Tag: analysis

Culture Wars: How Tightness & Looseness Create Different Cultural Dynamics Across the 50 States

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If you’re from the U.S., what do most people identify with your state?

Are its citizens stereotypical “celebrity-worshipping leftists”?

Are they “elitist yuppies”?

Are they “country bumpkins” of middle America?

Stereotypes abound, and these stereotypes are often based on the culture that exists at the state level.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at tightness and looseness of national cultures.

But every nation has subcultures and regional cultures.

This study delves into the tightness-looseness of the 50 United States.

And what researchers find is a spectrum – some states lean towards tightness, marked by strictly enforced rules and minimal tolerance for deviation, versus those who embrace looseness, with fewer rules and a more accommodating stance towards deviation. 

This study delves deep into the roots of theory, reinforcing the idea that tightness–looseness is not just happenstance. 

Instead, it’s a thoughtful adaptation to the nuances of local environments. 

The Study

In their examination of tightness–looseness – i.e., the intensity of punishment and permissiveness within a social system – researchers created a comprehensive set of potential indicators and refined them to form a composite index comprising nine key items.

This index encapsulates four facets of punishment strength, incorporating factors such as the legality of corporal punishment in schools, historical execution rates, the prevalence of student punishment, and the severity of penalties for marijuana-related offenses. 

Two additional dimensions delve into permissiveness, encompassing the accessibility of alcohol and the legality of same-sex civil unions. 

Institutions reinforcing moral order and constraining behavior are assessed through state-level measures of religiosity and the percentage of individuals with no religious affiliation. 

The final indicator, reflecting looseness, gauges the percentage of the total population that is foreign, offering insights into the degree of international diversity and cultural amalgamation within a state. 

The study then ranked the states from tight to loose based on these indicators.

The Results Are In…

The top 10 tightest states (from highest to lowest): 

  • Mississippi
  • Alabama
  • Arkansas
  • Oklahoma
  • Tennessee
  • Texas
  • Louisiana
  • Kentucky
  • South Carolina
  • North Carolina

And the top 10 loosest states (from highest to lowest):

  • California
  • Oregon
  • Washington
  • Nevada
  • Maine
  • Massachusetts
  • Connecticut
  • Hawaii
  • New Hampshire
  • Vermont

According to the study,

“tightness–looseness can account for the divergence of substance abuse and discrimination rates between states such as Hawaii and Ohio, reliably predicts the psychological differences in conscientiousness and openness between Colorado and Alabama, helps to explain the contrasts in creativity and social organization between Vermont and North Dakota, and provides some understanding concerning the dissimilarity in insularity and resistance toward immigration between Arizona and New York.”

Culture Wars

In essence, this research draws up the fascinating landscape of cultural dynamics across the 50 states of the United States using the tightness-looseness dichotomy.

The study sheds light on the divergence in substance abuse and discrimination rates, the psychological disparities in conscientiousness and openness, and the contrasts in creativity and social organization among states.

Breaking new ground, this challenges the conventional focus on tightness-looseness only at the national level. 

The findings underscore the predictive and explanatory power of tightness-looseness across diverse levels of analysis, paving the way for future research to extend this exploration into organizational and community realms.

While the correlational nature of the research precludes definitive causal inferences, the results align with tightness-looseness theory and broader eco-cultural approaches to understanding cultural differences. 

The study proposes that local environments, shaped by natural disasters, resource scarcity, and other threats, drive the adaptation of cultural norms, behavioral patterns, and psychological traits. 

Tightness emerges as an adaptive response in high-threat environments, fostering norms, impulse control, and orderliness. 

Conversely, low-threat environments cultivate looseness, promoting openness and flexibility.

Unveiling significant policy implications, the research illuminates the contrasting outcomes associated with tight and loose states. 

Tight states boast greater social stability and self-control but also exhibit lower sex equality, increased discrimination, and decreased innovation. 

In contrast, loose states exhibit higher social disorganization and drug use but also embrace creativity, cultural openness, and greater happiness. 

This nuanced perspective offers insights into what has been coined as “culture wars” between states, not just explaining their existence but also delving into their maintenance and psychological roots.

9/11 Interpreted: Discovering Culture Through History’s Depiction in World Textbooks

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From the North and South’s view of the Civil War to those of China versus Japan of WWII, interpretations of history differ wildly across the world.

When you enter your host country, knowing their historical perspective can help you better understand myriad aspects of their culture.

It can also help you avoid stepping on any landmines that might lead to a Monkey Moment.

History is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone wants to be the hero of their own story.

