Name: The Divide of Social Norms with Michele Gelfand
Uploaded: 2022-09-22T19:00:30.000Z
Duration: 6 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

what of our deep cultural codes that are driving our behavior.

For example, for many of you that have been to Singapore, you see that there's what's called the fine city is because they punish people for a variety of different behaviors from chewing gum to not flushing the toilet in public settings to spitting.

Even if you walk naked in front of your curtains in Singapore in your house, you could be fined if you take a quick trip over to New Zealand, you see people walking barefoot and banks, You see people celebrating with thousands of bras on fences.

You even see people burning couches and some universities and New Zealand is the only country that I know that actually has its own wizard.

So this dude actually is a retired professor from the U.

Set up shop in city streets debating everything from rugby to religion.

And instead of punishing the deviant, the prime minister of new Zealand actually gave him a license and said you are now the wizard of new Zealand and your job is to entertain the country.

And he has been known to build gigantic nests on top of libraries and hatch himself from huge eggs.

Um for example, in Germany, many people have traveled there.

You see people waiting patiently in the corner, even if there's no cars around in my hometown in new york.

You see people jaywalking constantly, even sometimes with kids in tow.

Um This is actually really interesting example, this is an extra incentive in Germany that's being developed to stay put on street corners.

And this is actually a ping pong game that he's playing with the person across the street.

And actually what happens is that as you're playing, I've watched this video, I've seen the technology.

And actually what happens is you see when the light's gonna change.

So it's really very effective in keeping people entertained while they're waiting and and and really waiting patiently.

But on a more serious note, why is it that some people can smoke weed publicly in the Netherlands and they can get the death penalty for this in Indonesia or other puzzling trends.

Why is it that in the United States, unique baby names are increasing at dramatic rates.

One of my colleagues was in a supermarket in Manhattan and asked where the candy was and they said she no longer works here.

And also why are we and especially the United States getting fatter and fatter.

Is there anything that unites these trends?

And I would submit to us that there are that there's very reflects a very fundamental aspect of human behavior, which is our adherence to social norms?

So social norms is something that we've developed distinctly as humans.

There's no other species that has it to the same extent.

Sometimes they become more formally written and we follow rules all the time.

Um We're really a normative species and it's really helpful for us to predict each other's behavior and to coordinate.

And it's so important that we take it for granted.

Imagine you wake up people go out of their houses, they are wearing clothes or not.

They're driving on both sides of the street and they're not obeying stop signs or imagine walking into an elevator and everyone's shaking their umbrellas on each other and they're facing the rear or the pressing all the buttons.

Or imagine that sex is not restricted to private places.

People do it in public parks on busses and in movie theaters.

This is a world without social norms and we humans decided that's not a good idea.

We invented social norms to avoid those kinds of scenarios.

But what I've discovered this is the glue that keeps us together.

And I've discovered through many years of research that cultures vary in terms of how strong that glue is, how strict their norms are or how permissive they are.

And I call this tight and loose, tight cultures have many strong norms and punishments as you saw in the example of Singapore of Germany and other context, loose cultures tend to have weaker norms and they're much more permissive And it turns out this distinction of Titan loose is extremely important.

It affects everything from our politics to our parenting for nations and to our neurons.

The first study that I did to try to document this difference was done with a large team of researchers that was published in science across six continents, 33 nations and many different participants and languages.

And what we found was that just as you can classify individuals in terms of their personality, we can also classify nations in terms of the strength of norms, tight loses a continuum.

So we can see a very strong variation around the world.

With countries like Japan, Singapore Germany Austria that tend to veer tight have strong norms.

Countries like the Netherlands new Zealand Greece brazil.

And what we also found was a very important trade off that each of these dimensions offers human groups.

So what we could see is that tight cultures provide a lot of order for their citizens.

They have for example, much less crime and more monitoring of behavior.

There is a great example of an NPR wait, wait, don't tell me show where they're asking the audience what a Japanese policemen need more of and we're all guessing higher pay more vacation, turns out they need more crime because there's so little crime in Japan.

There's been some instances where Japanese policemen trying to egg people on to actually commit minor crimes.

They have people wearing more similar clothing driving some more similar cars and they even reflects clocks on city streets.

I've analyzed the similarity in clock times around the world.

And sure enough tight cultures, they tend to say the same time clocks in loose cultures like in brazil or grease, you're not quite sure what time it is because things are not in sync.

Actually, there's some interesting research that shows that stock markets have been more in sync and tight cultures more buying and selling of stocks together.

And finally with their strong norms and punishments, people are more behaved.

They tend to have less alcoholism, less debt and they're even less fat.

In fact, in my own country, about 50-6% of pets are overweight, including my beloved dog pepper.

So loose cultures, you can imagine they suffer on this criteria.

They have more crime and they have a host of self regulation problems.

But loose cultures have the market on openness.

They're much more open to different types of people, whether they're people of different religions, races and creeds, People with disabilities, people that have stigma.

I discovered this by sending my research assistants around the world with facial warts that I bought them.

Uh, and also tattoos and those rings and I simply wanted to see how fast are they helped and how much are they helped when they ask for directions on city streets or ask for help in city stores and it was a very clear pattern that people that were more stigmatized that look different.

 We're helped much more in use cultures. 