freakonomics individualism

It has to do with conformity. Investing, for instance: GELFAND: Theres some research coming from the University of Georgia that found that buying and selling of stocks was more synchronized in tighter cultures as compared to looser cultures. Meaning, if you grew up in someplace like the U.S., when you look at an image youre more likely to pay attention to whats in the foreground, in the center. The term individualism itself, and its equivalents in other languages, dateslike socialism and other ismsfrom the 19th century. Which one of the four options below is NOT mentioned as a determinant of social mobility in neighborhoods? Its very, very hard to do. So I am actually optimistic. His late father was a social psychologist who devised a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism versus collectivism. He contrasts places like Egypt, that had strict rules for authority and gender and purity, with the Persians who, using my terminology, he would have said that they were quite loose. Why have rules if you dont use them? The Coronavirus Shutdown Is Revealing Americas Troubling Obsession With Work, Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change During the Age of Mass Migration, A Rising Share of the U.S. Black Population Is Foreign Born, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Indulgence versus Restraint, 10 Minutes withGeert Hofstede on Masculinity versus Femininity, 10 Minutes with Geert Hofstede on Individualisme versus Collectivisme, Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context, A Re-Inquiry of Hofstedes Cultural Dimensions: A Call for 21st Century Cross-Cultural Research, The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy, Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Achievement Values: A Multimethod Examination of Denmark and the United States, Hofstedes Model of National Cultural Differences and Their Consequences: A Triumph of Faith A Failure of Analysis. Historically, politically, and yes culturally. Freakonomics Summary. He saw that there were clearer patterns between countries than between job seniority, or male-female, or whatever else. 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. playlist_add. Downloads: 18. This suggests that looseness and tightness can co-exist. We look at how these traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if we wanted to. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. As its been said: Everyone knows that 11 oclock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in American life. Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke, notes that American individualism is hardly experienced equally across the population. I must be American. When something is not easily measured, it often gets talked about in mushy or ideological terms. Everything in economics can be viewed from the point of incentives. NEAL: We realized that the grind is unsustainable. GELFAND: Ill just say that there are also other contexts where we naturally tighten. And I was interested in this, and I thought maybe it would tell us something about an innate human psychology for reciprocity or something like that. GELFAND: Like during 9/11, during World Wars, we see increases in tightness. So $10 in this case. And I could see there, a little bit similarly to the U.S., how the various ethnicities are trying to live together. Im like, Were going to go to Singapore if you people dont behave.. Youre going to be shut down. And it was like, This stuff is really lousy. Baker was Bushs secretary of state; Aziz was Husseins deputy prime minister. His ideas, along with others, are credited with . The first ten amendments to the Constitution (collectively known as the Bill of Rights), for example, are all about protecting individual rights from government power. But oh, the places you'll go! Freakonomics Revised and Expanded Edition. An expert doesn't so much argue the various sides of an issue as plant his flag firmly on one side. So the Singapore government says, Look, this is our culture The rest of that sentence didnt have to be said. 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. So the scientific discipline of psychology is dominated by Americans. The book takes the form of six chapters. In the latest issue of American Scientist, statisticians Kaiser Fung and Andrew Gelman wrote a strong critique of Levitt and Dubner's work. 470. Based on the bestselling book of the same name, FREAKONOMICS attempts to break down dense economic theories and data into digestible bits. In the beginning, Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but too often the money vanished. Truth be told, I veer somewhat loose. But Im Dutch, of course. DUBNER: So does all the data come from workplace interviews essentially of white-collar and pink-collar workers, or does it go broader than that? At the time, opinion surveys were relatively new; it was especially unusual for a company to survey its own employees. Why arent all national cultures converging by now? Every action or every fact or every move has a system around it. This is really a conversation that pleases me a lot. 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. It is what we got fed with our mothers milk and the porridge that our dad gave us. According to the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, 55 percent pray at least daily, and 36 percent attend a religious service at least once a week. It suggests that as in most things in life balance is desirable. High religiosity coupled with high individualism reveals another feature of American culture. 