We often look to other countries for smart policies on education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. These are stereotypical names. Nobody can feel insulted. Industrialized. Joe HENRICH: Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. If they reject, both players get zero. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. The five tightest countries are Pakistan, Malaysia, India, South Korea, and our old friend Singapore. We had a very tight social order. But the big C in my mind is very different than the little c.. The U.S. is overall relatively loose. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Read the excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. The Aztec, the Inca, and todays Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, are very collectivistic. That, again, is Gert Jan Hofstede. DUBNER: Do you think the average American and the average fill in the blank Laotian, Peruvian, Scot will be substantially more alike in 20 or 50 years, or not necessarily? GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. One of the defining features of Americanism is our so-called rugged individualism. You might even call it wild individualism. This feeds back into what Michele Gelfand was talking about earlier, in the context of geopolitical negotiations. Theyre threatened by that interdependence, and they want to assert their cultural identities. It always was unsustainable, but was made even more acute to us. I asked Hofstede what he would advise if a given country did want to change its culture? DUBNER: What problem was he, and later you, trying to solve by doing this work? GELFAND: Well, it requires a lot of negotiation. Can that possibly be trueour culture shapes our genetics? Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. And things worked out well for them for a bit. All rights reserved. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better). So were all constraining one another through our collective culture. Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: Culture is the ripples on the ocean of human nature. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn't) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything. who thought, This is important, and having answers about what the workers value will make us better bosses and its going to be good for the company. So there was quite an enlightened atmosphere, and there was a lot of money in those times. During the Cold War. Theres a huge variation in how much spontaneity people like versus how much structure they want. HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. GELFAND: And it caused a real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic punishment, which was caning. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, is designed to pose fundamental questions concerning economics using a variety of imaginative comparisons and questions. Think Belarus, Myanmar, Russia, China. Freakonomics is a registered service mark of Renbud Radio, LLC. But one of the things thats happened, particularly in the context of social media in the last 10 years, is that people now can speak back to power and close the gaps in terms of where individual people see themselves in relationship to power. Well go through the other five dimensions, much faster, I promise. When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York: Colgate University. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. HENRICH: Some people grow up speaking languages like Mandarin, where you have to learn to distinguish words just by the tone. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel . GELFAND: Ill just say that there are also other contexts where we naturally tighten. DUBNER: What are some of the consequences of being relatively tolerant of uncertainty, as the U.S. is? There, its really important to maintain that humility, to be focused on your privacy, but not trying to one-up other people. Joe HENRICH: Culture is information stored in peoples heads that got there via some kind of learning process, usually social learning. In a more masculine society, men and women adhere to the gender roles you might think of as patriarchal: fathers, for instance, take care of the facts, while mothers handle the emotions. Okay, you get the gist, right? But for folks who are pushed out of the mainstream you know, Black folks have rarely had the luxury of thinking about just simply being themselves. So you can see that in an individualistic society, after becoming a world champion in a sport or certainly after winning a major war, people do not fight one another, but they admire one another. But its also a tremendous outlier. But oh, the places you'll go! Because for all the so-called globalization of the past half-century or so, the U.S. still differs from other countries in many ways. NEAL: I often think about how the U.S. has historically thought about freedom and how, say, the Soviet bloc had talked about freedom. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. Not necessarily better or worse but very different. Citation styles for Freakonomics How to cite Freakonomics for your reference list or bibliography: select your referencing style from the list below and hit 'copy' to generate a citation. DUBNER: Where is the loosest place in America? Did you know there is an entire academic field called cross-cultural psychology? The reason we reached out to Michele Gelfand is that I want to understand this stuff better, too. You might think that these relatively minor differences dont add up to much. What was I.B.M. And if you get crumbs in your pajamas, theyll make you itch. But there must be, I would think, evolution across time, yes? The fourth original dimension was called uncertainty avoidance. This has to do with how comfortable people are with ambiguity. By the way, Gelfand doesnt really take a position on whether loose or tight is superior. Out into the ocean where they were caught by people on jet skis. It is that the wealth comes first, and the individualism follows. Henrich takes a more nuanced view: HENRICH: To explain the massive economic growth that weve seen in the last 200 years, you need to explain the continuous and, for a long time, accelerating rate of innovation that occurred. Listen to this episode from Freakonomics Radio on Spotify. But remember what Hofstede told us: HOFSTEDE: Youre like one drop in the Mississippi River. HOFSTEDE: I like this question a lot. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. And I think thats always going to be an ongoing tension this idea of America thats rooted in individualism, thats rooted in transactional practices. Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition. In any case, heres how Gelfand breaks down the upsides and downsides of tight cultures. You can see this on many dimensions: how we work and travel; how we mate and marry; how we care for our children and our elderly; how we police; how we conceive the relationship between the individual and the state; even how we manage death! Now, keep in mind this was London, English-speaking London not Uzbekistan or Botswana, even Mexico. The second one measures whats called power distance. (Dont worry, well explain the name later.) And we found the full spectrum of variation. Good on you, I say. Freakonomics (2005) aplica el anlisis econmico racional a situaciones cotidianas, desde las citas en lnea hasta la compra de una casa. employees in more than 50 countries. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if we wanted to. In a collectivistic setting, if you try something new, you are maybe telling your group that you dont like them so much anymore and you want to leave them, which is not a good thing socially. Happiness is going to be lower, but crime, too. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, show that increasing socioeconomic development is an especially strong predictor of increasing individualistic practices and values . Henrich argues that national psychologies can be quite particular, but you may not appreciate that if all you read is the mainstream psychological research. The U.S. assembled a coalition of allies. NEAL: I think thats always been a tension in Black culture, around this idea of Americas rugged individualism and the collectivity of Blackness that was born out of necessity because of segregation. GELFAND: In Germany and in Japan, the clocks are really synchronized. HENRICH: We dont like people telling us what to do. According to a decades-long research project, the U.S. is not only the most individualistic country on earth; we're also high on indulgence, short-term thinking, and masculinity (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better). The best thing you can become is yourself. Theres not going to be violent crime. And its by no means easy. The correct answer of the given question above would be the second option. Freakonomics, which weighs in at just over 200 pages (plus a hefty section of bonus material for those interested in learning more), takes as its principal argument the idea that economics exist as a tool to study society. Q uite soon after the Freakonomics guys, Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt, walk into their office on New York's Upper West Side for our interview, the scene resolves itself into the kind of . It also is related to obesity. Theyre really hard-working. Some of the countries with high power distance: Russia, China, and Mexico. People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. At the time, opinion surveys were relatively new; it was especially unusual for a company to survey its own employees. HENRICH: You want to be the same self, regardless of who youre talking to or what context youre in. When Americans did this experiment, a third of them conformed and gave an obviously wrong answer. A. We just need to do it. And you could have a perfect storm in that direction. Hofstede analyzed these data at what he called the ecological level. He explained this approach in a paper called Flowers, Bouquets, and Gardens the idea being that an individual flower is a subset of a mixed bouquet, which in turn is a subset of an entire garden, which has even more variation. She did want to measure culture, and how it differs from place to place. According to Chapter 5 of Freakonomics, there is a black-white test score gap and that gap is larger when you compare black and white students from the same school. So, yeah, that is WEIRD. In general, individualism can best be seen in laissez-faire capitalism and classical liberalism, which both emerged to prominence in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most white Americans have an entirely different ancestral history. 1, the most individualistic country in the world, 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede scale of individualism. HOFSTEDE: This is not about a homogenous soup, but its about the power of the millions versus the individual and the power of ostracism. Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: None of it is intentional. Neal is making a couple of compelling points here. Equating individualism with selfishness may be a mistake: Some of the world's wealthiest and most individualistic countries are some of the most altruistic, says 13.7 guest commentator Abigail Marsh. Very soon, there will be an Institute of Gladwell Studies. But somehow, that diversity and that early celebration of permissiveness has overridden that. Capital W-E-I-R-D, which stands for: HENRICH: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. And we see that the combination of high individualism, high masculinity, and high short-termism can produce some chaos, at the very least. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". Whats a Chaos Muppet? HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., there is little constraining. You might want to change, but if you get ostracized, its very difficult to persist. How much should we attribute that success to these very same factors that create chaos on other dimensions? GELFAND: And I thought, If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. So if you base your understanding of a given culture on a body of research that fails to include them, youll likely fail to understand how that culture thinks whether were talking about another country or a group within your own country. 469). Heres one of the questions they asked. Because if you try something new, you show to the people around you that you are an individual and you can make your own decisions. When youre trying to understand the nature of something, an outside view can be extremely helpful. We will learn which countries are tight, which are loose, and why. As always, thanks for listening and again, I do hope you'll also start . 6 Pages. Culturally maybe more than anything! Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the debut non-fiction book by University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen J. Dubner.Published on April 12, 2005, by William Morrow, the book has been described as melding pop culture with economics. Real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic,! But somehow, that we are a time is money country in ways. Loose or tight is superior first, and there was no difference, as U.S.... The way to upstate New York: Colgate University I promise country did to! Asked Hofstede what he would advise if a given country did want to understand this stuff better too. The Mississippi River context youre in, would have better facial-recognition skills end, but if get..., well explain the name later. time, yes lot of money in those times problem was,! 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