CHAPTER 6
U.S. Regional Cultures
Watching Lisa Radloff sprint across a marathon finish line, or vanquish her competition on the racquetball court, you would never guess that just four years ago she weighed 281 pounds. “That’s like a linebacker,” she points out.
A few years after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, the native of Palatine, Illinois, saw the writing on the wall: “I was surrounded by athletic girls who all wore a size 2. If I wanted to be successful here, I had to lose weight.”
So, over the course of eleven months, the six-foot, one-inch information technology manager dropped 110 pounds. Unlike the vast majority of dieters, she has managed to keep the weight off, mostly because her California home has allowed her to unleash her long-dormant athletic side.
Radloff’s rotund husband, however, was a different story. “He didn’t even try to get healthy,” she says. Instead, he brought home cheesecakes, pizzas, and beer to tempt his shrinking bride. When three years of unemployment packed on another fifty pounds, he could no longer join Radloff in exploring Northern California’s mountains and beaches. The couple slowly drifted apart until last year, after twenty years of marriage, Radloff asked for a divorce. Her husband promptly packed up his car and moved back to his hometown of Peoria, Illinois.
The shimmering lure of relocation is a staple of America, a nation of people from somewhere else. Roughly 20 percent of Americans live in a region other than the one where they were born. This year alone, between 5 and 6 percent of Americans will move across a county line.1
Some of these internal migrants will discover, as Radloff did, that they prefer using the selves their new homes require. Yet many others will find, as did Radloff’s husband, that their new worlds and old selves just don’t jibe. These mismatches take a toll. Rates of schizophrenia and substance abuse are higher among more mobile Americans.2 And Americans who move frequently in childhood have more alcoholism, depression, and suicide attempts in adulthood.3
Many migrants can’t put a finger on why their selves aren’t meshing with their new homes. But in the woes of the wandering, we see a common problem: the clash of interdependent selves with independent places, and vice versa. Within the United States, these collisions follow a pattern. The culture cycles of the South and Midwest support and reflect interdependent I’s that strive to relate, fit in, adjust, stay rooted in traditions, and know their rank in the larger social world. In contrast, the culture cycles of the West and Northeast drive and derive from independent I’s that aim to individuate, express uniqueness, exert influence, and feel free, equal, and great.4 Anecdotal evidence suggests that when people transfer to a region whose culture cycle fosters a different sort of self, they experience more malaise than when they relocate to a region with a similar sort of self.
Although Americans aren’t as migratory as they were thirty years ago, they are still among the most mobile people in the world.5 The rise of telecommuting means that Americans are spending even more of their time working with people in different regions. And as more people than ever immigrate to the United States, they are discovering that settling in Tacoma, Washington, is quite a different proposition from settling in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Understanding the regional patterning of U.S. cultures can help these present-day pilgrims. Should you find yourself contemplating a move, you can select a U.S. region that best complements your present self or the self you want to cultivate. Or, if you don’t have any choice in your destination, you can at least prepare yourself for the culture shock ahead. By knowing what kind of world you’re headed to and what kind of self you have (a question we help you answer in chapter 10), you can use the culture cycle to carve a comfier niche for yourself. And if you’re staying put, you can also use the culture cycle to make your world more welcoming for other transplants.
The United States is not alone in its regional clashes. The histories of many nations are stained with bloody civil wars. Although many of these conflicts have calmed, some tensions still rear their ugly heads. Quite a few of these collisions take place across the independence-interdependence divide. Understanding this divide and then adjusting culture cycles to build bridges between different regions can help heal the rifts within borders.
Although Radloff is proud of her lean body, she dislikes some of the pressures that drove her to it. “Californians are sort of superficial,” she says. In addition to judging people because of their appearances, “they have an annoying habit of making dates and then not showing up. In the Midwest,” she adds, “that’s a punishable offense.”
At first Radloff took the flakiness personally. But after a while, she blamed the weather, and the culture that it encourages.
“I know this sounds like stereotyping,” she says, “but in the Midwest, it’s too cold to go outside for much of the year. And so you stay inside, watch football together, drink beer, and bond. But out here, you can meet people year round out surfing, and running, and biking. And so you don’t have to make close friends, because you can always find new ones.” But when you’re constantly in the market for friends, “you feel more pressure to look good,” she notes.
What Radloff has experienced in her own life, psychologist Victoria Plaut and colleagues see in their research: people who have more potential friends, such as people in more densely populated areas or with more money, value physical attractiveness more than do people with fewer social options, such as folks in rural areas or with less money.6
“When you have more choices in friends,” Plaut explains, “you need a sorting mechanism. A common sorting mechanism is attractiveness. But when you have fewer choices, your friends tend to be the people you’re already connected to—the people you grew up with or you go to church with. And so attractiveness doesn’t matter as much.”
Accordingly, Plaut and her team show that urban women with high waist-to-hip ratios, and thus more around the middle, are less satisfied and socially connected than their apple-shaped sisters in rural areas. She also finds, as Radloff suspected, that even moderately chunky women suffer more in “free market” social worlds than in more traditional and rooted settings.
