We've all heard about
the importance of IQ in our
interactions.
And some of us have even heard
about EQ, emotional intelligence in
our interactions.
But have you heard of CQ,
cultural intelligence?
Today, I am excited to explore
how culture influences
our communication.
[MUSIC]
I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach
Strategic Communication at Stanford
Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast,
Talk Smart: The Podcast.
I am really excited
to chat with Michele Gelfand.
Michele is the John H Sculley
professor in Cross Cultural
Management and a professor of
Organizational Behavior.
She uses field
experimental computational and
neuroscience methods to understand
cross cultural organizational
behavior, negotiation, conflict and
diversity.
Michele is the author of Rule
Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight
and Loose Cultures Wire the World.
Welcome, Michele.
>> It's great to be here, Matt.
>> Thanks for being here, and a big
congratulations to you on your
induction to The National Academies
of Science, that's so exciting.
>> Thank you.
>> You are known for many things,
but perhaps the idea most
associated with you and
your work is the idea of tight and
loose cultures.
I'd love to have you define what
you mean by those two concepts, and
perhaps explain how the Muppets
fit into all of this.
>> [LAUGH] Yeah, so
I'm a cross cultural psychologist,
and I study culture,
which is really a puzzle.
It's omnipresent,
it's all around us, and it affects
us from the moment we wake up until
the time you go to sleep.
But we take it for granted, it's
like the two fish swimming around,
and they pass by another fish who
says, hey boys, how's the water?
>> [LAUGH] >> And
they swim past them, and they say,
what's water?
And that story indicates something
really profound,
which is that sometimes
the most important realities around
us are the most difficult to
appreciate or recognize.
And for fish, that's water.
But for humans, that's culture.
So I try to understand the deeper
cultural codes that
drive our behavior.
And I focus on social norms.
And these are basically unwritten
rules for behavior that sometimes
get more formalized in terms of
codes and laws.
And in particular,
how strictly people follow social
norms has been my focus.
The idea is that all cultures have
social norms.
We drive on one side of the street
versus both sides of the street.
We don't steal people's food in
restaurants or
start singing in libraries.
Most of us don't do that,
because these are things that
help us coordinate our behavior.
They're the glue that keeps
us together.
But some cultures have strict
social norms,
we call them tight cultures.
Other cultures have looser
social norms, where there's
more permissibility of behavior.
And so we try to really quantify
how tight or loose are cultures
around the world, not just nations.
But then we can zoom in and
look at states in the US, or
provinces in China.
We can look even beyond that
in terms of organizations,
how strict or permissive tight or
loose they are.
We can even look into our own
mindsets.
We can classify people in terms of
whether they're an order Muppet,
like Bert, or
whether they're a chaos Muppet,
like Ernie, or like Cookie Monster.
And the idea is that we all
are socialized to certain mindsets,
whether tight or loose, and
it's important understand why
these codes develop.
Why do they evolve in
the first place?
What trade-off do they provide for
people, for organizations, for
nations?
That's what really we try to do in
cross cultural psychology, is try
to understand these cultural codes,
quantify them,
study them all around the world.
>> It's totally fascinating.
I'm channeling my inner Elmo as I'm
talking to you.
We had Phil Zimbardo on a while
ago, and
Phil was a mentor of mine when I
was a student here at Stanford.
And we talked about norms, and
the influence of how they can
impact our activities and actions,
and it sounds like you're diving
very deep into that.
I'm curious, is there an advantage
to having a tight or loose culture?
Is one better than the other?
>> Yeah, this is such
a great question.
And we published a paper some years
ago in Science where we asked
people all around the world about
the level of norm strength in
their countries.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And places like Singapore and
Japan, China, Austria, Germany,
they tended to lean tighter.
Even though all tight cultures have
loose elements and all loose
cultures have tight elements,
they veered tight.
Cultures like Brazil, Greece,
the Netherlands, the US,
they tended to veer looser.
Again, even though all cultures
have both elements.
And what we found is in general,
tight cultures have a lot of order.
They have less crime, they have
more monitoring in terms of police
per capita, security cameras.
They also have more synchrony.
So they have people who are wearing
more similar clothing or driving
more similar cars, more uniformity.
Even city clock in streets have
more synchrony in tight cultures.
We actually measured this.
We looked at how aligned
are clocks in city streets.
