In 2013, I asked some of my research assistants to do something a little out of the ordinary. At my request, each donned a temporary tattoo, a (fake) skin piercing, a purple hair extension, or synthetic facial warts. I then sent them out to fourteen countries to ask strangers on city streets for help with directions or clerks in stores for help with a purchase. The results were clear: My students wearing the stigmas were more likely to receive help from strangers in loose cultures than in tight ones.
I’m not the only psychologist who has messed with environments to root out cultural differences. In 2008, researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands did so quite literally: In one condition of their study, they temporarily added graffiti to an alley near a shopping area—in essence, making it an impromptu “loose” environment. In the other condition, they kept the alley clean, making it a spotless, tight environment. Then they hung useless leaflets that read “We wish everybody happy holidays” on the handlebars of parked bicycles in both conditions. It was an ingenious test. The bike owners would need to remove the leaflets from their handlebars to ride their bikes, yet there were no trash cans around. Would the riders take the leaflets with them or throw them on the ground? About 70 percent in the loose, graffiti-ridden alley littered; only about 30 percent in the tight, clean alley did.
As these studies show, tightness and looseness both have their pros and cons depending on your vantage point. Broadly speaking, loose cultures tend to be open, but they’re also much more disorderly. On the flip side, tight cultures have a comforting order and predictability, but they’re less tolerant. This is the tight-loose trade-off: advantages in one realm coexist with drawbacks in another.
In a 2017 episode of Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!, the weekly U.S. National Public Radio comedy show, host Peter Sagal asked his panelists the following question: “Just like the United States, Japan has problems with its police force. In Japan, many police officers are in desperate need of what?” The answer to his question wasn’t what you’d expect: new uniforms, faster cars, higher pay, or more time off. Quite the contrary, Sagal explained. “They need crime . . . Crime rates in Japan have fallen so low in the last thirteen years that police officers are literally looking for things to occupy their time.” According to the Economist, as of 2014, Japan had one of the lowest murder rates in the world, just 0.3 per 100,000 people. The streets of Japan are so safe that some police officers have resorted to prodding individuals to steal: Policemen in the southern city of Kagoshima started leaving cases of beer in unlocked cars just to see if passersby would grab them. But even this sting was underwhelming; it took a week before they could revel in the opportunity to punish a hapless offender.
Beyond this one comical example, my statistical analyses of George Thomas Kurian’s Illustrated Book of World Rankings show crime rates per hundred thousand people are all significantly lower in tight countries. Like Japan, China is known for its low level of crime, as are India and Turkey. In looser countries, like New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United States, crime is much more common. And while violence has been falling for decades, as shown by renowned psychologist Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, murder rates still vary widely around the world in a predictable pattern: Looser nations have higher rates than tight ones.
How do tight cultures maintain social order and keep their crime rates low? First, through threat of serious punishments. Retention of the death penalty, as reported by Amnesty International, is highly correlated with tightness ratings. For example, possessing drugs can get you the death penalty in Singapore—as compared with the Netherlands, where marijuana is sold legally in coffee shops (and increasingly in some U.S. states). At least sixteen crimes can result in a death sentence in Saudi Arabia, including drug possession, burglary, rape, adultery, and gay sex. Get caught drinking alcohol, and you may face jail time and even a public flogging. And whether you agree or disagree with Singapore’s caning practices, such deterrence appears to have helped make the country relatively crime free.
No doubt, extensive monitoring systems also keep a lid on crime. I’ve found that tight cultures tend to have more police per capita and employ more security personnel to check for inappropriate behavior in public spaces. Surveillance cameras are rampant in tight countries, reminding the public to behave themselves. In Saudi Arabia, high-tech cameras called saher, which translates to “one who remains awake,” dot highways, exit roads, and intersections. They capture images of drivers talking on the phone, texting, not wearing seat belts, and driving over the speed limit, as well as tailgating and changing lanes excessively. Similarly, Japan has millions of surveillance cameras on streets, buildings, store entrances, taxis, and train stations.