As she morphed from apple to hourglass, Radloff discovered that all the choosing, individuating, mastering, and freeing that the West7 requires not only shrink a body, but also make and mirror an independent self. She also understood that all the accepting, relating, adjusting, and rooting back in the Midwest not only had generated warmth on cold nights, but also had required and reproduced an interdependent self.
With some regret, Radloff realized that the longer she stayed in California, the more her interdependent self receded: “Out here, people think and talk about themselves all the time. I never wanted to be that person. I wanted to be the person who asked you about yourself first, because that’s what it means to be a decent, good human being. But then you absorb that ‘Me! Me! Me!’ mentality. And that’s been an interesting change. I think about myself first now.”
Although the differences between the West and the rest of the country are less studied than the North-South differences we discuss later in this chapter, they are no less stark. The region that brought you “Hollyweird,” Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, the Silicon Forest, the personal computer, and the self-esteem movement hosts some of the most independent selves in the country. In national surveys, for instance, Westerners describe themselves as more open to new experiences, autonomous, and self-focused, as well as less friendly, agreeable, and other-focused, than do Midwesterners and Southerners.8
Even compared to the Northeast—another open-minded, self-focused, and not-so-agreeable region9—the West is more independent on some measures. In one study, for example, Plaut and her colleagues explored how residents of San Francisco and Boston get their sense of self-worth. Both cities are refuges for the “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading” liberal elite.10 Nevertheless, what feeds the selves of their denizens differs. Bostonians’ self-worth rises and falls with the circumstances of their families, communities, finances, education, and work. In contrast, the self-worth of San Franciscans is tied mostly to their work.11
“This doesn’t mean that people in the West aren’t nice to each other,” explains Plaut. “It doesn’t mean that they don’t make good friends and colleagues. It just means that they put less weight on social norms than do people in the Northeast.”
One big difference between the two cities, explains Plaut, is their ages. Although Boston and its environs hosted the Puritans’ arrival, the American Revolution, and other great moments in independence, the area has had many more years to grow roots, nurture relationships, and establish hierarchies than cities in the West. Many Northeasterners now struggle to reconcile their independence with the constraints of an older culture. New and shiny San Francisco, in contrast, is relatively lacking in entrenched traditions, communities, and status systems. And so its selves feel freer to rush headlong toward their individual goals.
Some rush so fast that observers ask, is the United States tilted so that all the nuts roll toward the Pacific? Or does the wild, wild West turn its residents into wild, wild people? The answer is yes. Both forces are at work. Across cultures, people who migrate are the ones who are willing to abandon everything they know to pursue something they have never seen or felt. These pioneers then establish culture cycles of ideas, institutions, and interactions that continue to feed and follow from an independent self.
Rob Goldhor is one Yankee who answered the call of the West. In his own words, he “just wasn’t feeling it” as a college student in his hometown of Boston. Instead of taking classes in the close confines of a city he already knew, he wanted to be riding his motorcycle in the wide-open spaces of a totally unknown place. On a ski trip back in 1997, he passed through Colorado, liked what he saw, and moved to Boulder two years later.
Now a machinist in Golden, Colorado, Goldhor spends his free time hiking, skiing, and piloting his “rock crawler,” a pickup that he customized to navigate the treacherous terrain. “I live more in my skin,” he says. “I’m more of who I am, rather than who I thought I was supposed to be when I was growing up in a family of Ph.D.s, with all that pomp and circumstance.”
The United States isn’t the only country with a wilderness that attracts independent selves.12 In an intriguing set of studies, psychologist Shinobu Kitayama and his team compared Japanese college students at Kyoto University, an elite university on Japan’s main island of Honshu, to those at Hokkaido University, an elite university on the island of Hokkaido, Japan’s sparsely populated northern frontier. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, mainstream Japanese culture cycles sustain and stem from interdependent selves. Yet Shinobu and his colleagues found not only that the Hokkaido-born Japanese showed more independent tendencies—a desire for personal achievement, a need to justify their personal choices, a tendency to look for the causes of events in individuals rather than in situations—but also that students who had relocated to rugged Hokkaido were just as independent as the island’s native-born students. In other words, wild people seek out wild places.
Even if you don’t start out wild at heart, the mere act of moving makes you more independent. Psychologist Shigehiro Oishi and his colleagues established this fact among American college students. In one study, for instance, they discovered that the more often college students had moved, the less often they mentioned sports teams, churches, or other groups when describing themselves. Instead, these more mobile students more often described themselves in terms of abstract personality traits, such as “hardworking” or “intelligent.”13
“If you change soccer teams every year,” explains Oishi, “the position you play becomes more important than the team you belong to. Likewise, when you move around, you are the constant, and the groups you belong to become less meaningful.”
The American West is still a region on the go. Between 1995 and 2000, the five states whose residents moved the most—Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Alaska, and Oregon—were all in the West. Reports from the 2000 U.S. Census likewise show that the West is the region with the most people transferring in, out, and around.14 This constant relocation gives rise to daily interactions that propel a more independent culture cycle.
