From Apple’s Siri to Amazon’s Alexa, artificially intelligent helpers can make our lives easier by booking reservations, playing just the right song, and even telling amusing jokes. In 2017, engineers at Facebook’s A.I. Research lab gave this technology an even more difficult task: negotiation. A highly nuanced process even for humans, negotiation poses many challenges, including accurately reading others’ emotions, making persuasive arguments, and balancing cooperation with competition. Perhaps hoping that naming them might confer such human abilities, Facebook researchers called their chatbots “Bob” and “Alice.” They taught the software hundreds of hypothetical English dialogues that could occur within a negotiation session. Then they assigned Bob and Alice a simple negotiation: splitting up some balls, hats, and books between them. Researchers programmed Bob and Alice to carry out this task over and over again, a trial-and-error process that allowed them to adapt and upgrade their negotiation tactics.
Over the course of thousands of practice sessions, Bob and Alice became deal-making savants. But there was just one problem. In the pair’s later interactions, Bob and Alice no longer seemed to be speaking English. Like childhood twins often do, the chatbots had developed their own secret code.
When Bob said, “I can i everything else,” Alice responded, “balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to.” Bob replied, “you i everything else,” to which Alice countered, “balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me.” And the conversation went on.
It sounds like gibberish or a bug in the software, but it actually reflects the canny work of two negotiation ninjas. Having been programmed to work together, Alice and Bob had developed their own code words and rules to coordinate. On the plus side, their new lingo and “rules of the game” appeared to be leading to successful negotiation results. But to the chagrin of Bob and Alice’s human creators, their exchanges no longer made any sense to outsiders. The researchers had to go back to the drawing board and reconfigure the software to follow the syntax of English.
We’ve seen what happens when humans commit to collective goals: They coordinate by developing distinctive rules that set (mostly unspoken) expectations for behavior. Remarkably, it seems that even primitive chatbots will do the same thing when designed to be social with each other. As Alice and Bob refined their abilities to coordinate, give-and-take, solve problems, and reach a deal, they naturally developed a kind of social code.
Humans have to negotiate much more than balls, hats, and books in the twenty-first century. From climate change and a population surge to global health crises, we face a wide array of challenges. In the past, efforts to alleviate these problems have often relied on economic and engineering solutions, such as making sure aid gets to the right people and developing technologies to fix our problems. While these remedies are often needed, we can also help mitigate many of these collective challenges by recalibrating our social norms. Although human cultures can’t be reconfigured as fast as reprogramming the code between two robots, they certainly can be changed. Our cultures aren’t destiny. The tightness and looseness of any culture is capable of being modified when needed to better solve our most vexing problems.
It might sound far-fetched, but adjusting a culture’s tight-loose balance is no pipe dream. We already have a rich history of cases in which communities successfully did so. In some cases, they had to loosen social norms. In others, they needed to tighten. In all cases, they began with honest self-reflection on how to better their communities.
In 1998, Iceland’s teens had a major drinking problem. More than 40 percent of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds got drunk at least once a month, making them some of the heaviest teen drinkers in Europe. Marijuana use was high, and almost a quarter of teens smoked cigarettes. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” according to Icelandic psychologist Gudberg Jónsson. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.” Parents and officials realized that loose social norms needed tightening to protect their country’s future.
To tackle the problem, Iceland’s government launched a multi-pronged program called “Youth in Iceland.” One major step was to toughen up laws. The country made it illegal for people under age eighteen to buy cigarettes and for those under age twenty to buy alcohol. Legislators also banned alcohol and tobacco advertising, and set a curfew for teens under sixteen.
Crucially, the program then addressed cultural factors. In an “eyes are upon you”–like program, parents took to the streets to monitor children and enforce the new curfew, kindly asking kids who were out too late to head home. Officials also encouraged parents to get more involved in their children’s schools, spend more time with their kids, and sign contracts with other parents stipulating the types of teen behaviors they’d prohibit. The government increased funding for sports, music, and art to give youth diversions other than alcohol and drugs.