Psychologists at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom tested the effectiveness of this “eyes are upon you” practice in fostering norm-compliant behavior. In their university coffee room, the researchers hung a banner with an image of a large pair of eyes above the coffee maker. Next to the machine, there was an “honesty box” as a collection receptacle for people’s payments for coffee, tea, or milk. During weeks when the banner with eyes hung above the coffee machine (as compared with weeks when there was simply a picture of flowers), people put almost three times more money into the honesty box, on average. In another study, researchers found that hanging up a poster of eyes around a university cafeteria reduced student littering by half.
In another experiment, people who were prompted to think about religious concepts, such as preacher, prophet, saint, and church (a habit of mind that is more likely to occur in tight cultures, which rank higher on religiosity), were less likely to cheat. So whether the eyes belong to our neighbors, the government, or God, monitoring leads us to conform to prevailing norms. “Watched people are nice people,” cultural psychologist Ara Norenzayan has aptly stated.
In addition to having less crime, tight nations tend to be more organized and cleaner. Here again, stronger norms and monitoring work hand in hand to bring this about.
In 2014, I asked my research assistants in other countries to examine signs of cleanliness in public settings. Even after factoring in national wealth, they found that tighter countries tend to have more cleaning personnel on city streets. They not only keep things tidy but also serve as a reminder to citizens about the value of doing so.
Many tight countries have a long tradition of keeping their cities clean. Germany and neighboring Austria, for example, are famous for their tidiness. On city streets in Vienna, “waste watchers” dole out hefty fines to litterbugs. In southern Germany, residents of apartment buildings strictly abide by a cleaning system called “Kehrwoche,” or sweeping week, where each person is responsible for cleaning up the building’s steps and sidewalks. In Oslo, Norway, whose spotless thoroughfares are perhaps rivaled only by the impeccably manicured streets of Singapore, an anti-littering mascot reminds people not to litter and organizes cleanup days that involve over two hundred thousand volunteers. Japan’s obsession with cleanliness made international headlines after the nation’s defeat in the 2014 World Cup, when Japanese fans swarmed over Brazil’s Arena Pernambuco stadium with bright blue trash bags, gathering up litter to discard—a postgame tradition in their home country that they’d taken on the road.
By contrast, in an extreme show of loose behavior, when the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in 2011, the city transformed into a “drunken vomity hellhole” that cost around $4 million to repair, blogger Isha Aran reported. Slovenly behavior like this is generally more widespread in loose cultures. Seventy-five percent of Americans report littering in the last five years, a habit that entails over $11 billion annually in cleanup efforts. The government in Brazil spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year in the city of Rio alone to collect trash on streets and beaches. And in Greece, residents compound their country’s financial crisis by tossing their garbage in makeshift landfills, causing fires and posing serious health and safety risks.
Interestingly, when we’re exposed to untidy environments, it creates a powerful feedback loop that facilitates more norm violations and disorder. Imagine witnessing someone littering, not returning his shopping cart, or scrawling graffiti on the side of a building. If you saw this, would you be more likely to break a different norm or rule? Research suggests you would. People have been found to litter more when they witness illegal fireworks going off nearby or when they observe others not returning their shopping carts. This kind of “norm-breaking contagion” is much less likely to occur in tight cultures where fewer norm violations occur in the first place.
In addition to generally being cleaner, tight cultures tend to have less noise pollution. Germany has mandated quiet hours on Sundays and holiday evenings. During these quiet hours, you’re forbidden to mow your lawn, play loud music, or run washing machines. The German courts take these restrictions very seriously. After one Cologne resident complained about a yapping dog, a judge allowed the dog to bark for only thirty minutes a day in ten-minute intervals. Likewise, in Japan, noise is tightly regulated. Commuters are expected to refrain from talking on the phone and to listen to music through headphones. By contrast, Dutch commuters often chat loudly while riding the train, even in cars that are designated “silent zones” (stilte in Dutch). In Israel, a transportation department video implored Israelis to be “more like the British” and stop yelling on the metro in 2016. Meanwhile, the New York Times labeled its namesake city “The City That Never Shuts Up.” In 2016, more than 420,000 noise complaints were made in New York, double the number made in 2011, and reports show that the city suffers from dangerous decibel levels. Even libraries, which are supposed to be the quintessential haven for quiet, are rated as being much noisier in looser cultures, my research shows.