And actually, in tight cultures,
they're off by milliseconds.
And in loose cultures, you're not
totally sure what time it is.
The clocks are not synchronized.
>> Right. >> And also,
tight cultures have a lot of order
when it comes to self-control.
So if you live in a culture where
there is a lot of social order and
uniformity, you learn to manage
your impulses from
a very early age.
And that has its downstream effects
on things like lower debt in tight
culture, lower obesity, and
lower alcoholism, and drug abuse.
So tight cultures corner
the market on order.
And loose culture struggle
with order.
They have more crime, less
monitoring, less synchrony, like
the clock example, and they have
a host of self-regulation problems.
Even, by the way,
animals like pets tend to be
fatter in loose cultures [LAUGH].
But loose cultures corner
the market on openness.
They have more tolerance of
people from different races,
religions, creeds.
We actually even sent out our
research assistants to do
in a field experiment outside in
their home countries,
where I dress them up with either
facial warts that I bought for
them on the Internet- >> Okay,
like Halloween sort of- >> Yeah,
we kind of put lots of warts on
their faces.
In another condition,
they were wearing eye tattoos, and
nose rings, and purple hair.
And then a third condition, they
were just wearing a normal face,
and we simply had them go ask for
directions in city streets, or
in stores in their home countries.
And what we found was fascinating
on this kind of openness issue.
We found that when people were just
wearing a normal face,
there was no cultural
differences in helping behavior.
But when they were wearing these
strange things on their face, or
tattoos and nose rings, they got
far more help in looser cultures.
So that's a indication of tolerance
out there in the wild.
We also know that loose cultures
corner the market on openness in
terms of creativity idea
generation.
There's been large scale studies of
creativity where people from loose
cultures are more likely to enter
those contests and
more likely to win.
And loose cultures tend
to be more adaptable.
When new norms enter
the population, they tend to sort
of take off more quickly.
So loose cultures corner
the market on openness, and tight
cultures struggle with openness.
So in that sense, it's a trade-off.
We can harness the power of social
norms to shift in either direction.
And I think that's really
an important part of the book and
our research, is how do you start
pivoting when you get too tight or
too loose?
How do you try to maximize order
and openness?
>> So the dialectic of order
versus openness,
I find really fascinating.
And I'm curious, for an individual,
is just recognizing it the first
step to being able to adjust and
adapt?
I live in a loose culture, and
I look at my own household where I
might have a more loose
attitude than, let's say, my wife.
Are those things that can be
changed over time?
>> The first thing I would say is
it's important to understand
one's own self.
And for that, you can go to my
website at michelegelfand.com and
take the tight loose mindset quiz.
This is actually based on data that
we published in Science.
And you can see where you score on
this continuum.
And I want to emphasize we can all
kind of switch codes quite easily.
When you go to a library, your
tight mindset kind of kicks in.
You kind of know this
is a tight context,
I can't start doing all sorts of
weird things- >> [LAUGH] Right.
>> Or in a classroom, for
the most part.
And then when we're in a party, or
in public parks,
we kind of become looser.
So it's amazing, actually, how much
we can really rapidly switch codes.
With that said,
we all have our own default in
the tight loose continuum based on
our own cultures,
our ethnicity, our race, gender,
our occupations and so forth.
>> Michele, before we go on,
I'd love to understand a little bit
about the evolution of tight and
loose cultures.
It has something to do with threat,
doesn't it?
>> Yeah, so what we wanted to
understand is why do tight and
loose cultures evolve the way
they do?
And what we found was really
interesting.
They didn't vary in terms of
their wealth like GDP.
So there's loose cultures that
are poor and rich, and tight
cultures that are poor and rich.
They're not different in terms of
religion or location.
But what we did find is that one
reliable predictor of tight loose
is the degree to which groups, or
individuals, or
nations have experienced a lot of
chronic threat.
Threat at the national level
can be either from Mother Nature,
think chronic natural disasters or
famine.
But it can also be based on
human threats.
Think about how many potential
times your nation's been invaded
over the last 100 years?
And we selected these nations based
on how much they varied on chronic
threat, as far back as 1500.
Cultures that have a lot of threat
need stricter rules to coordinate
in order to survive.
And loose cultures that
have experienced less threat can
afford to be more permissive.
