This is part of the history that made the U.S. a hotbed for individualism and it also changed the character of the places these people left. But heres the thing about culture: it can be really hard to measure. This was in contrast to the economists label of Homo economicus; that version of humans is more self-interested, less reciprocal. Kumail NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism (Ep. This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. GELFAND: My own sweet Portuguese water dog, Pepper, I mean, that dog is just gigantic. So keep your ears open for all that. So that leads to justifying more inequality. It always was unsustainable, but was made even more acute to us. DUBNER: What does an institution like the Navy see as the upsides of more looseness? Individualism encompasses a value system, a theory of human nature, and a belief in certain political, economic, social, and religious arrangements. And other cultures are more loose. When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness. Meaning, if you grew up in someplace like the U.S., when you look at an image youre more likely to pay attention to whats in the foreground, in the center. Thats my idea. And I could see there, a little bit similarly to the U.S., how the various ethnicities are trying to live together. GELFAND: Weve had our share of threat, but just not chronic threat. Part of it is that when you live in a world that has carpented environments like right angles, where we live in houses in the States makes us focus on those right angles. In restrained societies, people tend to suppress bodily gratification, and birth rates are often lower; theres also less interest in things like foreign films and music. 470 Replay) Freakonomics Radio Documentary 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 . The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. So Hofstede the Elder began to amass a huge data set about the workplace experiences and preferences of tens of thousands of I.B.M. When Hofstede the Elder went to work for I.B.M., he got involved with these surveys. NEAL: We realized that the grind is unsustainable. 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. HENRICH: Two players divide a sum of money. Those should be the new words to your national anthem. BROADCASTER: On the third trial, something happens. Can that possibly be trueour culture shapes our genetics? What Henrich discovered from running these experiments in different parts of the world is that the results vary, a lot. At the time, opinion surveys were relatively new; it was especially unusual for a company to survey its own employees. You can never admit weakness or failure. We can think about extraordinarily loose contexts like Tesla or Uber that probably need a little more structure. I hate to call out Michele Gelfand, but even in the loosest of cultures, dogs dont have unfettered access to food. If . All that it takes is to get out of their cages of bickering and anxiety. We are acronymically WEIRD. DUBNER: So weve done a pretty good job of beating up on the U.S. thus far. Like, the military should be tighter than tech. GELFAND: This has always been the big question, that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. And so often, theyll just point at some other country on the map. HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. I have a professorship in Joburg in South Africa, too. The reason we reached out to Michele Gelfand is that I want to understand this stuff better, too. Still, Gelfands horizons were suddenly expanded; and her curiosity was triggered. She grew up in Tasmania. This would never happen in a society of large power distance. The Ultimatum game is famous among social scientists. Im a professor of artificial sociality at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Oh say, can you see, the home run I just hit. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. So, lets try to measure this., Gelfand and several colleagues undertook a massive research project, interviewing some 7,000 people from 33 countries on five continents. If you wanted to reduce this to a slogan of Americanism, it might be something like: I am me, deal with it. This fits quite snugly with the fact that the U.S. has been found to be the most individualistic culture in the world. The final dimension on the Hofstede model is called indulgence versus restraint. Groups that tend to have threat tend to develop stricter rules to coordinate. So, organizations you can think about them as the people, the practices, and the leaders. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism av Freakonomics Radio direkt i din mobil, surfplatta eller webblsare - utan app. DUBNER: When youre inclined to look at the U.S. in a positive light, do you find uncertainty avoidance to be largely a force for the good in terms of creating and building a strong society, or do you think its more ? 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. HENRICH: So Americans tend to be more work-obsessed than other people. SFU will never request our users provide or confirm their Computing ID or password via email or by going to any web site. So the picture that emerges from these findings is that Americans are less likely to conform in the name of social harmony; and we also treasure being consistent, expressing our true selves, regardless of the context. The next dimension is what the Hofstedes call uncertainty avoidance.. This does not mean that no one in a loose culture, like the U.S., is stigmatized or mistreated. And they pass another fish, who says, Hey, boys, hows the water? And theyre like, What the heck is water?. The fifth dimension in the Hofstede universe came in the early 1980s, in collaboration with a Canadian social psychologist named Michael Bond, who was working in Hong Kong. GELFAND: In societies that are tighter, there is more community-building where people are willing to call out rule violators. NEAL: Were a country that presumes male leadership. 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. 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. Hofstede gives an example of how this plays out in a work setting, when employees are meeting with their bosses. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. Scholars in this realm have a general agreement on what culture is and what its not. The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. And not attending enough to contextual factorsopportunities that presented themselves, being in the right place at the right time. Twenty states rewarded individual schools for good test scores or dramatic improvement; thirty-two states sanctioned the schools that didn't do well. His ideas, along with others, are credited with . 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. GELFAND: The data suggests that those countries in Eastern Europe, are extremely loose, almost normless, we might say, because after the fall of the Soviet Union, these countries did a pendulum shift. After all, they were the data set. So uncertainty avoidance is the intolerance of ambiguity. HOFSTEDE: He did social psychological work on what it is to be a manager. The lawyer and journalist Dahlia Lithwick once argued that every living human can be classified according to one simple metric: Every one of us is either a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet. Essentially: loose, or tight. The spirit of competition of what Michele Gelfand calls vertical individualism seems to permeate every corner of American society. Even Gert Jan Hofstede suggests that his model shouldnt be seen as overly deterministic. And thats going to cultivate certain tonal abilities, which could feed into certain kinds of music, and things like that. 