As Westerners shift and resettle, for instance, they do not shrink their webs of relationships. Instead, these people have more friends than their more sessile counterparts. To do this, Westerners make the classic trade-off between quality and quantity: “They throw a wider net instead of having a few deep relationships,” says Oishi.
The knots that form these big, shallow nets are not the ties that bind, but they are the connections that inspire innovation. As the sociologist Mark Granovetter demonstrates in a classic paper, the more people in a network and the looser their connections, the more quickly and easily they circulate ideas. Because breakthroughs usually spring from the bumping, churning, and recombining of ideas from all directions, and not from the heads of lone geniuses, weak ties are the superhighways of creativity.15
Accordingly, the loosely tied West is the home of some of the most innovative industries of the past century, including motion pictures, semiconductors, software, and the Internet. Three of the top five patent-applying regions are in the West, namely the San Francisco Bay Area, the San Jose area, and Los Angeles regions. Four of the top eight biotech centers also skirt the Pacific, even though the industry is historically rooted in the Northeast.16 And as author Richard Florida recounts in Who’s Your City?, more than 50 percent of all venture capital goes to just three regions (Silicon Valley, San Diego, and greater Boston), with two-thirds of that amount going to Silicon Valley alone.17
Meanwhile, the folks back east move around a lot less. Four of the five most stable states are in the Northeast: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maine. (West Virginia is the fifth.) These regions are hardly creative backwaters, though; Boston and New York log their fair shares of patents and, along with Philadelphia, are among the biotech giants. New York remains the center of fashion, media, and finance (an industry where many Americans now crave less creativity). Other cities have their niches of genius.
But as Plaut and her team highlight, the way that people practice independence in the Northeast is different from the way they do it in the West. For example, in their analysis of the websites of venture capital firms (the funders of invention), the researchers discovered that Boston firms stress status and experience more than do San Francisco firms, which instead emphasize egalitarianism and creativity. Boston firms also more frequently mention teams, companies, and other kinds of groups, while the San Francisco VCs focus more on individuals. Even in the highly independent field of venture capital, the Northeast is a shade more interdependent than the West.18
Stability may not be the hottest engine of innovation. But it yields different benefits: cooperation, trust, and cohesion within a community. These are the strengths that deep ties bring. They are also the strengths that are diminishing in contemporary America, argues sociologist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. Putnam demonstrates that changes in work, family, and technology are eroding the nation’s store of social capital—the networks, norms, and trust that allow people to work together. He also finds that these changes are not affecting all segments of the nation equally. In particular, the right-hand side of the Midwest—Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota—consistently clocks the highest levels of social capital.19
Oishi similarly documents that the less peripatetic corners of the country are kinder and gentler. In one study, for instance, he and his colleagues uncovered that people living in more stable ZIP codes are more likely to purchase a license plate whose proceeds support conservation than are people living in less settled communities.20 To probe further whether and why mobility undercuts altruism, Oishi’s research team then randomly assigned college students to either a stable community scenario (groups that worked on four tasks together) or a mobile community condition (groups that reshuffled their members for every task). For the final stage of the experiment, the participants competed against one another in a trivia game for a ten-dollar prize.
The researchers discovered that, compared to participants in the mobile community condition, stable community members offered more help to a struggling coed (actually, an actor planted by the researchers), even though doing so undercut their chances of winning the ten dollars. The researchers also revealed why the stable group members acted more generously: these community members felt a stronger sense of belonging to and empathy for their group. Although the researchers did not directly measure independence or interdependence, their results suggest that people in the stable groups felt more interdependent with their new communities, and therefore acted more empathically toward their members than did people in the mobile groups.
Oishi himself is a global migrant. A native of Japan, he moved to the United States to pursue his graduate studies, whereupon he made a curious observation: “Individual Americans love uniqueness. But if you look at American suburbs, they are amazingly uniform. You see cookie-cutter developments everywhere, and all the shopping malls have exactly the same stores.” In stark contrast, the hamlets of interdependent Japan are all distinct.
“Why, does the U.S. look the same in so many places?” Oishi asked. He sensed that the answer had to do with Americans’ wanderlust. Although moving brings the separation and uniqueness that independent selves crave, relocation is hard on a psyche. “You become a stranger in a strange land,” he says.
When faced with the stress of strangeness, Oishi reasoned, perhaps Americans do as infants everywhere do: cling to the familiar. But instead of security blankets, mobile Americans turn to Barnes and Noble, Best Buy, Starbucks, and other national chain stores.
“Americans want to pursue their own individual goals,” Oishi explains, “and so they’ve created this landscape where it’s easy to move around.” Oishi and his coauthors indeed find that the more mobile the state, the more “big box” stores it hosts (even after controlling for income and population). They also see that the more college students moved in their childhoods, the more they preferred national chains to local alternatives.21
Although they may revel in their newfound independence, many neophyte Westerners are nostalgic for the quirkiness of their native lands. “I miss the homes that had some style to them, that were built to be missed,” says Goldhor of New England. “I really hate ranch houses, and that’s what 90 percent of the homes out here in Colorado are.”