The intervention showed sweeping results: By 2016, surveys indicated that only 5 percent of teens had gotten drunk in the last month, a mere 7 percent had smoked marijuana, and only 3 percent reported smoking cigarettes every day. In a world where alcohol abuse causes more than 3.3 million deaths globally, programs like the Icelandic Model—which combat social norm violations with tighter standards—can serve as an example worldwide.
Iceland’s success illustrates a broader—and encouraging—point about culture: Our environment may shape our social norms, but so can we. We can make collective choices about the kinds of norms we want to embrace. And when our norms aren’t serving us well, we can, and should, take steps to rebalance them.
For centuries, our early ancestors lived in small communities where face-to-face interactions and intimate social networks built trust and kept people accountable. Following the Industrial Revolution, in cities and large factories, human beings faced a new reality: regularly interacting with hundreds of strangers outside their social networks. We again adapted by creating new norms that enabled cooperation to flourish.
Today, we live in an entirely new world: the Internet. Between 2000 and 2016, the number of people using the Internet grew from 738 million to almost 3.8 billion. Across the globe, we each have, on average, five different social media accounts and spend about two hours every day online. More than half the world’s population has a smartphone, which we use to shop, network, date, get the news, and entertain ourselves. Remarkably, the Internet is so important to people that on average over 70 percent of Americans said they would go without coffee, chocolate, and alcohol to have access, 43 percent said they would give up exercise, and 21 percent even said they would sacrifice sex for a whole year.
Our new online world offers many advantages, including convenience, quick access to information, and new relationships. We can even conduct many of our most important financial transactions online—from banking, to bill paying, to filing taxes and insurance claims—creating unprecedented economic efficiencies. We’re also being exposed to more unfamiliar ideas than ever before, which boosts our capacity for innovation. Reaping the benefits of this brave new technological change invariably requires looseness. Not only will people with loose mind-sets be able to create new technologies, but they’ll also be better able to adapt to “dizzying” rates of change, in the words of journalist Thomas Friedman.
But while technological change thrives on looseness, it’s also in dire need of tightness. Many of the virtual spaces where we spend a considerable portion of our days lack regulation and monitoring. Consequently, they’re treacherous catch basins for insults, bullying, dishonesty, and even criminal behavior. This is the dark side of the Internet’s subterranean cultures. Incivility is ubiquitous, and fraud, data breaches, and cyberattacks are on the rise. As many as 40 percent of young people have reported being victims of cyberbullying, and more than 50 percent also admit that they, too, have been mean or hurtful to people online. A new vocabulary—flaming, trolling, spamming, and doxxing—has arisen to describe egregious behavior.
Undeniably, people feel psychologically unleashed to be rude and uncivil when they’re on the Internet—to be norm violators. The “online disinhibition effect” describes the sense of anonymity and dissociation that people feel from their “real” selves when they’re online, therefore also feeling less restrained by the social norms they follow in the real world. Studies have shown that people who meet in computer-mediated discussions are less inhibited—more apt to swear, flirt, and make impolite comments—as compared with those who meet face-to-face. Unlike in the “real world,” online bullies show even less remorse for their bad behavior because they don’t see the sadness and outrage on their victims’ faces.
Another vexing consequence of digital connectivity is the massive rise of “fake news.” On the Internet, inaccurate and misleading information can spread like wildfire, enflaming fear and threatening communities.
In 2014, for example, panic swept the state of New York when the news broke that an American doctor who had volunteered in Guinea to help victims of the Ebola outbreak had checked into a hospital with symptoms of the virus. Although medical professionals assured the public that the patient was in quarantine and there was no future threat of the infection spreading, news outlets suggested otherwise. Ominous Ebola-related headlines and social media conversations amplified the false sense that New York had become a contagious cesspool.
This is a major historical pivot. While in the past we’ve had to deal with mostly objective threats, now we must sort through a murky universe of subjective and false threats, without always having clear means of discerning truth from fiction. Moreover, through algorithms that analyze how people behave on the Internet and what stories they pay attention to, online marketers and media sources have grasped what cognitive psychologists discovered in the lab decades ago: Emotional content, including information that triggers our greatest fears—terrorism, disease, natural disaster—grabs our attention. Once captured with the help of complex algorithms, our attention translates into high click-through rates that may even be monetized as advertising and subscription revenues. For those seeking to profit from our fears, it’s a “race to the bottom of the brain stem,” according to technology ethicist Tristan Harris.