Another contributing factor to the greater order seen in tight cultures is their superior synchronization. Synchrony can be found in many human activities: swimming, marching bands, army drills, and more. It’s also a feature of many nonhuman species. Fireflies have mastered synchrony with their well-timed flashing, as have crickets, whose chirping is so precise that we can use it to predict the temperature. Synchrony is all around us. In humans, cardiac pacemakers, firing neurons, intestinal activity, and applauding audiences all reflect synchronization. All nations need to be synchronized to some degree, or they’d collapse. Yet nations vary widely in their ability to synchronize actions, with tight cultures faring better at it than loose ones.
Take something as simple as clocks in city streets. You might assume all countries ensure their major clocks are perfectly synced to the right time, but a clever study led by psychologist Robert Levine suggests some countries are more successful at this than others. He had research assistants measure the time displayed on fifteen different clocks across the capitals of thirty-plus countries. In some countries, including Austria, Singapore, and Japan—all tight nations—city-center clocks were highly in sync, deviating from each other by less than thirty seconds. But in loose countries like Brazil and Greece, clocks were off from one another by almost two minutes. My analysis of Levine’s data shows that, generally speaking, synchronous clocks are likely to be found in tight nations, as seen in the figure below.
Transportation tends to be more coordinated in tight cultures. If you live in a tighter culture, you’re more likely to be able to depend on the preset schedules of public transport, whereas if you’re in a loose culture, you should expect delays. Japan’s Shinkansen “bullet trains,” which travel up to two hundred miles per hour, had an average delay of only fifty-four seconds in 2013. Likewise, the trains of the Swiss, renowned for their timeliness, boasted a 97 percent punctuality rate. In 2014, Singapore’s main rail system had only fourteen delays lasting over thirty minutes. Rail operators can be fined up to one million Singapore dollars a year for delayed performance. When delays do happen in tighter countries, apologies and explanations flood in. When a power surge led to a two-hour delay on Singaporean trains, the national transport minister personally issued a public apology. And when German trains are late, passengers can expect a detailed explanation from the conductor. By contrast, train riders in loose countries are both more likely to face delays and less likely to receive apologies or explanations. The heavily trafficked New Jersey Transit line between the Big Apple and New Jersey prompted the endearingly titled website njtranshit.com, which tracks the almost-predictable daily delays and cancellations suffered by customers. On American railway Amtrak, an estimated 20 to 30 percent of trains run late on some of the busiest lines.
It’s not just the clocks in tight cultures that are synchronized. People are more likely to dress the same, buy the same things, and generally downplay their uniqueness. Why? Because if everybody acts like everybody else, order and coordination become much easier. Take something as seemingly benign as which hand you use for writing. One of my studies found that there are far fewer “lefties” in tight cultures. For example, while about 12 percent of Americans write with their left hands, only about 3 percent of people in Turkey do. And the tighter a country is, the more likely it is to require school uniforms. This uniformity even extends to the cars people drive. I had my team of research assistants also venture into parking lots around the world. We found less variation in the make and color of cars in tight cultures as compared with loose ones.
Synchronization practices abound in tight cultures. The practice of “precision walking,” also called Shuudan Koudou, which translates to “collective action,” has been perfected by Japanese students walking together in amazingly complex routines that echo marching bands and the military. In China, radio calisthenics—exercises set to music and broadcast on the radio—are mandatory at state-owned companies and are part of the curriculum in many primary and secondary schools, and older women frequently gather in public squares at night to dance in synchrony in forms modeled after Tai Chi. In other cultures, religious practices are used to synchronize people. In the Middle East, the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, resonates through the streets five times a day, synchronizing individuals throughout the region. Whether derived from clocks, clothes, cars, or calls to prayer, synchronization leads to the same predictable psychological consequence: enhanced cohesion and cooperation, as I discussed in Chapter 1.