Up a level in the culture cycle, institutions reinforce and result from the independent interactions and individuals of the West. Perhaps the best-documented ecosystem of Western institutions is that of Silicon Valley, which produced the greatest uptick in wealth in human history.22 Named for the silicon microchip, the brain of the modern computer, the area of Northern California that later became Silicon Valley had a leg up on innovation even before computers came on the scene. The U.S. military was already investing heavily in the area’s aerospace and electronics companies, which meant that plenty of talent, money, and infrastructure were on the ground. A network of law firms then expanded to help new companies take advantage of business-friendly laws. Venture capital firms stepped in to supply the many-figured funds that fueled the legendary growth of the region’s companies. To match expertise with enterprise, headhunters and consultants leapt into the fray. Local universities also got in on the act, forging unprecedented alliances with local industries.23
Altogether, these institutions made it remarkably easy to start up a technology company in Silicon Valley in the latter part of the twentieth century. These startups, and the multinational behemoths many grew up to be, continue to advance the cause of the independent self through their daily interactions. “Creative people don’t wear uniforms,” writes Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class, so Silicon Valley companies have replaced the corporate suit with the casual dress code. Creativity is also notoriously difficult to schedule, so many of the area’s companies allow flexible hours. And to free workers from the everyday business of living so that they can chase their next great idea, many companies offer free meals, on-site day care, medical services, and other perks.24
Rounding out Silicon Valley’s innovation-inspiring offerings are practices that encourage demographic diversity, including benefits for same-sex partners. By signaling their openness to diversity, the region’s institutions attract open-minded people from an array of backgrounds. The wide variety of thoughts, feelings, and actions that these migrants bring with them then flow into the region’s pool of ideas.25
The flip side of the hustle and diversity that Western institutions promote are the calm and solidarity that Midwestern institutions support. Compared to the rest of the nation, the Midwest has the most civic organizations of the sort that inspire lifelong memberships among like-minded people. For instance, Moose International, Kiwanis International, and Rotary International are all headquartered in the Midwest. And though the South gets the “Bible Belt” moniker, the Midwest has an equally high number of churches per capita. Midwesterners amply support their institutions, turning out for more club meetings, volunteer opportunities, and elections than do residents of any other region.26
Somewhere between the unfettered independence that Western institutions inspire and the cozy interdependence that Midwestern (and, as we will show, Southern) institutions sustain is the tempered independence that Northeastern institutions build. Home to most of the nation’s first and oldest institutions, New England and the Mid-Atlantic states are steeped in tradition. Nevertheless, their functions and goals reflect the founding independence of the nation. As the columnist Brian McGrory wrote of Boston, “We are a city shaped by the past that always leads to a better future.”27
More famous than the differences between the West and the rest are the historic divides between the North and the South. About this gulf, Alana knows a fair amount. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, she grew up with dozens of stories of how family members redressed perceived insults with violence. Some of these tales are funny. When Alana’s raven-headed great-grandmother discovered a long blonde hair in the zipper of her husband’s overalls, for example, the elderly woman said nothing. Instead, she grabbed an axe and hacked the garment to bits. When Alana’s very pregnant, very hormonal mother broke down into sobs because she couldn’t make the ironing board stay upright, Alana’s father defended her honor by tearing apart the insolent device with his bare hands.
But some of Alana’s family stories are tragic. For instance, at a University of Arkansas party in 1926, Alana’s great-uncle publicly scolded a male classmate for harassing a woman. The insulted classmate drew a gun and shot Alana’s great-uncle dead.
Until Alana moved to New England for college, she assumed that all families had lore like this. After all, most of her friends in Memphis did. But she soon discovered that her Southern stories amazed and alarmed her Yankee friends. She also learned that her own reactions to perceived incivilities were peculiar. In response to good-natured teasing, for instance, her roommates did not feel their blood pressure rise, their cheeks flush, and their fists clench. In debates about the finer points of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, her classmates did not experience one another’s mid-sentence interruptions as physical assaults. And upon encountering a surly salesperson, her friends did not mutter, “Well, aren’t you just as useful as a trapdoor in a canoe?”
After years of comparing notes, Alana learned that many transplanted Southerners similarly concluded that their heads were too hot for the Northeast. They also felt bruised by the low-level rudeness that Yankees constantly dish out. The Southerners who leave the South are usually not the ones who take the most offense when, say, someone starts eating before everyone is served, or when men do not hold doors for women. Nevertheless, after heading North, many Southerners come to appreciate the less-heralded pleasures of their homeland’s etiquette: salespeople who go out of their way to help, strangers who greet you on the street, drivers who never use their horns, bosses who observe weekends and holidays, and neighbors who bake cookies to welcome you into your new home.
“There’s a sharpness to things here in the Northeast that wasn’t there,” says Jason Long, also a native Memphian who is now an architect in New York, “a brusqueness in people’s demeanor, from the corner-store clerk, to the waiters, to the people I work with. It’s easier to feel lonely here.”
Migrating in the other direction, many Northerners discover that they rather like the interdependence of Southern culture cycles. “The people really are friendlier here,” notes a Bay Area native now practicing law in Atlanta. He doesn’t want to be identified, he says, “because I’d hate for my old colleagues to think that I’m slacking. But come Friday night, work is over and the weekend begins. People make time for family, and sports, and church. And they invite the new guy to come along.”
