Rule Makers, Rule Breakers; Tight And Loose Cultures w/ Michele Gelfand

Hello, everybody! This Monday, I am releasing an interview with Dr. Michele Gelfand. She is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture--as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, among other outlets. She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018).

In this episode, we focus on some of the main topics of Dr. Gelfand’s book, Rule Markers, Rule Breakers. Dr. Gelfand gives us a definition of tight and loose culture, and then we explore the several different aspects that go associated with the tightness-looseness continuum. We explore its relationship with other ways of approaching culture, like the individualism-collectivism continuum, and if there is any relationship with the Big Five personality traits. We also refer to the divide in the US between the northern and the southern states. We talk about how normative behavior arises in early stages of development in children. Toward the end, we discuss the relationship between tightness and looseness and some health outcomes, and how we can use this framework to potentially solve some relevant contemporary issues, like political polarization. 

https://youtu.be/oLC3KhYDsLg

Link to podcast version (Anchor): http://bit.ly/2jR06xQ