The Internet poses a dilemma: We need to have loose mind-sets to adapt to technology, yet we need tighter norms to regulate the destructive, normless, and fear-mongering behavior that it enables. Even the cofounder of the World Wide Web Robert Cailliau has voiced the need for a tighter Internet culture: “The Net is a space in which you encounter others,” he told New Scientist magazine, “so there has to be some regulation of behavior.” Just as a person must learn traffic laws to earn their license to drive, Cailliau suggests navigation of the web ought to have similar provisions. “A traffic regulation only limits behavior, not content,” emphasizes Cailliau. “You can drive where you want, when you want, provided you do it with safe behavior toward other traffic users.” Even on the web, he says, “we should all know what our rights and duties are. Teach it in schools. Hand out a license that shows one has passed a test of minimal awareness.”
Just like in other areas of our lives, we need a tight-loose Goldilocks balance in these new spaces. The effort to tighten up our online spaces must balance users’ freedoms but still have adequate constraints.
Fortunately, tighter norms for appropriate behavior are starting to emerge in our new virtual worlds. Some of this is occurring informally. Hundreds of books, online manuals, and YouTube videos offer guidelines on how to act appropriately via email, tweet, text, Facebook, and more. “Netiquette” guides stress the importance of remembering that there are actual people on the other side of our screens who deserve to be treated with the same respect we’d give them face-to-face.
Online communities are also taking more formal steps to tighten overly loose environments by simultaneously promoting the free exchange of information and monitoring and punishing norm-violating behavior. For example, visitors to the Reddit discussion forum ChangeMyView engage in challenging someone’s viewpoint on topics ranging from spanking to immigration, yet they’re required to do so with civility. Volunteer moderators ensure conversations don’t get out of hand by deleting inappropriate comments and kicking out rule violators. What’s more, a user who succeeds in changing another person’s opinion through respectful dialogue is rewarded with a delta sign by their username. Other online communities are posting official behavioral guidelines to promote a healthy balance of tight and loose in their virtual spaces.
In an even more formal approach, web-based platforms and businesses are test-driving ways to tighten their online cultures by policing more of their offensive content. After Facebook introduced its Live feature, which allowed its users to broadcast videos in real time, the developers were shocked by the number of people who used the feature to share footage of torture, sexual assaults, suicides, child abuse, and murders. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg added three thousand more employees to regulate and remove offensive videos and users “to build a safe community” and adjusted the site’s algorithms to show people fewer news reports and ads, and more posts from family and friends. Over on Twitter, following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, investigators discovered that over fifty thousand accounts were actually bots controlled by Russian parties. Since this discovery, Twitter has been creating new online tools to detect bots and hiring people to get rid of them. Google likewise is working on curbing the dissemination of false and offensive information by employing raters tasked with evaluating whether certain web pages are putting forth demonstrably inaccurate information. And Instagram’s CEO, Kevin Systrom—who once declared the Internet a “cesspool”—is tasking engineers to develop machine learning techniques to detect and eradicate offensive behavior.
Promoting more personal accountability will also help to counter antinormative behavior on the Internet. Max Bazerman at Harvard Business School and his research team have found that very simple changes can incentivize people to avoid the temptation of lying when filling out forms online. Remarkably, when people are asked to sign their name before filling out a form when their money is at stake, their responses are more honest as compared with when they sign after making their claim. “Signing before rather than after reporting cues people to the fact that the task has an ethical dimension and thus encourages them to avoid cheating,” Bazerman told me. Moreover, simply having customers video-record their claims might also improve honesty by heightening their awareness that they’re being watched and that their responses will be available for analysis at a later date. Such steps can be taken in any industry where customers may be tempted to engage in “loose” reporting.