Tight cultures across the board,
not all, but
many had much more threat.
And we validated this at the state
level in the US.
Tight states in the South and
the Midwest
tend to have more threats as well.
We can also see this with
an organizational context,
organizations that lean tight,
or in context where there's
a lot of safety issues,
coordination problems.
I want to say again, not all tight
cultures have threat, and not all
loose cultures are an easy street,
but it's really an important
principle that threat does seem to
cause the evolution of tightness.
>> So threat really underlies a lot
of that.
And it might be interesting to
analyze a lot of what we see in
terms of the impact of threat in
the history of threat within
organizations, relationships, etc.
Now, those who listen and
know that language is something
I've always found very fascinating.
I love the fact that you have
looked into language as well.
And in fact, you've
published a threat dictionary.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about, I've never seen
a threat dictionary before.
>> That's right, so this is a paper
we just published recently.
The idea is that
we're constantly being bombarded by
threatening information,
whether it's on social media,
in the newspaper, radio, newscasts,
hopefully not this podcast.
>> Hopefully not. >> We're talking
a lot about threat.
And it's something that it's really
affecting our brain circuitry, and
we wanted to develop methods to
track it in real time.
So we partnered with some
computational linguistic scholars,
along with psychologists like
myself, and developed
a new threat dictionary, that it's
developed based on big data.
We seeded outwards into different
platforms like Twitter, Wikipedia,
Common Crawl, and
we chose words that were coalescing
around each other
that were clustering together.
Things like attack and
crisis destroy fear, injury,
outbreak, unrest, these kinds of
words are really tapping into
the psychology of threat.
And what we wanted to do is then
track threat over time over
the last 100 years with newspapers.
So all the newspapers published in
the US, we tracked threat,
whether it's changing over time.
And we found, for example,
that during times of threat,
there were far more ethnocentric
types of attitudes and
other surveys against immigrants.
There was more rallying
around the flag,
around current US presidents, more
conservative shifts during threat.
We found that norms tended to
become tighter.
During times of threat in general,
people became more groupie,
more collectivistic.
We also found during times of
threat that economic activity
took a big toll in terms
of the stock market.
It's just a new dictionary that can
help us track threat and
understand its influence.
One other thing we found is that
threat talk is very contagious.
And so when you add a threat word
or two to a tweet, it really
increases its retweeting power.
And this does suggest that when we
have these tools, we can start
tracking in our own lives how much
threat am I being exposed to?
What other things does it predict?
Whether it's like how CEOs talk
about threat, how does that affect
how other competitors
see the company or customers?
It can be used to track
online radicalization.
A lot of times, people using threat
to tighten people,
elected leaders use threat and
manufacture threat, fake threat
that tightens people unnecessarily.
So there's ways that we can now
make this very powerful psychology
more visible, and more tangible,
and measurable in real time.
>> And it can also help all of us
reflect on the language that we use
and maybe become more personally
responsible for the way
in which we use certain words.
>> Yeah, that's right.
And on my website, the threat
dictionary is publicly available.
You can download it,
you can have your own feed.
What kind of threat talk do you
see in your feed?
But it will give you kind
of a breakdown of the words and so
forth..
>> So this might be one of those
things that can help break
those thought bubbles that people
talk about.
If we can see literally the types
of language that we're receiving
called out would be really
interesting.
I find that work fascinating,
the notion of a threat dictionary.
It used to be my teachers would
threaten that I'd have to go read
the dictionary if I did something
wrong, and now there's a threat
dictionary- >> [LAUGH] >> I'm
excited to read, so thank you.
I know Michele that you are very
interested and
passionate about justice and
diversity, equity, and inclusion.
What insights do you have based on
your research and other
things that you've done to help us
better understand the issues and
challenges and
perhaps do better in this space?
>> Yeah, the most recent work that
we're doing on this topic is
really around tight loose.
The idea is that research suggests
that women and minorities tend to
live in tighter worlds.
So that's to suggest that they
are being evaluated more harshly or
more strictly with consequences for
deviance that a majority high
powered groups don't have.
And we can see that.
We've done some studies,
for example,
in banks where we ask managers to
evaluate deviant behavior by just
switching the name Jamal, or
Leticia, or Brad, or Lauren.
And these are workplace deviant
types of questions around coming to
work late, or being on the phone,
or so forth, other things, or
even more major deviance.
