HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., individualism coupled with masculinity creates a society where if youre not a winner, youre a loser. Let me give a little background. HENRICH: Im Joe Henrich. A recent paper by a Harvard postdoc named Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen analyzed Scandinavian emigration from 1850 to 1920, when roughly 25 percent of the Scandinavian population left their countries, a great many coming to the U.S. People of an individualistic mindset were more prone to migrate than their collectivistic neighbors, she writes. 1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Freakonomics. It shouldnt surprise anyone that individualism might contribute to inequality or at least, as Henrich puts it, the justification of inequality. Why not? HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. Then you can have something very good happening. Culturally maybe more than anything! But that makes sense. Based on the bestselling book of the same name, FREAKONOMICS attempts to break down dense economic theories and data into digestible bits. 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 you feel better). GELFAND: This has always been the big question, the myth that with the internet and globalization were going to become more similar. In other places they dont think its a smart idea to be consistent. You could argue that treating your own children as if theyre special may make it harder to care as much about other peoples children. And you know who else had that skill set? She did want to measure culture, and how it differs from place to place. When theyre by themselves, the vast majority of people who do this experiment get the right answer, like in this archival tape of an Asch conformity test. My husband is an attorney. Joe Henrichs research into national psychologies led him to an even more fascinating conclusion. Here are some things that tend to thrive in highly individual societies: human rights, a free press, divorce, and a faster pace of life. These attacks continue as I speak. Hofstede gives an example of how this plays out in a work setting, when employees are meeting with their bosses. So that can be very beneficial. HENRICH: And Americans have this probably worse than anybody. Tight cultures, she writes, are usually found in South and East Asia, the Middle East, and in European countries of Nordic and Germanic origin.. That was our hypothesis, at least. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. HENRICH: It chafes us when we get ordered around. And thats because the vast majority of the research subjects are WEIRD. The fifth cultural dimension is one that I think will resonate with everyone whos ever listened to Freakonomics Radio, since it is at the crux of problem-solving. Michele GELFAND: The people that came to New York early on, they were from all sorts of different cultural backgrounds, and thats helped produce the looseness that exists to this day. GELFAND: Its like that story of two fish where theyre swimming along. DUBNER: What does an institution like the Navy see as the upsides of more looseness? In a future episode, well look at why the U.S., for all its wealth, has such a high rate of child poverty, and whats being done to address that. 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. It means you really want to know and youre not satisfied until you know. You could ask people, What do you like to eat? The more collectivistic they are, the more likely they are to talk about their grandmother and what she made, and theyre less likely to start entirely on their own diet. Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda, Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski, Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. You can even see the evidence in the clocks that appear on city streets. Read the following excerpt from Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics. BUSH: Allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. So he read about factor analysis, which had become a little bit fashionable at the time. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. This suggests that looseness and tightness can co-exist. Long Island, New York, is thebirthplace of the American suburb. The final dimension on the Hofstede model is called indulgence versus restraint. Good on you, I say. HENRICH: This probably wouldnt be in a psych textbook, but something like the Ultimatum game. So, organizations you can think about them as the people, the practices, and the leaders. That is one of the main guests in todays episode. Okay, you get the gist, right? This is the dimension based on data from the World Values Survey. And this dynamic leads to a lot of fighting for the sake of fighting. High religiosity coupled with high individualism reveals another feature of American culture. Relatedly: Americans place a high value on being consistent across different situations. Like, you saw in the U.S. trying to locate Covid in sewage. 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 . Insight, for the authors (economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner) is all about explaining behaviour in terms of the incentives and dis-incentives (rewards and penalties) that drive it. But its not only compliance. And they often dont even realize theyre being acted upon. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. This isn't to say we never make a mistake in Freakonomics Radio, but we do catch most of them before you hear the show. And I was like, This is every day in America! But one has arrows going out and one in? Not just regular weird. Freakonomics is therefore NOT the book that I would recommend to anyone interested in (a) learning economic theory, (b) learning about how economists think, or (c) understanding the world or thinking of ways to improve it. Like, you can buy them on the internet. The average U.S. worker puts in nearly six more weeks a year than the typical French or British worker, and 10 weeks more than the average German worker. But it can make life harder for the millions of Americans who arent so entrepreneurial, or rugged, or individualistic. HOFSTEDE: My name is Gert Jan Hofstede. But Im Dutch, of course. We will leave you with a patriotic tribute from one last transplanted U.S. comedian. 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 also realize that were a culture in distress in many, many, many ways. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. 470. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". DUBNER: You sound very grateful that you were not born an American. Twenty states rewarded individual schools for good test scores or dramatic improvement; thirty-two states sanctioned the schools that didn't do well. GELFAND: Sometimes people actually revert back into their cultural chambers. But thats only the first study. Its very, very hard to do. But the big C in my mind is very different than the little c.. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. If youre a constrained sort of person, you wont go far in the U.S. Stephen DUBNER: Im curious whether youve ever been accused of political incorrectness in your study of national cultures. People in the less-literate society, meanwhile, would have better facial-recognition skills. Theyre able to make finer distinctions in terms of their olfaction. Those are the upsides. - Lyssna p 470. The American model is among the most successful and envied models in the history of the world. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as supremely WEIRD) as America? We look at how these traits affect . HOFSTEDE: Okay, well, dont. Henrich has also observed this about Americans. If you no longer even pretend to be one people and to be fair to all the citizens of your country, then youre not going down a road that leads to a great future. But Im Dutch, of course. This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: None of it is intentional. Our theme song is Mr. HOFSTEDE: If I had been born in America, I would have liked it, probably, because I would have been used to it. Theyre really hard-working. HOFSTEDE: You are on the masculine side not at the very end, but more on the masculine side. Which is probably why we dont hear all that much about the science of culture. 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 you feel better). I do this for you and you do this for me. Folks who come from a collective standpoint where, I do this for you, but youre doing this for us thats a very, very different way of seeing the world. Our staff also includesAlison Craiglow,Greg Rippin,Joel Meyer,Tricia Bobeda,Mary Diduch, Zack Lapinski,Emma Tyrrell, Lyric Bowditch, Jasmin Klinger,andJacob Clemente. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. So uncertainty avoidance is the intolerance of ambiguity. Individualism is thought to be on the rise in Western countries, but new research suggests that increasing individualism may actually be a global phenomenon. So that leads to justifying more inequality. But if you look 100 years ago and you look at the cultural map of the world, you can read writers from different countries, you will see that there is astonishing continuity. data, gathered in the late 60s and early 70s. Were trying to buy time, save time. GELFAND: Like during 9/11, during World Wars, we see increases in tightness. Innovation requires coming up with a lot of ideas. Thats John Oliver. What we saw in Egypt was very similar. 47 min. But Gelfand saw an even bigger question: How can you understand culture if you dont know exactly what it is? GELFAND: We have a whole new map of the U.S. where we can actually rank-order the U.S. 50 states in terms of how much threat they have. 470 Replay) Freakonomics Radio | Freakonomics Radio Publicit Annonce - 0 s 00:00 00:00 Suivant | propos Voir la description Freakonomics Radio. If basic things like visual illusions are not universal, what about other phenomena? The notion of the American Dream has long been that prosperity is just sitting out there, waiting for anyone to grab itas long as youre willing to work hard enough. Singapore, for instance. When they took out Mubarak, this went the opposite extreme to almost anomie, normlessness. And then in a third condition they were wearing just their face. Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . Hence the term, the changing same. I think there are historical moments that are transcendent. In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. We bring in neuroscience to understand all things cultural. His ideas, along with others, are credited with . Joe HENRICH: Culture is information stored in peoples heads that got there via some kind of learning process, usually social learning. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism. In an individualistic society, depending on how the mood is, you can get very different developments. It was freedom from hunger. Also, he uses some very bold examples (crime rates versus abortion, drug dealership, cheating teachers, etc) to make some very simple . Why arent all national cultures converging by now? His late father was a social psychologist who devised a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism versus collectivism. Neal is a professor of African and African-American studies. He would spend the rest of his life building out the 6-Dimension Model of National Culture. Thats my idea. GELFAND: Well, it requires a lot of negotiation. So why did someone succeed? And life is an adventure. Scholars in this realm have a general agreement on what culture is and what its not. GELFAND: The U.S. is one of the most creative places on the planet. The U.S. is overall relatively loose. This does not mean that no one in a loose culture, like the U.S., is stigmatized or mistreated. And we found that people from minority or even women backgrounds were seen as violating something more severely and were subject to higher punishment without even people realizing this. 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. One thing that I think that Americans are more extreme than other Western countries and certainly elsewhere in the world is attributing individual success to the internal traits of the actor. How does the U.S. do on this dimension? And I could see there, a little bit similarly to the U.S., how the various ethnicities are trying to live together. By this time, Hofstede the Elder had already gotten a Ph.D. in social science. Heres one of the questions they asked. So I would be very interested in knowing whether theres any data on the ethnic component of homicide and suicide. Just like good science, good . Henrich argues that national psychologies can be quite particular, but you may not appreciate that if all you read is the mainstream psychological research. The next dimension is what the Hofstedes call uncertainty avoidance.. Open Document. GELFAND: They talk about individualistic accomplishments. All that it takes is to get out of their cages of bickering and anxiety. Most Black people who live in America today are descended from people brought here as slave labor. We need to change our practices. 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. 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. And if you get crumbs in your pajamas, theyll make you itch. By the way, Gelfand doesnt really take a position on whether loose or tight is superior. Macroeconomics, on the other hand, works on a larger scale. The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism av Freakonomics Radio direkt i din mobil, surfplatta eller webblsare - utan app. Still, Gelfands horizons were suddenly expanded; and her curiosity was triggered. Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. This feeds back into what Michele Gelfand was talking about earlier, in the context of geopolitical negotiations. Controlling for a variety of other factors, they found that looser countries the U.S., Brazil, Italy, and Spain have had roughly five times the number of Covid cases and nearly nine times as many deaths as tighter countries. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. 1, the most individualistic country in the world, 91 out of 100 on the Hofstede scale of individualism. Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is the book for readers who run screaming at the thought of cracking open a book with the word "economics" in the title. 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