Synchronization is also found in the most unexpected of places: the stock market. Analysts had long assumed that behavior on the stock market was primarily related to economic or political variables, like a country’s wealth or information transparency. But a group of U.S. professors had a hunch that culture might play a role. In a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Cheol Eun and his colleagues found that investors in tight cultures are more likely to make similar buying and selling decisions—what they call stock price synchronicity. In their study of stock price movements across forty-seven countries from 1990 to 2010, tighter countries, such as China, Turkey, and Singapore, featured greater synchronicity than loose nations such as the United States, New Zealand, and Brazil. Investors from tight areas evidently have more common experiences and perspectives, and are generally more sensitive to peer influence (or “herd behavior”), which leads them to make similar trading decisions.
Due to their cultures’ greater social regulation, it seemed plausible that people in tight cultures might have greater self-regulation than people in loose cultures. German sociologist Norbert Elias was the first to make the connection between social constraint and self-constraint in his book The Civilizing Process, published in 1939. The more people have to attune their conduct to others’, he argued, the stronger their ability to regulate their impulses. My research supports this argument: People in tight cultures do indeed show higher self-control. For example, 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. (As an aside, in the United States, over 50 percent of dogs and cats are overweight or obese, including my own dog, Pepper.) Some of the highest scores for alcohol consumption in liters per capita also came from loose countries such as Spain, Estonia, and New Zealand. Residents of tight nations such as Singapore, India, and China score low on alcohol consumption rates.
Spending habits also differ widely between tight and loose cultures. Residents of loose countries such as the United States, Hungary, and Estonia are more likely to gamble than residents of tight countries such as South Korea and Singapore. Loose nations also have lower gross national savings—a country’s gross national income minus public and private consumption—even when taking into account wealth and income distribution, suggesting that economies in loose cultures are spending more income than they produce.
These differences aren’t just found in scientific studies—they show up in international headlines. When the 2008 financial crisis hit the world markets, years of sloppy bookkeeping caught up with Greece, a loose culture, which plunged €300 billion into debt. Banks in tight Germany ended up shouldering a lot of Greece’s debt, and much like a no-nonsense parent, the German government called on Greece to implement greater fiscal austerity. “You just have to ask the Swabian [a wealthy southwestern region of Germany] housewife,” scolded Chancellor Angela Merkel. “She would have given us some worldly wisdom. You cannot live permanently beyond your means.” Tellingly, the German word for debt and guilt is the same (Schuld). Greeks, in turn, hit the street and vehemently protested such strict measures. Tensions came to a head in July 2015, when Germany proposed that Greece leave the eurozone. In the end, another bailout was arranged, but the tight-loose fault line persisted.
Tight cultures generally have low crime, high synchrony, and a high degree of self-control. Loose cultures, on the flip side, can be highly disorganized and suffer from a host of self-regulation failures. Yet loose cultures have a significant edge when it comes to being open—to new ideas, different people, and change—qualities that tight cultures sorely lack. This is the tight-loose trade-off in action.
The human capacity to innovate sets us apart from other species, and has produced countless achievements—from the wheel to the lightbulb to the Internet. Creativity requires out-of-the-box thinking and acceptance of ideas that might violate preestablished norms, which gives loose cultures a clear innovation advantage.
In one study, management professors Roy Chua, Yanning Roth, and Jean-François Lemoine analyzed eleven thousand responses to ninety-nine creativity contests on a crowdsourcing platform where large monetary prizes were given to the best ideas. Creativity challenges posted included designing a new shopping mall in Spain, creating a TV commercial tailored to Egyptian culture, rebranding instant coffee for Australians, and designing a water bottle that was quintessentially “French.” People from tight countries weren’t only less likely to win these competitions, but also less likely to enter. Even more telling, judges in tight cultures gave fewer awards to foreign participants’ ideas, presumably because these ideas were more radical than those the judges were accustomed to.
