Michele Gelfand’s Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World points out the power of social norms as “a cure for chaos”. Measured from one culture to another, Gelfand’s survey size of 7,000 respondents evaluates common practices and flexibility of rule application to designate a tightness and looseness score for 33 countries. For example, tight cultures have small public clock deviation as countries like Austria, Singapore, Japan, and Germany, while loose cultures have a greater deviation such as Mexico, Brazil and Greece. Other interesting research gages include willingness to live next to stigmatized groups, politeness differences within the US, and innovation vs. tolerance. To use a driving analogy, loose cultures are countries with figuratively more dotted white lines than double yellow lines that guide behaviors such as dress code for public and private events, wet umbrellas in slick indoor lobbies, and noise acceptance in public areas. Gelfand proves that looseness and tightness are independent of northern and southern hemisphere, developed and developing, and collective and individual cultural divides. She identifies the US largely as a loose culture, China as a tight one. For such big countries, she shows on a granular level, maps of loose and tight by states and provinces and thereby, explaining the grays of looseness and tightness. Gelfand’s book is useful because the loose and tight terms give us a neutral vocabulary, rather avoiding tension stirring terms, to begin a dialogue on cultural differences. Nonetheless, there are some limitations to explain more complex political tensions domestically and abroad.
These photos of American tourists in the US and Chinese tourists in China demonstrate body language of looseness and tightness.
Photo by Westwind Air Service on Unsplash
Photo courtesy of Morrie Goldman.