This is the better part of Southern chivalry: the desire to make other people feel good by entertaining them and helping them feel at home. This interdependence is why many Southerners don’t just say, “He’s fast,” or “I’m surprised.” Instead, they exclaim, “He’s like a scalded dog with ears laid back!” or “Well, knock me down and steal my teeth!” It’s also why Southern storytelling, preaching, politicking, and music-making have so powerfully shaped the nation as a whole.28
But Southern politeness has its dark side. For centuries, the mythology of well-mannered Southern belles and the protections they required provided many of the excuses for keeping Blacks separate from Whites, lest the former sully the alleged purity of the latter. Even today, the unwritten Southern code of behavior is used to maintain racial, class, and gender divides. Elaborate shibboleths reveal not only whether you know which fork to use or what shade of white to wear after Labor Day, but also who your people are and how much respect they get. Common courtesies sustain injustice in another way: when individuals are bending over backward to be civil to one another, they may be too busy to notice the larger incivilities built into their culture cycles: interactions, institutions, and ideas.
Most contemporary Southerners know that the rest of the country does not think too highly of them, and many feel great shame about their homeland’s troubled past. Thus hospitality, writes Southern scholar Diane Roberts, “is also a function of the desire to present the South—where the populace is accustomed to being represented as stupid, backward, poor, prejudiced, and degenerate—as a place full of tremendously nice people who’d gladly give you their last piece of Jimmy Dean sausage.”29 But as transplanted Southerners serve up ever-healthier portions of politeness, many feel an even greater gulf between their kindnesses and others’ insults.
In graduate school, Alana learned that her sensitivity to affronts and appreciation for good manners were not crazy, or even unique. Instead, her ways were just part and parcel of the Southern culture of honor, a cocktail of violence and politeness that makes the U.S. South a charming place to visit but a slightly dangerous place to live.
For most of U.S. history, the South has been the nation’s most violent region, logging the highest rates of homicide, domestic violence, corporal punishment, capital punishment, gun ownership, and support of wars. Yet individual Southerners do not unleash their wrath for just any old reason. Instead, psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen find that Southerners disproportionately use violence to protect their reputations and restore their honor. For example, although Southerners comprise less than one-third of the White population of the United States, White Southern men commit 49 percent of lovers-triangle murders (where someone gets killed as the result of one partner cheating on the other) and 40 percent of argument-related homicides. Similarly, among White women, Southerners are responsible for 55 percent of lovers-triangle killings and 52 percent of argument-related murders.30 These findings add steel of a different sort to the “steel magnolia” archetype, which portrays Southern women as hiding a flinty will beneath their delicate manners.31
Southerners also go out of their way to protect the honor of others, which is one reason they are so courteous. Southern politeness isn’t just an empty stereotype. In a comparison of thirty-six American cities, psychologist Robert V. Levine and his colleagues discovered that Southerners are the most likely Americans to return a stranger’s dropped pen, make change for a quarter, help a blind person cross the street, and retrieve magazines for a person with a hurt leg.32 Southerners agree that they are kind. In a nationally representative survey of more than three thousand American adults, Southerners rated themselves as more soft-hearted and caring than did residents of any other region.33
At the center of this paradoxical mix of hostility and hospitality lies an interdependent self that rises and falls with public opinion. Because reputation is so important to selves in the Southern culture of honor, “Sticks and stones break Southerners’ bones, and names deeply hurt them,” says Cohen. Reputation is also important in the so-called face cultures of Asia, where people go to great lengths to save themselves and others from shame and “losing face.” But unlike their counterparts in Asia, interdependent selves in the Southern culture of honor don’t rely on other people to right a wrong. “It’s up to you to respond to the affront,” explains Cohen, “not a superior, or the group, or a court.”
Without a posse backing them up, Southerners choose their battles wisely. But when they do exact revenge, they do so completely. Hence the adage “A Southerner is polite up until the point when he is mad enough to kill you.”
The dynamics of insult, politeness, and violence are different for Northeasterners. Theirs is what Cohen calls a culture of dignity, which holds that all selves are born equally good.34 With a solid self as their birthright, Yankees rely less on the opinions of outsiders in constructing their selves and more on the truths they discover within. (Although recall that Northeasterners are more concerned about social approbation than are Westerners.) More intent on expressing themselves than courting the opinions of others, Northeasterners tend to dispense with the niceties, express their anger early and often, and not take anyone else’s guff too personally.
Cohen and his research team captured the violent politeness of Southern interdependence and the toothless ire of Northeastern independence in a highly entertaining laboratory experiment. Billing their study as a “simulated art therapy session,” the researchers invited individual college students (half of them Southern men, half of them Northern men) to spend an hour drawing pictures inspired by their childhoods.
Sounds fun, right? The only problem with this scenario, each man soon learned, was their session’s other participant—an obnoxious, six-foot-tall oaf. This fellow participant was actually in league with the researchers—an actor trained to deliver eleven escalating annoyances. Annoyance 1 was innocuous enough: the actor reached across to the participant’s desk, took two crayons, and said, “Let me get a couple of your crayons, Slick. I’ll give them back later.”