This study points to an interesting aspect of the tight-loose trade-off. Loose cultures may be less orderly than tight ones, but a certain level of disorderliness actually proves beneficial to thinking outside of the box. Imagine yourself in a psychology experiment in a well-organized room with a spotless desk, as shown in Figure 3.3. Then imagine yourself in a chaotic space with papers, open books, pens, and pencils strewn across the desk and the floor (this is how my office looks). How would these environments affect your creativity in the experiment?
Psychologist Kathleen Vohs and her collaborators found that people who spent time in a messy room performed better on a brainstorming task—specifically, listing more innovative uses for Ping-Pong balls. In another study, people in a messy room indicated that they’d rather order a menu option that was labeled “new” (the creative option) versus one labeled “classic.” Tight rooms—and tight cultures—enhance the status quo; by contrast, loose, messy environments may seem chaotic, but they encourage unconventional thinking.
Relatedly, while synchrony has its benefits for cooperation in tight cultures, there are benefits to being unsynchronized that loose cultures gain. In one study, my collaborators Joshua Jackson, Nava Caluori, Morgan Taylor, and I asked groups of people to perform a creativity task after they walked around campus either at the exact same pace or at their own pace. Groups that walked in sync were less creative than those that marched to their own beat.
In another study where groups chanted either the same or different words together at the same time, groups that chanted the same words were less likely to have individuals who voiced dissent in a later group-decision task that actually benefited from having different opinions.
From the ancient Athenians to the modern-day Dutch, loose cultures also exhibit greater creativity because of their exposure to multiple cultures. Research shows that people who have greater multicultural experience—meaning they’ve traveled or interacted with people from different cultures extensively—tend to be more creative than those who haven’t. For example, in laboratory studies, people with more multicultural experiences brainstorm more unconventional ideas for gifts and are more likely to solve tasks that require novel solutions.
Imagine you’re given a book of matches, a candle, and a box of thumbtacks and are asked to mount the candle to a wall so that the wax from the candle won’t drip onto the table. Figure 3.4 shows the solution. It clearly requires a lot of creative thinking, and having more exposure to cultural diversity bolsters this ability.
Economists call this ability to cross boundaries and break out of the norm “fluidity.” They argue that it’s a key skill if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur. As Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner puts it, “a lack of fit, an unusual pattern, or an irregularity”—quintessentially loose qualities—has the power to stimulate creativity. Indeed, our analyses of the 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which examined attitudes in more than 120 countries, show that people in loose cultures, such as Brazil and Greece, are more likely to believe that entrepreneurship is a good career choice and that they have the capabilities to start their own business, as compared with those in tight cultures, such as Korea and Germany.
Loose cultures are not only more open to different ideas—they’re open to different people. Centuries ago, Herodotus, known by his admirers as the father of history, observed in his travels circa 450 BC that all cultures are ethnocentric—that is, they believe their own way of doing things is far superior to that of others: “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.”
Herodotus illustrates his point with a story in which King Darius, the ruler of Persia, asks a group of Greeks who were cremating their dead fathers how much money it would take for them to eat their fathers’ corpses. The Greeks, shocked, reply that they’d never agree to do such a thing. The king then asks the Callatiae, an Indian tribe, who were known to eat their parents, how much money it would take for them to cremate their corpses. The Callatiae cry out in horror and tell Darius not to suggest such appalling acts.
