Do you thrive in a tight or loose culture?

Stanford Professor and psychologist Michele Gelfand explains the difference between tight and loose cultures and why it matters.

On winter weekends, my family sometimes visits a nearby ski mountain (well, it’s more of a hill). And as I ride up the slow-moving lift, I occasionally pass the time by scanning the slopes below and counting how many skiers aren’t wearing helmets. First, I should say that almost everyone wears a helmet (as they should, given the safety benefits). But I’ve noticed a striking pattern: men are more likely than women to forgo this crucial piece of safety gear.

This observation is just one way of measuring who follows norms and who bucks them—a distinction that matters for a lot more than safety on the slopes. This month, I’m sharing fascinating research showing that our proclivity for rule- or norm-following isn’t just a function of gender (as I’ve observed on ski trips), but is highly determined by our environment. It varies massively across countries, across companies, and of course, across contexts (consider the differences in adherence to norms at funerals versus Halloween parties).

In the Q&A below, you’ll learn more about the distinctions between cultures that breed rule-followers and rule-breakers and why it matters.

But before we dive in, here are a few listens, views and reads I think you might enjoy…

This Month’s Recommended Listens, Views and Reads

• 15 Lessons Scientists Learned about Us When the World Stood Still: This fabulous New York Times piece shares discoveries made thanks to the abrupt shift in human behavior caused by the COVID pandemic, offering insights on everything from how sports fans influence home-team advantage to the dangers of high heels.

• Change with Maya Shankar: Cognitive scientist, host of the award-winning podcast A Slight Change of Plans, and founder of the first White House “Nudge Unit” (circa 2014), Maya Shankar has a new Substack newsletter that I’d encourage you to read.

• Gene Hackman on Mental Accounting: Actor Gene Hackman will be remembered for many legacies, but by behavioral economists, he will be best remembered for explaining mental accounting to Dustin Hoffman in this clip, which is a must see for behavioral science lovers everywhere.

• A New Season of Choiceology Launches with “A Numbers Game”: Psychologist Dr. Linda Chang explores quantification fixation in this episode, or our tendency to overvalue numerical metrics—like the price of a meal or a job candidate’s GPA—when making tradeoffs.

Q&A: Tight vs. Loose

In this Q&A from Choiceology, Stanford Professor and psychologist Michele Gelfand discusses her research on the differences between tight and loose cultures, tight and loose mindsets, and why these distinctions matter.

Me: Michele, can you first define tight and loose cultures?

Michele: All cultures have social norms—these unwritten rules of behavior that sometimes get formalized into codes and laws. We need social norms. Imagine a world where people are driving on either side of the street and not obeying stop signs. But, while all cultures have rules, some cultures really strictly abide by those rules—we call them tight cultures—and other cultures have a wider range of behavior that's seen as permissible.

Our research group has been trying to understand what causes the evolution of tight and loose cultures, and what the trade-offs are.

Me: I love this work, and I'm excited to get into some of the details. Could you give some examples of tight and loose cultures around the world?

Michele: You could think about Singapore as a tight culture. It's called "the Fine Country" because you can get a lot of fines for things like spitting or littering or even not flushing the toilet in public. And more of a loose culture might be New Zealand, where you might see people walking barefoot in banks or people driving with open bottles of alcohol. Zoom back and you see the contrast in ancient Athens versus Sparta. Or, think about the military versus Silicon Valley.

Me: How can you measure whether a culture is tight or loose?

Michele: In the first study that we did on this, we simply asked people to report on the strength of norms in their local context, in Germany or in the U.S. or New Zealand. And we could see that people really agreed on their perceptions of how strict or permissive in general their countries were. We can also ask more fine-grained questions like how appropriate are certain behaviors — like 15 behaviors across 15 situations? How appropriate is to argue in a bank or sleep in class?

Me: For the record, sleeping in class is not appropriate! I know we agree on that, Michele. But how does the tightness or a looseness of a culture predict the decisions people living in that culture will make?

Michele: In one of my favorite studies, they were looking at tightness and looseness and creativity. And particularly they were looking at these large crowdsourcing studies of creativity and who enters and wins these contests where you come up with creative ideas like a new mall idea in Egypt or innovating on instant coffee. And what they found was really interesting: in loose cultures, people are much more likely to enter and win those contests. And this is just one indication of the openness that goes along with looseness.