But the annoyances quickly became more offensive. Here are examples from the experimenters’ script:
Annoyance 2: [actor crumples a drawing and shoots it at the garbage bin, but hits the participant instead] “Watch out there, Slick.”
Annoyance 7: [hitting the participant with another paper wad] “You’re sitting there like a sitting duck. Maybe I’ll call you Duck instead of Slick.”
Annoyance 9: [aiming paper wad at participant] “Duck, you need to duck.”
Annoyance 11: [hitting participant with paper wad] “I don’t know about your drawings, Slick, but you make a pretty good target.”
Throughout the experiment, a researcher watched the proceedings through a live video feed and made observations at regular intervals. Analyses of these observations revealed that Northerners did what Northerners do: they showed their pique early, but never flashed much hotter than their initial warning flare.
Southerners, in contrast, initially showed less anger than Northerners. During Annoyances 1 through 5, they seemed amused by the actor’s antics. They went along to get along. But by Annoyance 6, their amiability had flipped into full-blown rage. Indeed, two of the Southern participants “physically confronted” the actor, to quote the research report.35
Although North-South differences in reactions to insults, the desire for politeness, and notions of the self are large and clear, many people from these regions are not aware of them. “If you ask Southerners about the culture of honor,” says psychologist Joseph Vandello, “they can’t necessarily articulate the norm. They just know that if someone insults you, you punch him.”
The same is true for people everywhere, he adds: “We don’t know where we learned the rules, and we might not be able to say the rules at a conscious level, but when the occasion arises, we know how to act.” The invisibility of these cultural rules is what makes them so powerful; when you can’t explain why you are doing something, you infer that you’re doing it because it’s the only thing to do.
Yet a quick spin through the culture cycle of the South uncovers the many daily interactions that require and reproduce its unique form of interdependence. Starting in childhood, for example, young Southerners get more spankings from their parents, who in national surveys more strongly agree with statements such as “It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking.”36 Southern children also get more licks from their teachers than do Northern children.37 Southern adults expect children to be more aggressive—although, once again, not indiscriminately; in one study, for instance, Cohen and Nisbett found that more Southerners than Northerners would want a ten-year-old boy to fight his bullying tormentor.38
The years following school also seem to be more violent in the South than in the North. The South has always sent disproportionately more of its young people into the armed forces. In 2007, for instance, the South supplied 43 percent of new recruits to the U.S. military, although it harbored only 36 percent of males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.39 By joining the armed forces, these soldiers put their M-16s where their mouths were: Southerners consistently elect politicians with hawkish platforms.40
Aiding and abetting the wide spread of violence is the wide spread of guns, an everyday artifact that makes murderous interactions easier to commit. Whereas 47 percent of Americans as a whole keep guns in their homes, 54 percent of Southerners keep a hearthside firearm.41
Southerners are not only more likely to kill one another, but are also more likely to be killed for doing so. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Southern states have carried out 82 percent of the nation’s executions.42 Yet Southern judges, juries, and media are more lenient toward the perpetrators of honor-related crimes than are their Northern counterparts. And once a murderer has done his time for an honor-related crime, Southern employers are more sympathetic to him than are Northern employers.43
Murder is more commonplace in the South than in the North, but it is still a rare event. And given the rules of the Southern culture of honor, trouble is rather preventable, notes the sociologist John Shelton Reed: “The Southerner who can avoid both arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer.”44
All those guns may have another desirable side effect. As author Robert Heinlein noted, “An armed society is a polite society.”45 Guns don’t do all the work of keeping the South congenial. To help out, a panoply of daily interactions and artifacts reinforces the importance of good manners and, more broadly, interdependence in Southern culture cycles.
Most obvious to the Yankee ear is how Southerners speak English. Despite the influence of national media, the Southern dialect is still strong. And it’s not just a matter of drawing out vowels or swallowing rs; Southern speech reveals a deep concern with not offending other people. For example, many Southerners of all ages and ranks still use the honorifics “ma’am” and “sir” to show deference.46 Southerners also frequently communicate a desire to “avoid imposing their version of the world on others,” notes linguist Barbara Johnstone. Whereas a Northerner might say, “Juneau is the capital of Alaska,” for instance, a Southerner would soften his assertion by saying, “I reckon that Juneau is the capital of Alaska.” And whereas a Northerner’s polite request for aid is “Please help,” a Southerner’s is the less insistent “If you could help, I’d be much obliged.”47
With their own children, Southern mothers are not so subtle, drilling their charges in the finer points of table manners, dress codes, holiday traditions, family obligations, formal comportment, and the many other domains of etiquette. Despite the centrality of these teachings, Southerners have produced few books on good manners. That’s because “Southerners prefer to learn proper behavior from mothers rather than from books,” historian Charles Reagan Wilson explains.48 As Southern mothers enter the workforce, however, they are increasingly enlisting finishing schools, etiquette classes, and beauty pageants to help with the rearing of genteel offspring.
