia, might find themselves passed over for promotion or tenure, or even be dismissed on spurious grounds, but they can sue their employers, and they cannot be prosecuted by government for “hate speech” — whatever that sleazy leftist term may mean.
the peoples republictoylitte of nu britn is waving in National Socialism on a daily basis
Absolutely correct and it is a national disgrace that the UK has sunk so low as to enforce ‘hate crime’ legislation. All the more staggering, that after twelve years of spineless Tory Government, nothing has been done to repeal this odious legislation.
What our ancestors fought for is on the cusp of destruction. Parliament has had its day, we need a new system, something along the lines of that paradise, sometimes referred to as Switzerland.
The loose and tight cultures theory is weak. For instance, Austria and Pakistan might both be considered tight, but one is a civilised country where rule of law matters and people practice self-control, on the other hand, Pakistan is a country where rule of law and due process doesn’t exist, people are disciplined only in matters related to religion, otherwise they know how to go around the law and break it.
I think that the authors should look at Kohlberg’s stages of moral development who explains the difference between youngsters who respect the law only under external pressure, and more mature and well-integrated people who have internalised the moral code and respect the laws even when no one is there to punish them.
The majority of non-Western “tight” countries teach to obey blindly therefore people learn an external locus of control and don’t reach mature moral development. On the other hand, Western “loose” nations teach their population to internalise the moral code and practice self-control. Therefore, I consider that it is wrong to state that people in “tight” countries practice self-discipline. They act under the fear of punishment.
It is important to look at the level of corruption in different countries, and one will see that “tight” countries are highly corrupt. I wonder how is that explained by the authors?
Another important aspect is the universality of human rights vs. relative culture related laws and moral codes. We should look at which moral code leads to better and more manageable countries.
I’m offended, you know me so well.
It might be, but it’s spot on in my opinion.
And in the meantime, the enormous majority, those who aren’t left wing, wealthy activists or poor, working class bigots (do most writers see the working classes as hate-mongering NF types?) just get on with whatever is thrust upon them.
There is a whole swathe of people who feel powerless – many of them working, educated and/or skilled and with aspirations, who have very little disposable income. They are not bigots, small-minded or stupid. They are all doing their best, for very little reward and often feel overlooked.
It’s the ordinary Joe, be he a graduate, a mechanic, a shop worker, an IT worker, a street cleaner or a small business owner – who have little or no voice, not much in the bank and slog away day after day and suck it all up. They don’t have prejudices, a mindset when they start out; they tend to be honest, fair and open-minded, yet have NO influence in any quarter. It’s no surprise when working people doing their best become bitter at the unfairness of society.
It’s the ones stuck in the middle going nowhere fast who need to band together and change the world. Hard slog and aspirations don’t pay the bills these days. That’s a massive body of people who will grow angry fast.
Sadly, they’re too nice, too decent and far too knackered to have the energy or appetite for rising up, for revolution.
It’s the posh, monied social activists in need of street cred who do the ‘rising up’ outrage from their keyboards – whilst scanning their Ocado shopping list and despising Brexiteers. They want to be a million miles removed from the ‘nasty’ ‘unenlightened’ working classes they purport to support.
And so it goes on.
Isn’t this true of most societies – at least four-tiered, and composed of the wealthy privileged, the sloggers going nowhere fast, the genuinely disadvantaged, and the contribute-nothing-takers – whether loose or tight?
The key comment here is ” We are a tribal species”: America, in its quest for displaying equality, and the myth that all Americans are the same ” people” had spread this creed here and to Europe. As an English born Irish Italian I have absolutely no issue with accepting that I am not actually English merely because I happened to have been born here.
In the same way that East Anglians of German and Saxon heritage are simply not the same race as, for example, Cornish, or Welsh people, or for that matter Irish Liverpudlians, Sicilians are not the same as Finns or Scots Ulsterman…. and a Labrador, a Border Collie and a Saluki Lurcher are all dogs, but they have entirely different levels of aptitude, skills, abilities, and cannot all be trained to achieve the same skills.
Why on earth can we not be honest enough to admit that homo sapiens are the same? Why will, for example, no-one dare acknowledge, given prima facie empirical statistical evidence, that Jewish and Indian Hindu peoples outperform all others, not least us Irish Italians?
You were sent to Eton, that should have made you, for better or worse, an Englishman. Lucky chap!
sadly not! but I actually loved school at Douai , no longer there, so our lot scattered amongst The other Benedictines, some cousins and uncles were at Slough Grammar!
My own country, Ireland, would probably have been regarded as a loose nation, but that is much less true now. We are tightening.
Rather an adolescent game trying to identify patterns and generalise like this. And each conclusion can be easily dissected and contradicted.
“We were here to beg to be brainwashed.” Never in 2 lifetimes would I have considered such a spoken or written sentence existed.
So, Is it a mark of evolutionary weakness, a deficiency perhaps, or a level of extraordinary sacrifice to ensure the specie survival? A variant of the “herd mentality?”
Arm-waving nonsense.