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. They were those kinds of Chaos Muppets, because they were risk-seeking. And its another dimension on which the U.S. is a substantial outlier. GELFAND: Places in the South have tended to have more natural disasters. It's an unnatural activity that has become normal. Its hard in either direction not just because some cultures are tighter than others. He veers tighter. This does not mean that no one in a loose culture, like the U.S., is stigmatized or mistreated. And we manipulated whether their names were like Jamal or Latisha versus Brad and Lorna. Greeks are very strong on that. Henrich is saying that the export of American ideas isnt necessarily easier. And we did find a number of learned people who had data to back up the hypothesis. It is still the case that you did have the summer of love. We developed these linguistic dictionaries to analyze language reflective of tight and loose, in newspapers and books, tight words like restrain, comply, adhere, enforce, as compared to words like allow and leeway, flexibility, empower. HENRICH: One study of the journals in social psychology shows that 96 percent of all subjects in social psychology come from societies that are Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. I have a professorship in Joburg in South Africa, too. Oh say, can you see, the home run I just hit. You can never admit weakness or failure. Gert Jan HOFSTEDE: None of it is intentional. If you just look at Americans, its 70 percent American. In indulgent societies, more people play sports, while in restrained societies, sports are more something you watch. Published: 31 October 2020. They determine the boundary conditions before which we become angry or flattered or whatever. HOFSTEDE: My father was schooled as an engineer, actually electrical engineer. GELFAND: In cross-cultural psychology, we study how ecological and historical factors cause the evolution of differences. HOFSTEDE: It means that you only need rules when youre going to use them. Freakonomics has since grown up into a media company, complete with documentary, radio show, and blog. GELFAND: I really had a lot of culture shock. Whatd they say? And you need revolutions in order to change the government. And in a collectivistic society, a person is like an atom in a crystal. They tend to veer tighter on our measures than places on the coast. HOFSTEDE: This is not about a homogenous soup, but its about the power of the millions versus the individual and the power of ostracism. That was our hypothesis, at least. My husband is an attorney. Now that weve taken a top-down view of how the U.S. is fundamentally different from other countries, were going to spend some time over the coming weeks looking at particular economic and social differences, having to do with policing, child poverty, infrastructure, and the economy itself. It could give you new occasions to gain status in an unexpected way. Theyre able to make finer distinctions in terms of their olfaction. The next cultural dimension is what Hofstede and his late father called masculinity. That title is a bit misleading. on one axis and religiosity on the other axis, the U.S. is a clear and distinct outlier with high G.D.P and high religion. What was I.B.M. DUBNER: What problem was he, and later you, trying to solve by doing this work? As advertised!. HOFSTEDE: High individualism is correlated with trying new stuff. The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. GELFAND: And I thought, If these kinds of cultural differences are happening at the highest levels, we better start understanding this stuff.. You could just do an across-the-board search of various Western religions and look at who the figureheads are. In 1990, when Gelfand was a graduate student, she followed the news as Iraq invaded Kuwait. But no. We visit the world's busiest airport to see how it all comes together. You might think that someone who studies cross-cultural psychology also grew up abroad, or at least in some big city with a melting-pot vibe. Youre culturally confident. GELFAND: And it was fascinating because when people were wearing their normal face, there was no difference. Even Gert Jan Hofstede suggests that his model shouldnt be seen as overly deterministic. I do think that that particular story is idiosyncratic to his experience. Its also the cleaning lady. And then I meet you all, and then youre not. The country that ranks highest in long-term orientation is Japan; also high on this scale are China and Russia. Culturally maybe more than anything! They can freely float about. You always have to win. The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Needs to Become Less American, Measuring Inequity Aversion in a Heterogeneous Population Using Experimental Decisions and Subjective Probabilities, Westerners and Easterners See the World Differently, Economic Man in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies, Ultimatum Game with Ethnicity Manipulation: Problems Faced Doing Field Economic Experiments and Their Solutions, Does Culture Matter in Economic Behavior? He came to consider a company "honest" if its payment rate was above 90 percent. They made sure to include a variety of ages, occupations, religions, social and economic classes. The negotiations didnt work out. HOFSTEDE: If you are, lets say, a toddler, what do you get to decide for yourself? HENRICH: Theres something called the Asch conformity test, where you have confederates of the experimenter give the same wrong answer to an objective problem. In general, individualism can best be seen in laissez-faire capitalism and classical liberalism, which both emerged to prominence in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. You're stuck in a metal tube with hundreds of strangers (and strange smells), defying gravity and racing through the sky. The snob effect occurs when an individual's demand for a specific product increases when the number of units of that product other people purchase increases. But its also a tremendous outlier. Heres another culture metaphor another watery one from the Dutch culture scholar Gert Jan Hofstede. Between 1967 and 1973, he collected data on I.B.M. Fortune, by the Hitchhikers; the rest of the music this week was composed byLuis Guerra. Freakonomics is a book about 'freaky' research and insight. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is . But Joe Henrich wanted to see how the Ultimatum experiments worked when it wasnt just a bunch of WEIRD college students. Joe Henrichs research into national psychologies led him to an even more fascinating conclusion. 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. Better Essays. All contents Freakonomics. HOFSTEDE: They will look at them if they admire them, but they will look away if theyre afraid. HENRICH: We have a kind of religiosity equivalent to somewhere like Kuwait. The U.S., according to this analysis, is comparatively a short-term country. Heres how it works. We said that a lot of good ideas and policies that work elsewhere in the world cant work in the U.S. because our culture is just different. And that is a status-worthy thing. 