But while some amount of ethnocentrism is universal, loose cultures tend to be less ethnocentric than tight ones. People in loose countries generally embrace what psychologists call a cosmopolitan mind-set. They report being identified with “the world as a whole” to a greater extent than do people in tight cultures. This cosmopolitan mind-set also makes them more receptive to foreigners. When people from all over the world were asked if they would tolerate immigrants as their neighbors, it was the loose cultures, including Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, that were the most welcoming, whereas the tightest cultures—such as Malaysia, South Korea, and Turkey—were not. Loose nations back up those attitudes, too: They are literally home to a higher percentage of immigrants.
Generally, people in tight cultures are more likely to believe their culture is superior and needs to be protected from foreign influences. China, for example, ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners. And in Japan, where foreigners make up only 2 percent of the population, many landlords have a “no foreigners” policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants, and hotels deny entry to foreign customers. In 2016, the Guardian reported that a train conductor on an Osaka railway announced, “There are many foreign passengers on board today . . . this has caused serious congestion and is causing inconvenience to Japanese passengers.” In Austria, another tight culture with little ethnic diversity, surveys show that almost thirty percent of Austrian citizens hold anti-Semitic attitudes. And Austria remains one of the most politically exclusive countries for non-EU immigrants, who reportedly have no voting rights and face very restrictive naturalization requirements.
People in loose cultures are also more tolerant of people with a range of commonly stigmatized identities. In surveys conducted with more than 33,000 people across nineteen countries, we found that people from loose cultures were 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.
International surveys by Gallup also show tight countries—such as South Korea, Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and China—to be some of the worst places to live for gays and lesbians, while loose countries—such as Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands—are more accepting. San Francisco, Barcelona, Amsterdam, São Paulo, and Tel Aviv were rated as some of the most gay-friendly travel destinations in 2015. Meanwhile, bullying and discrimination of gay students is prevalent in Portugal and Turkey, and in Iran and Afghanistan being gay can be fatal: Same-sex intercourse is punishable by death for breaking Sharia law.
Take another stigma that might not be as obvious: marital status. Are you single, married, or divorced? In loose cultures, such distinctions are comparably unimportant. There are multiple ways for people to cohabitate without being formally married in the Netherlands, such as through registered partnerships and cohabitation agreements. About half of all Dutch children are born to unmarried parents. Similarly high rates occur in New Zealand and Spain. Loose cultures are also more sexually tolerant. They report having more sexual partners and have more positive attitudes toward casual sex. By contrast, unmarried women and single mothers in tight cultures often face a lot of shame and ostracism for their unconventional lifestyles. In China, unmarried or divorced women in their late twenties are referred to as “leftover women,” or sheng nu, by the government and are mocked as being “a used cotton jacket” on state-sponsored TV programs. Being unmarried is also a liability on the job market. The New York Times recounted the story of a well-qualified thirty-six-year-old single female job applicant in China who was rejected for an editor position because the recruiter deemed she must have “severe personality flaws” or “psychological issues” if she was unmarried. In South Korea, over 90 percent of children given up for adoption are born to unmarried mothers—mainly due to the stigma the mothers would face if they kept their children.
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher (circa 500 BC), is credited for the notion that the only constant is change. Many centuries later, in 1992, the comedian Bill Hicks, more a truth-teller than a philosopher, made a similar declaration in one of his most acclaimed stand-up routines: “The world is like a ride in an amusement park . . . The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills . . . And we can change it anytime we want.” Yet change is not evenly distributed around the world. Loose cultures, with their openness and permissiveness, embrace change and are more adaptable to new and potentially better ideas that come along. By contrast, with their greater social control and synchronization, tight cultures cling to stability and the status quo, taking much longer to adapt to new circumstances.
For example, when people in loose cultures were asked whether they’d ever engaged in or planned to engage in any kind of collective political action—from signing a petition to demonstrating—they overwhelmingly said yes, whereas people in tight cultures said no more often. Not only do loose cultures boast a highly open media that enables uncensored dissent, but people even support the expression of ideas they find repugnant. In 2007, at a rally against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was visiting Columbia University, one protester proudly held a sign that read “Free speech for all. Even douchebags” and commented, “To deny free speech to anybody, you deny it to everybody.”