Loose cultures provide a great degree of openness, where people feel comfortable engaging in innovation and creativity and idea generation. Openness also comes with tolerance. We find in lots of studies that people in loose cultures are much more open-minded about living near different types of people—people from different races, religions, creeds.

Tight cultures really struggle with openness. They struggle with stigma. They struggle with creativity. But on the flip side, tight cultures corner the market on order. They have far more discipline. People have more self-control. There's less debt. There's less obesity. There's less alcoholism. There's more self-regulation in tighter cultures. So you can think about this as a trade-off between order and openness.

Me: It's interesting to point out those trade-offs and to think that, in some situations, we want both.

Michele: Yeah, we're thinking a lot about how you maximize both order and openness in any social system. And I think about it psychologically as trying to maximize both the empowerment that goes along with looseness and the accountability that goes along with tightness. We know that the more extreme either type of culture gets, the more dysfunctional they are, whether they're extremely tight or extremely loose.

Extremely loose cultures have massive coordination problems—a lot of chaos. And on the flip side, super tight cultures are very repressive. We have data to suggest that there's a relationship between tight-loose and well-being. And actually, I think it opens up this really exciting possibility of how you negotiate tight-loose in any social system.

I work with the Navy, for example, which clearly needs to veer tight. They have a lot of coordination needs. They have a lot of threat. But they want to insert some looseness into that system. Airlines, manufacturing companies, and hospitals I work with also really want to tweak that balance between having a lot of accountability but also some empowerment. And on the flip side, you can think about some places that are uber loose, like Silicon Valley. They need to insert some structure, some accountability. And of course, there's going to be resistance from either direction. When you're trying to loosen a tight culture, boy, there's a lot of resistance. You can’t introduce huge changes quickly.

On the flip side, when you're trying to tighten a loose culture, there's a lot of catastrophizing like, "Oh my gosh, we're going to lose all our autonomy," when in fact, we want what I call tight-loose ambidexterity. We invented social norms. We can harness the power of them when we need to change.

Me: You sent me a quiz that allows people to figure out what their own degree of tightness and looseness is, and I loved it. I was very intrigued to discover that—as a lifelong rule follower whose husband always says, "you know it's OK to break the rules"—I was very loose. Can you say a little bit more about individual tightness and looseness and what to make of it?

Michele: Sure. I'd like to first just mention that I don't like to call people tight or loose and equate that with nations. That's kind of an ecological fallacy. At the individual level we call this basically a tight or loose mindset. It's how much you're focused on following rules, like self-monitoring, managing impulses, liking a lot of structure. In looser cultures, people don't necessarily notice the rules as much. They're a little more impulsive, and they might be more tolerant of ambiguity. And these variables help people to fit in.

It's more generally what's your default? Are you an order Muppet or a chaos Muppet? A Bert or an Ernie? Of course, we can change it up depending on the context, so we all have our inner Ernie and our inner Bert. But we all have a default based on our own experiences, our upbringing, and so forth.

I lean moderately loose on my own quiz. My husband, Todd, leans relatively tight, and he's a lawyer. He has a lot of accountability. I have a lot of empowerment, some accountability, but we have different weights of those in our jobs. And we also try to be mindful of, "OK, why do we score differently on this?" Why might I have veered loose and him tight? And that gives us a little more empathy for our different mindsets, and it helps with a lot of conflicts we have. I always like to think we should give our potential partners the tight-loose mindset quiz because you're buying into potential conflicts related to finances, parenting. Our most famous conflict is over the dishwasher. He is deeply disturbed by how I load the dishwasher because he thinks it's a mess. He even reloads it.

But once you know your own preference, you can start to negotiate. We can think about what domains in our household need to be tight and what can be loose, and that might change over time. And I think that's a way of being ambidextrous. And it starts with a quiz because that’s how you find out about yourself. Culture starts with the self.

Me: Michele, I so appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. It's been a pleasure.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

To learn more about Michele’s work, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into tight and loose cultures or check out her terrific book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers. You can also take her tight-loose mindset quiz here.

That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in April!

Katy Milkman, PhD

Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and International Bestselling Author of How to Change

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