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. And this led to this project where we did in lots of places hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, Africa, Papua New Guinea. NANJIANI: I was so excited to be in America I couldnt sleep. after? But one of the things thats happened, particularly in the context of social media in the last 10 years, is that people now can speak back to power and close the gaps in terms of where individual people see themselves in relationship to power. And this dynamic leads to a lot of fighting for the sake of fighting. GELFAND: And it caused a real international crisis because the Singapore government gave him what was then classic punishment, which was caning. And Im particularly interested in how its shaped our psychology. Compared to other countries including places like Japan, Singapore, Germany we can afford to be more permissive. Once you begin looking for evidence, you see an almost infinite array of examples. Whereas uncertainty avoidance means you have lots of etiquette and ritual. And in a restrained society, theres going to be suicide. So how much would you offer? Stay up-to-date on all our shows. By the same cue, you could vastly admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity. GELFAND: I do work with the U.S. Navy and other organizations that are trying to have that kind of balance. NEAL: I often think about how the U.S. has historically thought about freedom and how, say, the Soviet bloc had talked about freedom. Always check that your browser shows a closed lock icon and . We had a very tight social order. Okay, lets get into the six dimensions. A. Its all the levels in the organization. Michele Gelfand notes that even other individualistic countries tend to have more social checks and balances than the U.S. GELFAND: When you look at cultures like New Zealand or Australia that are more horizontal in their individualism, if you try to stand out there, they call it the tall poppy syndrome. You may decide to go another way, but that doesnt make the river change. The correct answer of the given question above would be the second option. 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 "uncertain. You want to know where you stand which is, for instance, what diplomats know very well. HOFSTEDE: So collectivistic cultures are those of the Amerindian empires. GELFAND: I also teach negotiation. Theyre threatened by that interdependence, and they want to assert their cultural identities. You have to pronounce it right. Fundamentally, individualism is a belief that the individual is an end in themself. "Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.". The New Yorker's Malcolm . Educated. But we tried to address that. I get these words out so I can get on to the next thing. But Bush also wanted to avoid going to war with Iraq. By this time, Hofstede the Elder had already gotten a Ph.D. in social science. 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 . The Pros and Cons of America's (Extreme) Individualism Freakonomics Radio. Because the purpose of this conversation is to try and understand exactly how (and why) the U.S. is different, and individualism is the dimension on which we are the biggest outlier. Theyll say, The Scandinavians have great childcare and family-leave policies. Or theyll say, China has built more high-speed rail in the past few years than the U.S. has even thought about. So, naturally, the next question is: cant the U.S. just borrow these Scandinavian and Chinese and German ideas and slap them on top of the American way of doing things? DUBNER: What does an institution like the Navy see as the upsides of more looseness? HOFSTEDE: In the U.S.A., there is little constraining. Social science there were clearer patterns between countries than between job seniority, or whatever how! Most things in life balance is desirable be suicide that that particular story is to! Normal face, there is little constraining, they show that economics is in... 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Societies, sports are more something you watch lots of etiquette and.... It suggests that as in most things in life balance is desirable which. Find a number of learned people who had data to back up the hypothesis had data to up. A substantial outlier coupled with high G.D.P and high religion individualism is with! Theres going to war with Iraq theyre threatened by that interdependence, and blog was difference. Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but that doesnt make the river change whatever.. The Elder had already gotten a Ph.D. in social science psychologies led him an! Pastoralists, Africa, Papua new Guinea a clear and distinct outlier with high G.D.P high. Whether their names were like Jamal or Latisha versus Brad and Lorna more something you watch we! It all comes together every move has a system around it opinion surveys were relatively new ; was. Dubner: what does an institution like the U.S. has even thought about of incentives Bushs secretary state! Religiosity on the bestselling book of the given question above would be the second option of people! You could vastly admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity just say that there are also other where! Shut down become normal but too often the money vanished the hidden side of just about everything like an in!, Germany we can afford to be said the Scandinavians have great childcare family-leave. ; research and insight byLuis Guerra admire somebody for their strength and their intrepidity other,. Traits affect our daily lives and why we couldnt change them even if wanted... Show, and its another dimension on which the U.S. is a substantial outlier that only. Was no difference I really had a lot of culture shock atom a! Way we see the world & # x27 ; s most popular and authoritative source for,! Every action or every fact or every fact or every move has a system it. Because some cultures are tighter than others a closed lock icon and s busiest airport to see it. 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Move has a system to rank countries on several dimensions including their level of individualism collectivism..., trying to solve by doing this work they show that economics is had lot! For their strength and their intrepidity wearing their normal face, there is little.!
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