Perhaps the best way to reduce norm violations is to boost the sense of community in online spaces. “Those who gain a sense of group membership become part of a virtual community and often develop a sense of responsibility toward the social cyberspace in which it is situated, much as residents of a neighborhood may take responsibility for the area’s cleanliness and safety,” points out Lance Strate, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. Just as people have off-line for millennia, those who feel connected in an online environment may be motivated to develop and enforce social norms for the benefit of all.
We face pressing issues in the real world, too, of course. Here again, viewing our challenges through the lens of social norms can help. By tightening norms in some realms and loosening them in others, we can ensure that culture is a force for good.
One of the greatest threats is overpopulation. Today, the Earth is being asked to feed, clothe, and house a staggering 7.6 billion people—9.3 billion by 2050. To put this in perspective, in the 1500s, there were only an estimated 540 million people on the planet. By the 1800s, the human population had just breached the 1 billion mark. A century later, in the year 1900, the population was estimated to be around 1.76 billion. This means that our population will grow more in the next three decades than it did between 1500 and 1900. Few countries will escape the surge. The United States is expected to add over 100 million people, or 36 percent, between 2010 and 2050. This pales in comparison with countries like Uganda, where the population is set to triple in the same time frame. Nigeria will add 271 million people in those years; India will add another 450 million.
The consequences of this population boom could prove catastrophic, entailing rising unemployment, poverty, migration, and conflict over limited resources. Globally, producing enough food to feed an exploding population—especially when one in nine people already don’t have enough food to eat—will be a huge challenge. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the number of severely food insecure people rose 30 percent in 2017 to reach 7.7 million. With a projected population growth of 81 million from 2011 to 2050, poverty and limited resources threaten to devastate the nation. Globally, water supplies will be scarce as well: The number of people living in water-scarce areas is projected to rise from 2 billion in 2017 to 3.6 billion by 2035, the majority concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa. Kuwait, which is expected to grow by 4.3 million people between 2010 and 2035, is projected to have only 4,600 liters of water to give to each person for the entire year in 2035—what an average American consumes in about fifteen days. Other countries like the UAE, Libya, and Singapore face similar population-exacerbated water scarcities.
Ultimately, recalibrating social norms has to be part of the solution to the problem of overpopulation. In many countries, having large families is a tight social norm that has been hard to negotiate. Kenya, for example, has strict gender norms that prevent women from making decisions about family planning and accessing contraception. It’s taboo to even talk about such issues with one’s spouse and extended family.
CARE, an international humanitarian organization, was keenly aware that to affect fertility rates in Kenya, it had to focus on changing these norms, and that the change had to be led by esteemed, high-status members of the community. CARE trained local health workers, religious leaders, government officials, and teachers to lead community-wide dialogues on gender equity and the benefits of family planning. For three years, starting in February 2009, the organization led more than 750 dialogues in churches, markets, and village meetings. Community leaders gave their support for family planning and encouraged communication on the topic. CARE’s efforts succeeded in loosening the tight norms of male-dominated family planning; the percentage of women using contraception rose from 36.5 percent before the intervention to 51.8 percent afterward. In surveys conducted after the intervention, both men and women indicated that they were communicating more equitably with each other on the issue of family planning. CARE has led similar interventions to change social norms surrounding family planning in such countries as Rwanda and Ethiopia.
The pressure for large families isn’t restricted to developing nations. In his book The Land Is Full, Israeli environmental activist and academic Alon Tal explains why Israel is bursting at its seams. Once a tiny nation of 800,000, it’s now home to nearly 8.6 million, and by 2065 is projected to have a population of around 25 million—approximately 3,000 people per square mile, far surpassing the population densities of Japan and the Netherlands. Israelis are feeling squeezed in schools, hospitals, housing, and highways. Noise pollution is so bad that one of every four complaints to the police is about the racket made by neighbors. The ballooning population is wreaking havoc on Israel’s environment, with rising greenhouse gas emissions, diminishing natural resources, and massive losses of biodiversity. Tal’s logical conclusion is that Israel has to stop producing so many children. But the public response to his wake-up call has been underwhelming. “In a country that argues over everything else,” Tal remarked, “overpopulation, it seems, is one issue we never want to address.”