And it was remarkable to see that
there was no in group effect.
It wasn't that women and minorities
were evaluating each other more
leniently for these behaviors.
They didn't actually differentiate
who was doing the behavior.
But white majorities tend to let
other majorities off the hook,
and they were much more harsh on
women and minorities.
So that suggests that we need to
start thinking about the world we
live in when it comes to
accountability.
And we're starting to do more work
on that in everyday life
through some experiential sampling
daily diary types of studies.
To understand the constraints
that women and minorities and
people from stigmatized identities
have to experience.
>> It seems to me
that people who are stigmatized and
coming from a represented minority
are under threat much more.
>> Yeah, I mean,
we're just doing a lot more work
now also in social class.
This is a kind of a hidden
dimension of diversity that we
don't study so much.
We're building on some really great
work in psychology on social
class that was looking at
collectivism and
how family oriented people are from
working class versus upper class.
But we can also look at this from
a tight loose lens.
And we can see that people who
are in the working class,
they have a lot more threat.
They have to worry
about falling into hard living.
They have to worry about crime in
their neighborhoods.
They have to worry
about occupational hazards in
the kind of jobs they have.
They tend to lean tighter.
You can think about all sorts of
mismatches when you have working
class kids going to predominantly
loose institutions like colleges.
>> You're right.
>> What happens with that mismatch?
We've been starting to study that,
and understanding that we need to
start thinking about
diversity in terms of these
underlying dimensions of culture.
>> Interesting, that's fascinating,
the notion of class and
how it fits in.
Before we end,
I love to ask you the same three
questions I ask everyone.
Are you up for that?
>> Yeah, sure.
>> Excellent, question number one,
if you were to capture the best
communication advice you've ever
received as a five to seven word
presentation slide title,
what would that be?
>> I think one of the things is
really important is to know your
audience.
Being passionate and
charismatic kind of empowering I
think is really important, but also
being super clear and so forth.
I think it's really
important to make your
audience feel like they're
the only person in the room.
You're just laser focused
on a person.
That requires a lot
of listening skills.
It requires
also just pure attention.
>> I just want everybody to notice
that I gave a very tight
restriction, and you blew away with
a very open response.
So many things you said are really
important, knowing your audience,
really helping give content
that's relevant to them.
The notion of making the person
feel like they're the only person
in the room is really powerful.
I'm curious for question number
two, who is a communicator
that you admire and why?
>> Here I am being loose again,
I have two answers [LAUGH].
>> Two answers, all right.
>> One is Harry Triandis.
I mean, he was just someone who was
so brilliant in his breadth of
knowledge.
But he was not someone who took
himself so seriously,
he was very humble.
So much putting himself at
the level of his audience, and
I really admire that.
I was going to nominate
Thomas Friedman, The New York Times
journalist for that too.
I have breakfast with him
every so often.
And we did a joint book talk when
my book came out, and he's also
someone who really listens so well.
And he's so passionate and so
learning oriented, that he just
wants to hear your perspective.
And he's also brilliant and has so
much knowledge.
So when we meet for
breakfast, we're both
taking notes frantically.
And I really admire how he operates
and learns about the world through
communication and listening.
>> I hate to give you a constraint
on this third question, but
what are the first three
ingredients that go into
a successful communication recipe?
>> Audience, passion, humility.
>> Audience, passion and humility.
We've heard the first two before.
Talk to me a little bit about
humility.
Why is that so important to you?
>> I think that people are much
more likely to listen to you and
understand you when you treat them
with respect.
And when you don't take yourself
too seriously, that helps people
to feel seen and understood.
And that's going to open their
minds more to what you have to say.
>> Thank you, and thank you for
being here today.
That idea of opening minds
to what you have to say,
you've certainly done that for
us in a very non-threatening way,
so thank you for that.
And you make something that's so
important and serious very applied.
You give us very specific
techniques, and I for
one am going to relook at how I
interact with others, so thank you.
>> Thank you for having me.
[MUSIC]
>> You've been listening to Think
Fast, Talk Smart: The Podcast,
a production of Stanford Graduate
School of Business.
This episode was produced by
Michael Riley, Jenny Luna, and me,
Matt Abrahams.
Find more resources and join our
conversation on LinkedIn by
searching Think Fast, Talk Smart.
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