The King of Sweden Story and WorldView
If you have been following along here, you would know that since I visited Tanzania in 2000 I have been fascinated by the idea that we humans are walking around with a kind of “framework” or “worldview” in our heads that dominates how we “think” about things. My best example is this story of the King of Sweden. In 1988, he was trying to buy presents for his family in a department store in Stockholm - and he wanted to write a check. The clerk would not take his check without a “check card.” In Sweden, the king is just not a big deal. Their culture, their worldview of social hierarchy is very flat. That is not conscious, and it does not change easily. You can find that story in Hoffstede’s book, Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind. It is still a great read. I also wrote extensively about it in this earlier post: https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2014/03/culture-is-key-to-development.html
Cultural Psychology
In the intervening years since I discovered this, thanks to some pioneers, one of them being Geert Hofstede, this idea has become a whole field of scientific research called “cultural psychology”. I think this has enormous potential to help us understand our whole world of politics, economics, and the like. We might even be able to make a few changes to improve things. You can get a quick overview of what this field is from this Freakonomics Radio podcast episode #469.
The U.S. Is Just Different:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/american-culture-1/
There is a transcript if you are of the “reading” mindset, and not of the “listening”. There is also a bibliography. Geert Hofstede’s son is cited, as well as Joe Heinrich (The Weirdest People) whom I have cited here in the past.
Tight vs Loose
This episode introduces Michele Gelfand, a scientist studying cultural psychology. They talk mostly about one cultural dimension: tight vs loose. In a “tight” culture, rules are very important, and must be followed. Laws are strict, are strictly enforced, hierarchy and position are important, authority is unquestioned, etc. You might see that as all positive, but in a “loose” culture, people are much more creative, innovative, risk taking, progressive. California is the “loosest” state in our very “loose” United States.
Her book is Rule Makers, Rule Breakers How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World 9/11/2018. Her team of scientists have generated 9 volumes of studies in this field: Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology: Volume 9 2022 $85.
This is Amazon’s blurb on this annual collection:
With applications throughout the social sciences, culture and psychology is a rapidly growing field that has experienced a surge in publications over the last decade. From this proliferation of books, chapters, and journal articles, exciting developments have emerged in the relationship of culture to cognitive processes, human development, psychopathology, social behavior, organizational behavior, neuroscience, language, marketing, and other topics. In recognition of this exponential growth, Advances in Culture and Psychology is the first annual series to offer state-of-the-art reviews of scholarly research in the growing field of culture and psychology.
This is a BIG DEAL
IMHO this is a very big deal. I have been reading behavioral economics, the neuroscience of politics, and the psychology of tribal grouping and the like - and these folks have given this a deeper perspective. I think this opens a door to research to better understand how our human world actually works. The first step to changing something is to understand what is actually going on.
Culture and Diversity Within Individuals and Nations
Let’s be very clear on this - every individual has a personal and unique worldview or cultural psychology. It comes from your whole life history - family, peers, cultural milieu. You can change it, but only with a lot of effort. This is your “fast brain” - the worldview that your brain uses most of the time. It is difficult to get your “slow brain” to pay attention to it, and potentially move it a bit. But that will only work for you as an individual. As the author says in the podcast:
Within countries, there is of course enormous variation. There are plenty of looser people in tight countries and vice versa. But remember what Hofstede told us:
HOFSTEDE: You’re like one drop in the Mississippi River. You may decide to go another way, but that doesn’t make the river change.
Other Dimensions than Tight / Loose
Hofstede actually came up with 5 dimensions initially, and added a 6th with further research. Some scholars have added a few additional ones. (Nickerson)
Hofstede’s initial six key dimensions include power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, and short vs. long-term orientation. Later researchers added restraint vs. indulgence to this list.
There are probably thousands of these influences in our brains, but we need to simplify things down to the range of 6 categories or so in order to get a handle on them. Gelfand’s tight / loose is very similar to Hofstede’s masculinity-femininity. He sometimes called it hard / soft. I find all of them to be very helpful to understand human behavior. I think there are a few more I would like to see researched in more depth, such as the one described below: “In-charge”.
The In-Charge WorldView
I would add one that I found in East Africa which I would call “being in charge of life”, or the In-Charge view. I am still kind of amazed that it even exists and the power it has to alter our behavior.. It is an excellent example of what we are talking about. These worldviews or cultural psychological persuasions affect every decision that we make, and we are virtually unconscious of them. I have written at some length in the blog entry cited above, but here is a short story - about a rope swing.
In 2000, my son and I were visiting a good friend, a missionary in Africa. One of his volunteers, a Mennonite from Canada (an interesting cultural mix), made a simple rope swing for the kids in the school. He tied a rope to a board, and hung it from a tree. The kids loved it. I found it interesting that no one had ever made one before. One day the kids pushed it really hard, and it got stuck up in the branches. He said he thought he would wait and see what happened. That swing was up in that tree for 4 months. The kids would stop and look at it, and lament that they had no swing. They saw him put it up there, and they could probably climb the tree to get it back down. But they did not! Why?