By contrast, tight countries place many restrictions on what people can say in public. Tight nations are more likely to have autocratic governments that don’t hesitate to forcefully crack down on any dissent or censor the media. Not surprisingly, countries’ looseness ratings correlate highly with the organization Freedom House’s ratings of a nation’s openness to the media and to journalists. Countries like New Zealand, Belgium, and Australia have a very open media environment, affording a wide range of ideas that go uncontested. Countries like China, Malaysia, and Singapore, by contrast, put a lid on what people can say, on- and off-line. Twitter’s analytics division reported that Turkey’s government and other officials made more requests to remove content from its citizens’ accounts than any other country in 2017, even beating out Russia and its notoriously tight monitoring of irreverent Twitter content. China tasks its “web police” of two million people with conducting digital surveillance and eliminating rebellious ideas. To give citizens further incentive to stay in line, the government is reportedly working on a “social credit” system that would compile data about each individual citizen’s behavior—such as their debt repayment, driving history, and even their treatment of their parents—into a single score, similar to a credit score, with points taken away and sanctions imposed on those causing “disturbances.”
People in loose cultures might think these restrictions are excessive, and that the state should never interfere with the media. But many people in tight cultures actually embrace these restrictions. A 2008 Pew Research Center survey showed that over 80 percent of respondents in China think the Internet should be managed or controlled by the government. This reflects a broader trend: People in tight cultures believe that the most important responsibility of government is to maintain order, and they support strong leaders who do so, even if it means sacrificing some personal freedom.
With a huge marketplace of ideas and encouragement to challenge the status quo, cultural change can happen much more quickly in loose cultures than tight cultures. In fact, it’s something artificial intelligence experts Dana Nau and Soham De and I have shown with computer simulations. When we introduced new norms that would give a population more benefits—analogous to better economic or social conditions—tight groups resisted the changes for much longer than loose groups.
Beyond the confines of artificial laboratory simulations, tight cultures react to change with great resistance. I visit Jordan frequently to do research on terrorism (I’ll speak more about the connection between tightness-looseness and terrorism in Chapter 10). In 2016, Jordan’s Ministry of Education rolled out a new school curriculum in an effort to promote tolerance and reduce radicalization among the country’s youth. The changes were designed to foster a sense of acceptance toward non-Muslims: Pictures of women without the hijab, men without facial hair, and men vacuuming were added to textbooks, which retained a dominant Islamic point of view. The hope was these tweaks would immunize Jordanians against extremist ideologies, said Mohammed Momani, a government spokesperson for the project. But the effort completely backfired. Many viewed the changes as an attack on Islamic values. The teachers’ union told educators to disregard the changes, and in the city of Amman, some educators burned the new textbooks, chanting, “We will teach them what we want.” In this tight culture, the modifications were too threatening to the existing social order.
Tight societies have cornered the market on social order, synchrony, and self-regulation. Loose societies have made their own gains in achieving tolerance, creativity, and openness to change. Both invariably have potential assets and liabilities, as shown in Figure 3.6.
Of course, exploring the various trade-offs of tight and loose mind-sets is not to suggest that all cultures have these respective characteristics. Take height and weight. To a very large degree, taller people weigh more. Yet each of us knows a tall person who is thin and a short person who is heavy. Tight-loose dynamics work the same way. Not all tight and loose cultures exhibit all of these trade-offs, but many do.
But why do these deep differences exist in the first place? Tight and loose countries aren’t united by obvious qualities. They’re not similar in terms of their location: The tight countries of Japan, Germany, Norway, Singapore, and Pakistan are all scattered around the planet, as are the loose countries of Netherlands, Brazil, Greece, and New Zealand. Groups of tight or loose countries don’t speak the same language. They don’t share any common religion or tradition. Tight countries aren’t all the same age, nor are loose ones. Some, like Sparta and Singapore, or New Zealand and Athens, are separated by over two thousand years. What, then, do they have in common?
