That was our hypothesis, at least. Level of inequality C. Family composition D . And how are we defining culture? Fundamentally, individualism is a belief that the individual is an end in themself. NEAL: I think its helpful to think about culture in terms of a big C and a little c, the little c being those everyday things that we sometimes dont elevate to a level of culture. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. Since his first study, many people have started to do similar studies. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. OLIVER: When was that moment when America became the most American America it could possibly be? Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. Part of it is that when you live in a world that has carpented environments like right angles, where we live in houses in the States makes us focus on those right angles. Or if it will change at all. HOFSTEDE: You could say these six dimensions of culture, they are perimeters to our sociality. So, yes, the same attributes that can be a big problem can also be a big boost. It was back in grad school that Michele Gelfand first asked herself this question. Words: 777. So rules for the sake of having rules are not good. Whether proud or not, whether happy or not, it has a position. When Hofstede the Elder went to work for I.B.M., he got involved with these surveys. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is . And also, of course, people listening to this: Make it happen, come on. If . 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. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism: With Stephen Dubner. The average U.S. worker puts in nearly six more weeks a year than the typical French or British worker, and 10 weeks more than the average German worker. He started out as an anthropologist; but he started mixing and matching disciplines to suit his curiosity. HOFSTEDE: You have a democracy. The correct answer of the given question above would be the second option. Wed rather think about solutions temporarily rather than as, this might take some time. It means that we need to attract different types of people to an organization. Henrich has written about the notion of time psychology.. I do think that humanity as a whole is sort of evolving to being more reflective. You look at parents and how they treat their kids art. GELFAND: And that suggests that minorities, women, people of different sexual orientation, when they violate the same rule, might be held to higher accountability, to more strict punishment. John OLIVER: When was that moment that America became the most American America it could possibly be? In the U.S., it was freedom to do whatever the hell that you wanted to. GELFAND: This has always been the big question, that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. Thats Joe Henrich, a professor of evolutionary biology. data, gathered in the late 60s and early 70s. Someone raised in an Eastern culture might focus more on the image as a whole and less on the central object. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. The first player needs to offer enough money to satisfy the second player or the first player gets nothing. China, Japan, and Turkey are also tight. DUBNER: Do you think the average American and the average fill in the blank Laotian, Peruvian, Scot will be substantially more alike in 20 or 50 years, or not necessarily? Nevertheless, you might be able to intentionally create pockets of looseness so you can have more balance. NEAL: I think thats always been a tension in Black culture, around this idea of Americas rugged individualism and the collectivity of Blackness that was born out of necessity because of segregation. 1424 Words. Henrich says yes. Although it is more self-help than traditional economics it shares many of the weaknesses of more serious works in the discipline. The same experiment was done in other, non-WEIRD countries, like Ghana and Zimbabwe. The future could be bright. What is culture? The authors argue that humans usually make decisions based on the incentives for their actions. DUBNER: And Im guessing youre the spontaneous type. Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . The people that came to New York early on, in the early 1800s, they were from all sorts of different cultural backgrounds. Im a professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. DUBNER: And what would you say is maybe a political ramification of low power distance? And it should stay there. HOFSTEDE: It means that you only need rules when youre going to use them. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. Nobody can feel insulted. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. If someone acts in an inappropriate way, will others strongly disapprove in this country? Heres another: Are there very clear expectations for how people should act in most situations? In 2018, Gelfand published a book of these findings called Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. Although the concept of an individual may seem straightforward, there are many ways of understanding it, both in theory and in practice. Allen Lane 20, pp304. Individualism, Modern Capitalism, and Dystopian Visions Introduction to Heritage and Multicultural American Identities: Contemporary Voices (1970-2000) Introduction to Contemporary Literature of the Twenty-First Century The Poetry of Physics RL.CCR.3 Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text. Ambiguity is good. In the latest issue of American Scientist, statisticians Kaiser Fung and Andrew Gelman wrote a strong critique of Levitt and Dubner's work. Documentary. Mobility also produces looseness, because its harder to agree upon any norm. All that it takes is to get out of their cages of bickering and anxiety. For example, we asked bank managers some years ago to look through scenarios of people violating organizational rules, like coming to work late, staying on the phone too long, maybe checking their email. Why arent all national cultures converging by now? Am I really going to tell my kid how special they are about everything?. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. And in a restrained society, theres going to be suicide. 