Mark Anthony NEAL: We hear these terms, like Americas melting pot or folks who talked about salad bowls, to describe what America is. We owe much of our freedom to that influence. Thats my idea. This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. 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. Like, you saw in the U.S. trying to locate Covid in sewage. (but low on "uncertainty avoidance," if that makes you feel better) And I shifted from pre-med into what turned into a career of cross-cultural psychology. We bring in neuroscience to understand all things cultural. This carries over into many areas of society, including the labor market. It is that the wealth comes first, and the individualism follows. Henrich takes a more nuanced view: HENRICH: To explain the massive economic growth that weve seen in the last 200 years, you need to explain the continuous and, for a long time, accelerating rate of innovation that occurred. DUBNER: Where is the loosest place in America? Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda,Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski,Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. 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. And for me, its hard to divorce the toxicity of the grind from the toxicity of masculinity, when you always have to dominate. Self-centered so if you give them tasks and have them list traits about themselves, theyll tend to list their attributes and characteristics rather than their relationships. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. Whereas we usually describe a scent by saying something that it smells like.. Innovation requires coming up with a lot of ideas. Its like, Oh, my gosh, that is so amazing. I was feeling like I have to tell that to my kids as a good parent, training my kids to be vertical and individualistic. Freakonomics Quotes. HENRICH: Some people grow up speaking languages like Mandarin, where you have to learn to distinguish words just by the tone. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is . Q uite soon after the Freakonomics guys, Stephen J Dubner and Steven D Levitt, walk into their office on New York's Upper West Side for our interview, the scene resolves itself into the kind of . That is something that fundamentally many whites dont understand, right? Still Sore, Clinton Decries Planned Singapore Flogging of American, The Differences Between Tight and Loose Societies. But when you use data to measure the specific dimensions of a given culture, and compare them to other countries, you see some stark differences. If youre violating the social order, youre going to be punished.. And heres one of the people who created the WEIRD designation. And it should stay there. Heres how it works. (This is part of theFreakonomics RadioAmerican Culture series). Follow. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. Lets flip it for a moment. (This is part of the, competition amongst religious organizations. The answer to that is usually: no, you cant. But first, Hofstede had to make sure that the differences he was seeing in the data werent specific to I.B.M. It's part of our founding D.N.A. And: In present-day Scandinavia levels of individualism would thus have been significantly higher had emigration not occurred.. 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. I was on the phone with my dad, and I said, You know, its really crazy, all the differences between the U.K. and the U.S.. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism av Freakonomics Radio direkt i din mobil, surfplatta eller webblsare - utan app. If you dont feel that, then you will be an unhappy person. This failure leads to confusion at the very least, but quite possibly deeper misunderstandings, perhaps all the way up to hatred and violent conflict. And then theres the big C, the stuff that we have these big conversations about, that we do these incredible studies about, which is really about the worldview of groups of people coming together, in a community, in a nation, in a family, right? And democratic. The five loosest countries according to this analysis were Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, and the Netherlands. . Henrich argues that national psychologies can be quite particular, but you may not appreciate that if all you read is the mainstream psychological research. 1, the most individualistic country in the world, 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede scale of individualism. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as supremely WEIRD) as America? We may not be the very loosest culture; but we are No. GELFAND: Like during 9/11, during World Wars, we see increases in tightness. I know that wasnt your intention. Michele Gelfand is one of the premier practitioners of cross-cultural psychology. Both are long-term oriented, so they see a lot of context around things. Hannah GADSBY: Have you ever noticed how Americans are not stupid? Gert Jan Hofstede - Freakonomics. More information on phishing. I mean, youve got your quota, as have we all, but youre not. It means I did it my way.. That, again, is Mark Anthony Neal, from Duke. HOFSTEDE: High individualism is correlated with trying new stuff. And this paper was basically sitting in the shelves of libraries for many years. Now, California is a real interesting exception because it has a lot of threat. So how much would you offer? GELFAND: Groups that are of lower status tend to live in tighter worlds. HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., individualism coupled with masculinity creates a society where if youre not a winner, youre a loser. You Arent Alone as Most Cats and Dogs in the U.S. are Overweight, The Loosening of American Culture Over 200 Years is Associated With a CreativityOrder Trade-Off, Speaking a Tone Language Enhances Musical Pitch Perception in 35-Year-Olds, TightnessLooseness Across the 50 United States, The Mller-Lyer Illusion in a Computational Model of Biological Object Recognition, Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types, Egypt: Crime Soars 200 Per Cent Since Hosni Mubarak Was Ousted, Status and the Evaluation of Workplace Deviance. Equating individualism with selfishness may be a mistake: Some of the world's wealthiest and most individualistic countries are some of the most altruistic, says 13.7 guest commentator Abigail Marsh. (Ep. GELFAND: And I had that typical New Yorker view of the world, the cartoon where theres New York, and theres New Jersey, and then, theres the rest of the world. There, its really important to maintain that humility, to be focused on your privacy, but not trying to one-up other people. This man has proof of our individualism. To become American and to be American is to be individual. HOFSTEDE: Because its true: the very same dimensions under different circumstances, can work the other way. HOFSTEDE: But it turned out that lumping them by nationality was the best thing to do. And this dynamic leads to a lot of fighting for the sake of fighting. Like, you can buy them on the internet. In a multitude of ways, large and small. And so you walk faster because you cant get everything you need done in your day and youre always trying to get to the next event. And we manipulated whether their names were like Jamal or Latisha versus Brad and Lorna. My husband is an attorney. Steven D Levitt. But a lot of the world is much more like a family. You want to know where you stand which is, for instance, what diplomats know very well. HENRICH: This cashes out in an ability to make better abstract or absolute judgment. There is some overlap between these six dimensions and some of the ideas we talked about in last weeks episode particularly the notion that some national cultures tend to be tight and others loose. Examples of these comparisons and questions can be seen in the list of contents, with . As for the U.S., Gelfand says the U.S. is not only loose but getting progressively looser. Gelfand wanted to learn where theyd get the most help. HENRICH: Because Americans and Westerners more generally are psychologically unusual from a global perspective. Hofstede analyzed these data at what he called the ecological level. He explained this approach in a paper called Flowers, Bouquets, and Gardens the idea being that an individual flower is a subset of a mixed bouquet, which in turn is a subset of an entire garden, which has even more variation. 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. In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. And they were finding that people in Africa were not falling victim to this illusion. HOFSTEDE: In an individualistic society, a person is like an atom in a gas. GELFAND: They were trained to ask for help in city streets and in stores. Subtitles in: English Portugus Espaol Italiano Romn Polski Slovenina Freakonomics: The Movie is a 2010 American documentary film based on the book Freakonomics by economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner. In one experiment, Gelfand sent a bunch of research assistants to different places around the world. The Hofstede scale puts the U.S. at 62 out of 100 on masculinity relatively high but substantially less masculine than China, Mexico, and much of Eastern Europe. BROADCASTER: On the third trial, something happens. HOFSTEDE: They will look at them if they admire them, but they will look away if theyre afraid. Individualistic countries tend to be richer, but as Hofstede the Elder once put it, The order of logic is not that individualism comes first. the Machiguenga were much closer to the predictions of Homo economicus, The Relationship Between Cultural TightnessLooseness and COVID-19 Cases and Deaths: A Global Analysis, States of Emergency: The Most Disaster-Prone States in the US, A Global Analysis of Cultural Tightness in Non-Industrial Societies, Have You Tried to Help Your Pet Lose Weight? You can never admit weakness or failure. That, again, is Gert Jan Hofstede. 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