In November 2017, I met with Tal over coffee in College Park, Maryland. He wanted to discuss how to use tight-loose theory to deal with population growth in Israel. His hunch was that mere economic incentives wouldn’t solve the problem. Israelis, we agreed, are loose in many domains. But when it comes to family size, he told me, they’re exceedingly tight. In 2015, the national average (for both religious and secular families) was 3.1 children per family, as compared with an average of 1.7 kids per family in other developed countries. Ultra-Orthodox families have around 7 children on average. The norm of large families is rigidly promoted; couples face significant peer and even governmental pressure to have kids. David Ben-Gurion, the main founder of Israel and a former prime minister, is even credited with saying, “Any woman who does not have four children, as much as it depends on her, is betraying the Jewish mission.”
The sentiment offends modern ears, but it has a historical rationale. After the decimation of six million Jews in the Holocaust, Israelis understandably saw it as their national duty to have large families to replenish their numbers. Many also felt driven to match the high Arab birth rate. But these pressures have receded, Tal argues. The Jewish population worldwide has sprung back. As of 2016, there are about seventeen million people in the world who identify as Jewish, approximating pre-Holocaust numbers. The birth rate of Arab Israelis also leveled off at around three children per family by 2016. Ironically, the tight norm that helped successfully replenish Israel might now be threatening its survival.
Tal is determined to adapt these norms to build a more sustainable future. He knows it will be no easy task: The push for large families runs deep in the national psyche, and evolved for good reasons.
But, as with other stubborn social phenomena that have yielded to concerted effort in many nations, such as reducing smoking and combating homophobia, the problem of over-fecundity, Tal is convinced, can be tamed by launching a public advocacy campaign attuned to Israel’s unique culture. “This is the result of public policies and cultural norms,” he explains in an article in the Jerusalem Post in February 2018 after we ran a joint Maryland–Tel Aviv University workshop together with fertility experts from around the world in Israel. “David Ben-Gurion encouraged people to have many children, but now we need to have a collective conversation as a nation and realize that while there was once a period in Israeli history when having lots of children was absolutely a patriotic thing to do, today it is an unpatriotic thing to do because it harms the common good.”
Today we’re on the cusp of facing what is perhaps nature’s greatest test: climate change. This crisis, too, has cultural causes that demand cultural solutions.
Through much of our current Holocene period, which started about eleven thousand years ago, the Earth’s temperature has been relatively stable, enabling us to thrive as a species. In the last few hundred years, our technological advances have upset this environmental balance. Caused in part by the dramatic increase in carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution, climate change could wreak havoc in ways we don’t fully understand. Scientists predict a bleak future: Land will become too salinized to support crop growth, and extreme weather events will become more frequent. Even a moderate sea-level rise could threaten cities worldwide.
Climate change will inevitably reshape global ecological threats—and, with them, social norms. Some nations that have enjoyed a relatively threat-free status for much of their history are now facing the specter of widespread disruption. While many tight countries are found on the Center for Global Development’s list of the fifty countries most threatened by future extreme weather events (China is number one, India is number two, and Hong Kong is number six), loose countries also make the list. The United States clocks in at twenty-five, Brazil at thirty-six, and Australia at forty-five. NASA predicts that in the second half of the twenty-first century, the American Southwest and Central Plains will experience droughts worse than those of the 1930s Dust Bowl. And many cities on the East Coast are at high risk of rising sea levels.
When disaster strikes, groups will need to tighten up. Many tight cultures are already skilled at doing so, but loose cultures will have to develop stronger norms to coordinate in the face of massive climate changes. This was one of the main points of the 2014 science fiction novel The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway. Set in the year 2393, the book records how human follies led to a climate-related apocalypse. Interestingly, Western civilizations collapse in the catastrophe, while China, with its top-down control, is the only country to survive. In the book, Western nations fail to enforce strict regulations to slow rising CO2 levels due to their insistence on defending personal freedoms.