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. We had a very tight social order. GELFAND: In societies that are tighter, people are willing to call out rule violators. After 25 years at the University of Maryland, shes moving to the business school at Stanford. Tightness and compliance would seem to go hand-in-hand. He grew up in England. It is that the wealth comes first, and the individualism follows. Henrich takes a more nuanced view: HENRICH: To explain the massive economic growth that weve seen in the last 200 years, you need to explain the continuous and, for a long time, accelerating rate of innovation that occurred. It's an unnatural activity that has become normal. Not just regular weird. Gelfand has spent a lot of time trying to understand how a given countrys looseness or tightness affects everyday life. HENRICH: And this can include motivations, heuristics, biases, beliefs. . By this time, Hofstede the Elder had already gotten a Ph.D. in social science. And in culture, uncertainty means not knowing the ritual, not knowing how status-worthy or blameworthy some action is. Historically, politically, and yes culturally. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. Published: 31 October 2020. And you speak fast because I dont want to waste a lot of time talking. And we manipulated whether their names were like Jamal or Latisha versus Brad and Lorna. The converse, which is what Anglo societies are high on, means you dont care about ambiguity. Do you know what you are? IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. Follow. HOFSTEDE: This is a very American question, Stephen. HOFSTEDE: Its rather futile to advise somebody what their national culture should be because theres no way you can change it. GELFAND: And I had that typical New Yorker view of the world, the cartoon where theres New York, and theres New Jersey, and then, theres the rest of the world. Download. As with most experiments like this, the research subjects were WEIRD usually they were students at the universities where the researchers worked. Whereas looking away in a very egalitarian society is seen as a sign of deceptiveness. The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dateslike socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century. Joe HENRICH: Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. DUBNER: Although the U.S. is relatively high on suicide and homicide, so are we an outlier in that regard as well? So, yeah, that is WEIRD. Freakonomics Radiois produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". One of the defining features of Americanism is our so-called rugged individualism. You might even call it wild individualism. Also, the people who settled in different areas in the U.S. brought with them their own cultural norms and values, and set the stage for different levels of tight-loose within the nation. But Im Dutch, of course. The study of culture is a family business for Hofstede. The U.S. is a pretty successful country, maybe the most successful country on many dimensions in the history of the world. DUBNER: What problem was he, and later you, trying to solve by doing this work? But somehow, that diversity and that early celebration of permissiveness has overridden that. DUBNER: But that the research subjects, they gave him a lot back and they thought it was going to him. Theres not going to be violent crime. HOFSTEDE: Yes. GELFAND: And I thought, If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. Well find out what it means to be WEIRD although not weird in the way youre thinking. Factor analysis being a way to distill a large number of variables into an index, essentially a ranking. Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda,Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski,Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. The focus of that episode was American culture. GELFAND: My own sweet Portuguese water dog, Pepper, I mean, that dog is just gigantic. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. But it was serious. He contrasts places like Egypt, that had strict rules for authority and gender and purity, with the Persians who, using my terminology, he would have said that they were quite loose. Well hear about those dimensions soon enough. She was majoring in pre-med. She likes to eat human food. We bring in neuroscience to understand all things cultural. As an Amazon Associate, Freakonomics may earn commissions from qualifying purchases made through links on this site. NEAL: Were a country that presumes male leadership. Now that weve taken a top-down view of how the U.S. is fundamentally different from other countries, were going to spend some time over the coming weeks looking at particular economic and social differences, having to do with policing, child poverty, infrastructure, and the economy itself. That, again, is Gert Jan Hofstede. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. The first (and longest) chapter focuses on the role of incentives in human behavior. He takes on questions like: Why do kids with summer birthdays get the flu more often? 1, the most individualistic country in the world, 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede scale of individualism. The country that ranks highest in long-term orientation is Japan; also high on this scale are China and Russia. 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. The first: individualism versus collectivism. Not necessarily better or worse but very different. A. In a future episode, well look at why the U.S., for all its wealth, has such a high rate of child poverty, and whats being done to address that. Whats a Chaos Muppet? We look at how these traits affect . Its part of our founding D.N.A. GELFAND: They were trained to ask for help in city streets and in stores. DUBNER: What are some of the consequences of being relatively tolerant of uncertainty, as the U.S. is? Singapore, for instance. Michele Gelfand has another example of how culture shapes perception. And we see that the combination of high individualism, high masculinity, and high short-termism can produce some chaos, at the very least. People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. As we heard, the first four dimensions originated with the I.B.M. Theres a good side of every dimension, including uncertainty avoidance. Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: None of it is intentional. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. NEAL: I often think about how the U.S. has historically thought about freedom and how, say, the Soviet bloc had talked about freedom. Both are long-term oriented, so they see a lot of context around things. So the picture that emerges from these findings is that Americans are less likely to conform in the name of social harmony; and we also treasure being consistent, expressing our true selves, regardless of the context. They determine the boundary conditions before which we become angry or flattered or whatever. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. And it was like, This stuff is really lousy. HENRICH: This cashes out in an ability to make better abstract or absolute judgment. So, lets try to measure this., Gelfand and several colleagues undertook a massive research project, interviewing some 7,000 people from 33 countries on five continents. Individualism is thought to be on the rise in Western countries, but new research suggests that increasing individualism may actually be a global phenomenon. Stripped of our culturally acquired mental skills, he writes, we are not so impressive when we go head-to-head in problem-solving tests against other apes, and we certainly are not impressive enough to account for the vast success of our species. Henrich recently followed that book with another one called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. We will learn which countries are tight, which are loose, and why. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. In an individualistic society, depending on how the mood is, you can get very different developments. Lets flip it for a moment. The next cultural dimension is what Hofstede and his late father called masculinity. That title is a bit misleading. And in a collectivistic society, a person is like an atom in a crystal. Weve interviewed dozens of academic researchers about lowering healthcare costs or improving access to childcare or building smarter infrastructure or creating a more equitable economy. Self-centered so if you give them tasks and have them list traits about themselves, theyll tend to list their attributes and characteristics rather than their relationships. Freakonomics the film, like the book, is entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. The Ultimatum game is famous among social scientists. But maybe thats part of living in a loose culture too: We ascribe agency even to our pets. Theres some D.N.A. Once he saw that differences were driven by nationality, Hofstede sensed he was on to something big. There is some overlap between these six dimensions and some of the ideas we talked about in last weeks episode particularly the notion that some national cultures tend to be tight and others loose. Like, the military should be tighter than tech. HENRICH: One study of the journals in social psychology shows that 96 percent of all subjects in social psychology come from societies that are Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Freakonomics is a registered service mark of Renbud Radio, LLC. And then theres the big C, the stuff that we have these big conversations about, that we do these incredible studies about, which is really about the worldview of groups of people coming together, in a community, in a nation, in a family, right? Later on, fast forward, Pertti Pelto, whos an anthropologist. Gelfand wanted to learn where theyd get the most help. You could just do an across-the-board search of various Western religions and look at who the figureheads are. 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. 6 Pages. So keep your ears open for all that. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. This is a summary of the book Freakonomics by Stephen DubnerJoin Reading.FM now: https://fourminutebooks.com/go/readingfm/register/Read more summaries: http. Anyway, in this episode of No Stupid Questions, we'll be talking about how our surroundings can make us smarter and maybe happier too. Its more about how individuals are acted upon by the people and institutions around them. Europe has a strong influence from Germany, also from France. Today, an overview of the cultural differences. Theyre able to make finer distinctions in terms of their olfaction. So that leads to justifying more inequality. And that is a status-worthy thing. 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. One of the areas of cultural study that first hooked her had to do with optical illusions. HOFSTEDE: He decided to take a job there. the benefits to an individual from study and engagement in a topic. We will leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian. You can never admit weakness or failure. Thats John Oliver. This paper examines the production of race on the Internet by examining the elements that make up the weblog Freakonomics: the topic, the environment, the medium, and the users. So uncertainty avoidance is the intolerance of ambiguity. The U.S. patent database goes back into the 18th century and what a number of studies in economics as well as work in my lab has shown is that openness to other people so, trust in strangers, an inclination towards individualism, a desire to stand out, to be the smartest guy in the room fosters more rapid innovation because people are more likely to exchange ideas, theyre more interested in distinguishing themselves. HENRICH: And the case I make is its been highly unsuccessful to just pick up institutions that evolved in Western societies and transport them to drop them in Africa or the Middle East or places like that, because there needs to be a fit between how people think about the world, their values, worldviews, motivations, and the affordances of the institution. And its by no means easy. You could argue that treating your own children as if theyre special may make it harder to care as much about other peoples children. Why the business school? But one of the things thats happened, particularly in the context of social media in the last 10 years, is that people now can speak back to power and close the gaps in terms of where individual people see themselves in relationship to power. They can freely float about. Heres how it works. HENRICH: But if you want to talk about humans, then you have a problem. Theyre threatened by that interdependence, and they want to assert their cultural identities. I must be American. This interest goes back to those negotiations between Jim Baker and Tariq Aziz. Each and every person has individual reasons for pursuing a career, or goal. Truth be told, I veer somewhat loose. If you just look at Americans, its 70 percent American. So he left I.B.M. That is generated by looseness. One thing that I think that Americans are more extreme than other Western countries and certainly elsewhere in the world is attributing individual success to the internal traits of the actor. 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