So, what “truth” do we choose to believe?

And what does it say about us?

Recent History in Textbooks

While distant history can still smart a bit, recent history often stings more.

9/11 is but one of those events.

The case of how 9/11 is presented in various textbooks across the globe shows how history isn’t necessarily skewed with time; it’s biased even in the moment, as originally reported by historical textbooks.

Graduate student, Elizabeth Herman, returned to her old high school about a decade after the tragic event had unfolded and discovered the school’s new history textbooks already detailed 9/11 and its aftermath.

She was curious how these events appeared in other school history textbooks around the world.

Interpreting 9/11

For her university thesis project, and later for research under a Fulbright scholarship, Herman analyzed textbooks from thirteen different countries to examine the differences in how this attack was being taught.

What she found:

  • American textbooks highlight the tragedy using volatile language and emphasize how the country came together after the attack
  • Pakistani textbooks call the assailants “unidentified terrorists,” omitting their identity
  • Turkish textbooks omit their extremist Islamic faith
  • Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian textbooks emphasize the “reckless” actions taken by the U.S. post-9/11 in their illegal war in Iraq
  • Chinese textbooks also interpret 9/11 as a sign of the decline of American authority on the world stage

So, considering all these selective details and interpretations of history, what exactly is “the truth”?

The Truth

As we’ve previously discussed, from a cultural context, there is no One Truth – at least none that we’ll ever know, as bias will always exist, in the writing of history and in the reading of it.

But what these interpretations can teach us is how different cultures view the world, how they view themselves, and how they hope to shape future readers’ perceptions of it all.

You might say, “If no one’s telling The Truth, then history is useless.”

But that’s not the case. A country’s interpretation of history allows us to understand their rationale, to seek the “why,” and that’s the whole point when you’re trying to accept and adapt to a foreign culture.

As Herman said on the results of her thesis:

“If you hand a student thirteen different ways of looking at 9/11 from thirteen different countries and ask them, […] Why do you think it’s different? Why do you think that Pakistan tells this story one way and Brazil speaks about it a different way? I think that that’s the only way that we can actually reach a new understanding of this event.”

3 Mechanisms That Bias Our Decision-Making: Availability Bias

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Managers apply simple models to help make decisions. Personal experience and culture help form these models.

Our cultural environment largely influences the rationale of our decision-making processes.

Daily decisions don’t require extensive analysis; rather, progress is made more efficient using prior experience and rule of thumb.

But it’s important to note that when we lean heavily into “rule of thumb” and prior experience, we unconsciously rely on bias.

As identified by research, three mechanisms affect this decision-making bias:

  • Availability
  • Representativeness
  • Anchoring

We’ll outline each across the next few blog posts, starting today with availability.

First, a question…

Which of the following do you think kills more people worldwide each year?

  1. Vehicular accidents
  2. Lung cancer
  3. Cape buffalo

If you answered “a) Vehicular accidents,” you’re a product of availability bias.

Availability bias involves making a judgment based upon the frequency of an event in the forefront of one’s mind rather than the event’s real-life probability.

Emotional or easily imaginable events – like vehicular accidents – are recalled more readily than a vague, obscure, or uninteresting incident.

This makes such events seem more prevalent and probable than they actually are.

And the answer…

An experiment was done in the U.S. with just such a question, where participants were asked whether more worldwide deaths were caused by lung cancer or car accidents annually.

Most answered that car accidents resulted in a higher fatality rate. The reality is that lung cancer kills nearly twice as many each year.

On average, over 2 million die each year from lung cancer, according to the World Health Organization, while the CDC states that around 1.35 million are killed on roadways across the globe annually.

The reason there is such a lopsided perception on each event’s probability is partially related to media culture, in which vehicular deaths are much more widely covered than those caused by lung cancer.

Humans really do have a selective memory: we remember more frequently and distinctly situations with a vivid narrative.

This skews the perception of each event’s frequency.

Other aspects that contribute to an individual’s availability bias include personal experience. If the individual knew of someone or multiple people, for instance, who had died from either lung cancer or a vehicular accident, this information might also bias their judgment.

Now, consider if you asked the same question of a Kenyan participant. In Africa, 200 people die each year from Cape buffalo, and such fatal incidents are likely heavily covered by the media.

Overall, a Kenyan participant might have a higher estimate than their U.S. counterpart regarding the global fatality rate caused by Cape buffalo.

In this way, cultural differences impact our availability bias and, in turn, our perception and judgment when it comes to decision-making.

On deck next week: representativeness.