When it comes to entertaining guests, Southerners are less shy about consulting printed references, notes Diane Roberts: “The success of Southern Living magazine, which was selling ‘lifestyle’ years before Martha Stewart waxed her first camellia, testifies to the near obsession with ‘proper’ entertaining shared by the middle classes across the color line in the South.”49 This obsession endures throughout the lifespan and no matter the circumstances, as revealed in titles such as Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral.50
Southerners and Northerners do not have to wake up every morning and decide which practices and artifacts to interact with or, more generally, which kinds of selves to construct. Instead, institutions, especially laws, make some actions and selves much easier to realize than others. For example, Southern teachers are more likely to spank their students because laws protect their right to do so in all but two Southern states (Virginia and West Virginia).51 In contrast, most Northern states have outlawed corporal punishment in schools. Southern state laws also protect the use of force to defend property more so than do Northern state laws, and erect fewer obstacles to buying firearms.52 And underlying the higher number of executions in the South is the fact that all but one Southern state (West Virginia) allows capital punishment.
Although the South is noteworthy for institutions that endorse violence, it is even more noteworthy for its historical lack of institutions. Indeed, the lawlessness of the South is a major force in its culture cycles, driving the region’s violence, politeness, and interdependence.
The lawlessness of the South goes back five hundred years, when Europeans began making incursions into what would later become the United States. The main settlers of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states were English, Irish-Catholic, and other European agriculturalists and artisans. Farmers in the habit of cooperating, these settlers worked together to establish the political and legal systems that would ultimately free them to pursue their independent interests.53
But the main settlers of the American South were Scotch Irish mostly from the borderlands between Scotland and England. Because the forbidding climate and terrain of their native lands did not allow for much farming, the Scotch Irish were pastoralists—pig herders, to be exact. Their skill at squeezing a living out of unforgiving environments served them well not only in the old country, but also on the Southern frontier.54
Even when the Scotch Irish settled in areas of the United States that could support agriculture, they tended to stick with herding and slash-and-burn horticulture. This was a fateful choice. Although advanced agriculture is a risky business, farmers enjoy the security and stability that come with tying their wealth to the land.
But for herders such as the Scotch Irish, wealth wandered freely and widely on four legs. Often poor, they were sometimes tempted to nab a neighbors’ animals. But if someone nicked their pigs—the seminal event in the Hatfield-McCoy feud—most Southerners couldn’t go crying to the law, because there was no law. The low population density of the region meant that lawmakers and law enforcers were few and far between. When done wrong, a Southerner had to take matters into his own hands.55
Vigilante justice is seldom as much fun as it seems in the movies, so Southerners devised a method to deter would-be pig thieves: cultivate a reputation for being badasses. This entailed reacting violently not just to major threats to property, but also to the slightest threats to reputation. Fear of instant and cruel retribution could protect a Southerner’s property where the short arm of the law couldn’t reach and his own eyesight fell short. His property, moreover, included his livestock, his womenfolk, and, as the South’s “peculiar institution” of slavery spread, his slaves. To avoid the wrath of the Southerner, elaborate manners developed.
Meanwhile, back in the more densely populated agricultural Northeast, institutions to protect the individual flourished. In case of theft or other affronts, Yankees could turn to the police and the courts to set matters right. Not needing to flex their tough-guy reputations, they could tolerate other people letting off a little steam. And they could mouth off without worrying about getting shot down like a dog in the street.
The Scotch Irish did not invent the culture of honor. Herding economies the world over combine a sensitivity to insult and willingness to aggress with impeccable manners. Nisbett and Cohen list just a few of these groups: Sardinians, Corsicans, Druze, Bedouins, and many of the traditional societies of Africa and the steppes of Eurasia and North America.56 Another inhospitable and lawless terrain, the poor inner city of many U.S. metropolises is also thought to encourage cultures of honor, where insults must be answered with violence, and residents follow strict politeness codes so as not to raise the hackles of their heavily armed neighbors.57
At first blush, Southerners’ scrappiness may seem to smack of a more independent self, while Northerners’ live-and-let-live attitude may seem to suggest a more interdependent I. But as the world grows smaller and cross-national studies get larger, scientists are seeing that punishing outsiders to protect insiders is more typical of interdependent selves, while adopting a middle-gray neutrality toward everyone is more typical of independent selves.
For instance, a research team headed by Simon Gächter, an economist, watched students in sixteen cities all over the world play a classic economics game in which groups of four, students (all strangers) first had to use a complex set of rules to distribute tokens among themselves. In subsequent rounds, each player could punish the greedy by taking back tokens. Punished players could then either restore the peace by giving more tokens to fellow players or retaliate by taking away their loot.
In independent Boston, the students readily penalized the greedy and, when penalized themselves, responded with generosity. So did students in western European countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and Denmark. But half a world away, in the more interdependent cultures of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, the play was a little rougher. Students were not only less generous initially but also more vindictive when punished.58
“In these societies,” explains Gächter, “you cooperate with people inside your network, which is organized along family and friendship lines.” But in the anonymity of the lab, “everyone is an outsider,” he says, so the nastiness ensues.59
No matter which region they call home, Americans still have a lot in common with each other. Many of us watch the same television shows and movies, celebrate the same national holidays, obey the same federal laws, pledge allegiance to the same flag, speak the same language, even dine at the same food chains and shop at the same franchises. Because of these shared institutions and interactions, we often underestimate just how large the differences between the culture cycles of the West, Midwest, Northeast, and South really are. So when a new job or promising relationship crops up in another locale, we more readily leap upon it than do people in many other nations.