Of course, this is just a work of fiction. But the book offers an interesting premonition—that some degree of tightening will be needed across the globe to cope with climate change. Among other possibilities, however, this also prompts us to consider a world where all cultures are increasingly becoming tight. While tightness has many advantages, it also relates to higher ethnocentrism and hostility toward outsiders, which could lead to cross-cultural conflict, radicalization, and even large-scale wars. A world made up of tightening cultures, all dealing with imminent threats and limited resources, could spell disaster for all of us.
But there’s a more optimistic view. As the world collectively deals with mounting natural threats, we may be able to harness tightness-looseness to improve collaboration—not just within cultures, but between them. When we focus on developing strong norms that cut across ethnic and national lines—and build a larger global identity to deal with our planetary threats—cooperation can evolve at a much larger scale, to the benefit of all. In this view, our already highly cooperative species would evolve even further, given our collective challenges on Earth.
This might sound like a crazy pipe dream, but it’s already in action. Consider Greece and Turkey’s “earthquake diplomacy” of 1999. Relationships between the neighboring nations had long been strained, dating at least as far back as Greece’s fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. But when Greece and Turkey were each hit by earthquakes in August and September 1999, they surprised the world by coming to each other’s aid. After the first earthquake killed around seventeen thousand people in Turkey, the Greeks were the first to fly in food and medicine. More aid followed, and Greek pop stars raised money through benefit concerts to help their Turkish neighbors. When Athens was struck by a quake less than a month later, Turkey returned the favor, rushing to send over rescue crews. The reciprocal aid ultimately led to cross-border diplomatic discussions on bolstering collaboration in areas like tourism, trade, and the environment. In this situation, the boundaries to outsiders that tightness usually creates were diminished, allowing cooperation to flourish between groups.
Similarly, in August 2017, India and Bangladesh rose above their long-standing border dispute after severe floods washed over Bangladesh and the West Bengal area of India. Bangladeshi border guards peacefully allowed eight hundred fleeing Indians to cross the border to safety, and Bangladeshi families immediately welcomed them into their homes. “There should not be any question over crossing the borderlines when it comes to natural disaster or any other massive crisis,” said Reazul Haq, a resident of the Bangladesh Lalmonirhat District. In the future, cross-cultural collaboration will be needed to regulate rivers flowing through both nations to curb the threat of severe floods.
Disaster is often tragic, but it also has the power to bond diverse people under the universal banner of suffering. When a crisis exposes our common humanity, we become capable of seeing those outside our own culture as being like ourselves. In the process, natural disasters can produce the outpouring of compassion toward outsiders that characterizes looseness, while spurring the tight coordination needed to survive.
In a 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the late American writer David Foster Wallace shared an old fable with the new graduates: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ ”
“The point of the fish story,” Wallace explained, “is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see.”
Social norms are as old as humanity itself, and they’ve helped us coordinate and survive on this planet in the most difficult circumstances. They surround us, shape our experiences, and influence our interactions on a daily basis. Yet, like the fish who can’t see the water that surrounds them, we rarely notice the extent to which norms pervade our lives and how much we need them.
In this book, I’ve tried to make this pervasive force visible and intelligible, and illuminate how it affects everything from our nations to our neurons. The more we recognize the impact of our cultural programming, the better we can understand not just others, but ourselves—and cultivate the capacity to solve our biggest problems. Our ability to grasp the nature of our differences, why they exist, and what trade-offs are involved will help us to successfully navigate an increasingly globalized world. Norms have shifted within cultures over the centuries, often dramatically, and will continue to shift, but their basic code—tight or loose—remains timeless.
In an age of breathtaking global change, we need to be prepared to recondition our cultural reflexes. Through a smart mix of monitoring and accountability efforts, Iceland reduced teen drinking, and Reddit clamped down on obnoxious trolling. On the flip side, CARE succeeded in loosening centuries of tight gender norms in Kenya to increase the use of contraception. And in 2017, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman initiated a major loosening of Saudi society. In enacting such measures as opening movie theaters and allowing women to drive, he’s betting that cultural change can precipitate sorely needed economic growth and reform. By tightening when we’re becoming too loose and loosening when we’re becoming too tight, we can build a better planet.
As you continue to encounter the world’s great diversity, keep asking yourself this simple question: Tight or loose?