We had another instance of the same worldview when the water stopped. This small place, near Endulen,Tanzania, is home to several hundred Masaai. Their water came from a single pipe that ran a mile from the hospital. The hospital was built 30 years prior by the Belgians, and they installed a generator, a well, and a single pipe to provide water to this small community. One day, we walked over from the hospital and people told us: “The water stopped. No water.” Well, we had showered that morning, so we were sure the well was working. I asked what happened. They said, “The water stopped”. My first reaction was - let’s go see what’s up with it. So I asked, had it stopped in the past? They said, “Yes. Sometimes the pipe is broken.” I asked what they were going to do for water. They said they would walk down to the stream and fill jars with water, and carry them back up - about a half a mile. And that they only took water from the upper part of the stream, above the dam that the British built way back. The water on the other side of the dam was for the animals to drink. It seemed very clear that no one was going to go try to fix the water pipe? Why?
My simplistic conclusion, based on just this tiny bit of empirical evidence, is that the culture which I grew up in tells me that I am in charge of life. It tells me that I am in charge of the planet. If something is broken, or needs attention, I can do that. If I come upon a toilet running anywhere in the world, I will lift the lid and fix it. My culture thinks we can install a democracy anywhere in the world - no problem. East African culture seems to have a worldview that they are NOT in charge of life. Life to them is something that happens to you. I do not know the roots of that, but it might go back to hundreds of thousands of years of basically hunting / gathering. Food shows up - or it does not. Diseases come and go. You can invoke spirits and shamans - but doing anything else simply does not occur to you. They know exactly what causes AIDS, but they take almost no steps to avoid getting it. They are not lazy - they work very hard just to stay alive. But it does not occur to them that they are in charge of things.
The swing appeared. The water appeared. And then it was gone. Too bad, so sad.
They are taught how HIV is passed on, but they do almost nothing to avoid it. When we were there, 40% of the people who presented themselves for treatment in the hospital were HIV positive.
It is still difficult for me to understand that there is a whole culture that thinks that life is something that happens to you. In Nicaragua, based on personal observation, I think the prevailing view is that “someone else is in charge of life”. It is the boss, the government, the army, the northamerians - someone else - not me.
A Behavioral Scientist / Science
Popular articles describe this approach as Behavioral Psychology, or characterize the practitioners as Behavioral Scientists. It seems to be an interesting outgrowth of “behavioral economics”, thank you Daniel Kahneman.
Sources of Culture
A cultural psychology of worldview forms over hundreds of years. The podcast says that threats give rise to a more tight culture. They can be climate, weather, war, things of that ilk. There is some research into what weather and environment have contributed to various cultures. My personal theory is that the Scandinavians like our Swedish king are unique for a combination of reasons. They live in the far north. They had to pull together just to survive the winters. AND they were never part of the Roman Empire or Holy Roman Empire. No one ever bestowed on them a leader that was ordained or designated by any higher power. When they wanted a king, they went to France to find a member of a royal family.
Similarly, Costa Rica has a very different culture than most of Latin America. Hoffstede’s theory is that it was mostly populated by families with Jewish heritage that fled the Spanish persecution of Judaism. The Muslim government had no probem with Jews back then. When the Catholics took over, you had best become Christian.
Neither Side is Best - Both are Needed
By the way, Gelfand doesn’t really take a position on whether loose or tight is superior. She argues that both styles have their upsides and their downsides. A loose country, like the U.S., tends to do well in creativity and innovation; in tolerance and openness; in free speech and a free press. The downsides of looseness are less coordination, less self-control; more crime and quality-of-life problems.
Cultural Change through Backlash
The podcast talks about the former Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Under Soviet domination, their whole world was forced to be “tight”. Everything was controlled from the top down, rules were absolute, etc. When those governments were overthrown, the reaction of the populace was to go to the other extreme. Those cultures now are very “loose”. Ukraine is one prime example. The pendulum swings - and that is hopeful for the U.S. culture at some point.
A Light in the Tunnel
When I first ran into this idea, I found it just remarkable. It seems amazing that our decisions can be profoundly shaped by psychological tendencies in our brain, in our culture, below our level of awareness. Daniel Kahneman’s work explained some of the psychological tendencies for this. Thaler applied the idea to economics to give us Behavior Economics. Now this new field of science, behavioral cultural psychology, holds the promise to help us understand it more fully. I have to read more to see if this can actually help us understand how we might manage this a little better to help us move forward.
Diversity Reigns
My gut, my “fast brain” thinks that the ultimate answer is that “Diversity Is King”. When one world view dominates, we tend to miss a lot of perspectives and opportunities. It would be like having one religion, one language, one way of thinking. Each dimension of cultural difference brings some strengths and some problems. I doubt that we could ever artificially create a common global or even national culture that would serve us in all instances.
Today, we are separated by national borders, so that a country’s culture remains somewhat uniform and static over time. I think one of the secret weapons of the U.S. culture has been our relatively open borders. We have welcomed many different cultures. They tend to blend after a few generations, but their influence is felt even a hundred years later. See the book: American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard.
If the world eventually breaks down our political borders, it would behoove us to foster cultural differences within our nation states. Enclaves, family groups, self selecting townships - whatever works. Think company cultures, neighborhood cultures. We should be looking for a wide variety of people to work on all of our problems. The more diverse their cultural background, the more likely their strengths will pull together, and not their weaknesses.
Bibliography
Popular articles on the topic can be found here:
https://www.michelegelfand.com/popular-press
Nickerson, Charlotte, Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory, 2022.05.02.
This is a nice summary of Hofstede’s original work, and some additions by others.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/hofstedes-cultural-dimensions-theory.html
OK. Enough for now. I’ll be back in a bit when I have read the book. Until then - Stay Safe. And spend a few minutes actually THINKING about this stuff - with your slow brain. Thanks for that.