American corporations also worry less about transferring their workers than do employers in other countries. For instance, when Walmart attempted to expand to Germany, the company assumed that German executives would go where the jobs were. They wouldn’t, which left Walmart scrambling for talent. This is one of many reasons Walmart failed to break into the German market.60
Perhaps Americans should adopt a similar wariness toward picking up and moving on. Though some migrants such as Lisa Radloff and Rob Goldhor wind up loving their adopted homes, many others find that their selves just won’t align with their new culture cycles (at least at first). Transplanted to the more independent coasts, many interdependent selves from the Midwest and South find themselves craving the deeper relationships, clearer roles, and stronger traditions back home. Independent pegs likewise labor to fit into interdependent holes, as they struggle to pursue their individual interests, express their uniqueness, and exercise choice.
Just as culture cycles erect and echo these different selves, so, too, can selves use culture cycles to make cross-regional sojourns less traumatic. At the institutional level, employers, schools, and other organizations can take the edge off relocation stress by linking transplants hailing from the same region. For instance, Princeton University hosts both a West Coast students’ club and a Southern Society.61 “International students have all sorts of resources for adjusting to life at Princeton,” a club founder told the Daily Princetonian, “but no one seems to realize that it might be just as hard for those of us from the other end of the country to feel comfortable.” Organizations such as these give migrants a secure and familiar base from which to explore their new environments.
Region-hoppers can also do a lot at the interaction and individual levels of the culture cycle to make their selves at home. As is so often the case in psychology, admitting the problem is the first step. Migrants should acknowledge that regional cultures are real, and do matter. Armed with this insight, Southerners and Midwesterners transplanted to the coasts should take a walk on the independent side by opening their minds to the new ways around them. “People who are more open are going to experience much less difficulty acclimating to the new environment,” says psychologist Peter Jason Rentfrow, who studies regional differences in personality. “Their curiosity makes it easier [for them] to overcome some of the obstacles.” For Southerners in particular, opening your mind to the possibility that Northerners are often just venting their spleens rather than personally attacking you can go a long way toward taking the sting out of Yankee gruffness.
In return, the independent selves on the coasts should extend some interdependence to their friends from flyover country. Rather than honking at the car with Mississippi plates doing the speed limit in the fast lane, for instance, the Pennsylvania driver should first consider how insulting his actions might seem. Before canceling drinks with the new coworker from Indiana, the Oregonian should think about how hurt the Hoosier might feel. And before sharing that great new West Virginia joke, the New Yorker should pause and reflect that, for some interdependent Southerners, them’s fighting words.
In contrast, the independent souls from the coasts will need to get in touch with their interdependent sides to make the most out of their spells in Dixie or the Heartland. These transplants will probably not need to make the first move; neighbors and coworkers will likely extend invitations to dinner or a weekend event. And when that weekend event is “church,” accept it. Your interdependent friend isn’t trying to convert you; she’s just trying to plug you into one of the most important social networks in town.
The interdependent selves of our nation’s interior, in turn, have to cut the coastals some slack when they show up late, empty-handed, and underdressed. They likely aren’t putting on airs, defying tradition, or cutting a figure. Bless their hearts, they just don’t know any better.
Mark Zuckerberg does know better. A Northeasterner by birth, the cofounder and CEO of Facebook comes from a culture that knows how to wear a suit. But now a Californian, Zuckerberg is almost as famous for sporting a gray hooded sweatshirt as he is for making $17 billion before the age of thirty. In Silicon Valley, his attire isn’t a problem; Steve Jobs broke the CEO dress code a generation before when he adopted a black turtleneck and jeans as his power suit.
But on buttoned-down Wall Street, Zuck’s hoodie causes an uproar. The Northeast establishment sees the young entrepreneur’s refusal to don at least a jacket when he is in New York as a sign of disrespect. Potential investors worry that Zuckerman is unreliable and immature.62
Should Zuckerberg shed his casual threads to make nice with the Northeast crowd? Or is he right to stick to his Silicon Valley guns and flaunt his independence?
At the risk of betraying our own Silicon Valley allegiances, we think Zuckerberg (and all culture-crossers) should strategically deploy both his selves. Zuckerberg may think his hoodie is critical to his independence, just as Jobs regarded his own sartorial choices as necessary for his success. Yet as Jobs’s biographers now note, the Apple founder’s stubborn individuality may sometimes have hindered him more than it helped.63
By being interdependent in interdependent places, Zuckerberg could receive even more support for his independence. The advice of Ambrose Bierce, another stridently individualistic region-trotter, still applies: “When in Rome, do as Rome does.” This flexibility can win friends and reap prosperity not only in Rome, Italy, but also in Rome, Georgia; Rome, New York; Rome, Indiana; and Rome, Oregon.