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. International, and they were just starting international opinion surveys. And he tried all kinds of categories and groups. Also, he uses some very bold examples (crime rates versus abortion, drug dealership, cheating teachers, etc) to make some very simple . You can followFreakonomics RadioonApple Podcasts,Spotify,Stitcher, orwherever you get your podcasts. GELFAND: Classic things like the Mller-Lyer Illusion, which is these two lines where one looks longer than the other. And there are other inconsistencies, especially in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. For instance, where you live. FREAKONOMICS is the highly anticipated film version of the phenomenally bestselling book about incentives-based thinking by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.. Between 1967 and 1973, he collected data on I.B.M. So after we ran that first project, we redid the entire project, and we took concerns like the one Francisco had. He grew up in England. Freakonomics the film, like the book, is entertaining and sometimes thought-provoking. And it got the attention of President Clinton: Bill CLINTON: Its the first Ive heard of it, Ill look into it. It shouldnt surprise anyone that individualism might contribute to inequality or at least, as Henrich puts it, the justification of inequality. Some researchers looked at these results and came up with a new label for humans in this context: Homo reciprocans. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. I came back to Colgate. As we heard, the first four dimensions originated with the I.B.M. GELFAND: And that suggests that minorities, women, people of different sexual orientation, when they violate the same rule, might be held to higher accountability, to more strict punishment. DUBNER: But that the research subjects, they gave him a lot back and they thought it was going to him. The cross-cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has been telling us about loose and tight cultures around the world. This suggests that every time a social scientist runs an experiment whose research subjects are WEIRD thats capital-letter WEIRD the results of that experiment may be meaningful in the U.S. and some other places, but quite likely not in others. "The conventional wisdom is often wrong.". Download Print. We should be nice to one another. But when push comes to shove, most of the time it doesnt go that way. And this dynamic leads to a lot of fighting for the sake of fighting. Well call it The U.S. Is Very Different from Other Countries So Lets Stop Pretending Its Not. Its the first in a series of episodes where well look at different pieces of that difference. HOFSTEDE: Well, if you want an honest answer, I think mainly our own curiosity. Here are some things that tend to thrive in highly individual societies: human rights, a free press, divorce, and a faster pace of life. So, today on Freakonomics Radio: can we really build a model that explains why the American psyche is so unusual? NEAL: I often think about how the U.S. has historically thought about freedom and how, say, the Soviet bloc had talked about freedom. Michele Gelfand again: GELFAND: De Tocqueville noticed this about Americans, that we are a time is money country. Well go through the other five dimensions, much faster, I promise. I dont want to be a doom thinker. And it should stay there. Because remember, threat is what can drive tightness. HOFSTEDE: This is a very American question, Stephen. We put in a bunch of other checks and controls. Henrich says yes. In the U.S., it was freedom to do whatever the hell that you wanted to. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. Why the business school? This is the flip side of the idea we started out with in this episode that is, why its hard for the U.S. to simply import successful policies from elsewhere. We often look to other countries for smart policies on education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. Apparently over 50 percent of cats and dogs in the U.S. are obese. But if you want to talk about humans, Homo sapiens, then you have a generalization problem. They made sure to include a variety of ages, occupations, religions, social and economic classes. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism: With Stephen Dubner. Its also important to recognize that even though were really connected, still people are largely in their echo chambers, interacting with people who they know. It also is related to obesity. You realize, you want a black or white value judgment. HOFSTEDE: And it immediately yielded a four-dimensional model. GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. And in culture, uncertainty means not knowing the ritual, not knowing how status-worthy or blameworthy some action is. Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. Michael Fay wasnt a tourist; he was living in Singapore with his family, attending an American school. So I am actually optimistic. So, yeah, that is WEIRD. But, lets look at the pandemic from a different angle: which country produced the most effective Covid-19 vaccines? The United States, you may not be surprised to learn, is on the loose end of the spectrum although not in the top five. So if you only want to talk about American psychology, youre fine. Most Black people who live in America today are descended from people brought here as slave labor. We developed these linguistic dictionaries to analyze language reflective of tight and loose, in newspapers and books, tight words like restrain, comply, adhere, enforce, as compared to words like allow and leeway, flexibility, empower. The converse, which is what Anglo societies are high on, means you dont care about ambiguity. The individual agents/brokers only take a $150 hit after their costs/fees. NEAL: So its always evolving, its always developing, but theres some core principles. He would spend the rest of his life building out the 6-Dimension Model of National Culture. The third measures masculinity versus femininity in a given culture. Is that the case? The Coronavirus Shutdown Is Revealing Americas Troubling Obsession With Work, Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change During the Age of Mass Migration, A Rising Share of the U.S. Black Population Is Foreign Born, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Indulgence versus Restraint, 10 Minutes withGeert Hofstede on Masculinity versus Femininity, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Individualisme versus Collectivisme, Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context, A Re-Inquiry of Hofstedes Cultural Dimensions: A Call for 21st Century Cross-Cultural Research, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Achievement Values: A Multimethod Examination of Denmark and the United States, Hofstedes Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith A Failure of Analysis. GELFAND: I grew up on Long Island. 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