 Good morning, and I want to start my talk with a story about two fish and these two fish are swimming along one fine morning And they pass by another older fish who says to them Hey boys, how's the water and they swim by swim on and then one of them turns to the other and says What the hell is water and This story is pretty simple, but has a profound point which is that sometimes the most important realities around us are the most difficult to see and for fish, that's water, but for humans, that's culture and Culture is really interesting puzzle because it's omnipresence. It's all around us all the time 24-7 But it tends to be invisible. We take it for granted. We don't think about it It's also something that's distinctly human. There's no other species that has it to the extent that we do and It also is really important in terms of affecting everything around us from our politics to our parenting From our nations to our neurons What's interesting is that we as humans have a lot of technical components We put a man in the moon. We've wired the earth. We discovered the laws of gravity But what if we can discover the laws of culture? What if we can move beyond superficial types of distinctions like red versus blue and east-west or rich and poor to understand the deeper Cultural codes driving our behavior Then we might be able to collaborate better in context like this and even build a better world for all of us So as a cross-cultural psychologist I've been studying hundreds of cultures over the last 25 years From ancient Sparta to Singapore from the Aztecs to Alabama from the military to sing upon the Silicon Valley and as you study culture around the world and in pre-industrial societies you see a lot of different Contrast puzzle and contrast for example you go over to Singapore, which is aptly called the fine country Because there's so many punishments you can get from chewing gum to not flushing the toilet in public places Or is it even walking naked in front of open curtains in one's house? And I know a lot of you like to do that so I'm just warning you about that If you take a quick ride over to New Zealand you'll see very different kind of behavior You'll see people walking barefoot in banks and in many places on college campus You see people burning couches and New Zealand is the only place that I know of that has its own national wizard So this dude actually was a fired professor from Australia who landed in New Zealand and was lecturing on everything from Rugby to religion in city streets and instead of punishing the deviant the prime minister of New Zealand asked him to become the national wizard And his job was to entertain the country If you go around the world you see other puzzle and contrasts why for example in Germany Do people tend to wait patiently on street corners even if there's no cars around Whereas my own beloved state of New York people jaywalk incessantly with children in tow In Germany some cities are trying to now incentivize this behavior You might not notice but this guy here is actually playing a game of Street Pong And actually he's playing with the dude across the street and a real game I've actually talked to the owners of this company and in fact they show when the lights about to change Which helps people to stay entertained while they're behaving themselves But on more serious note Why is it the case that in some countries you can smoke weed openly including the United States in some places in other Context you can get the death penalty for the same behavior Closer to home what explains puzzling trends like why are we giving our babies more and more unique names as? An aside one of my colleagues in New York went to a store and asked where the candy was and they said she doesn't work there anymore and Why are we getting fatter and fatter over time? Is there anything that helps us to tie these examples together and I would say that there is and these examples reflect something really fundamental about culture That is to say how strictly we abide by social norms All cultures have social norms these unwritten rules behavior and the something that we follow constantly We're expert as humans in developing and enforcing social norms In fact, we net really recognize how much we need social norms in order to predict each other's behavior and to coordinate I want you to do a little thought experiment and try to imagine a world where people are driving on both sides of the street and Not paying attention to stop signs. Okay, that's New York, but Imagine a world where you walk into restaurants which are open whenever and people are chewing with their mouths open and they're belching loudly And they're stealing food off of each other's place Okay, that's my family household or imagine you walk into an elevator and people are facing backwards And they're actually shaking umbrellas on each other I encourage you to try to do that see what kind of looks you'll get in this world Imagine that sex is not reserved for private settings people have sex on buses on airplanes and in contexts like this Luckily humans develop social norms in order to avoid these situations Societies families organizations would collapse without social norms. It's the glue that keeps us together But what I've discovered over some years of research is that that glue tends to be stronger in some context than others This is what I call tight cultures and they have strong norms and punishments for deviance like in Singapore And we contrast that with cultures that are looser that have much weaker norms that are much more permissive And it turns out that this distinction of Titan loose can explain a lot about the world I first started to study this with a large team of scientists I put together around the world the results of which were published in science a few years ago and Just like we can classify individuals on personality dimensions We can also classify whole countries in terms of the strength of their norms tight loose is a continuum What we found was that some cultures like Japan Singapore Germany Austria Switzerland tended to be your tight even though they have some loose elements on the flip side places like New Zealand Brazil the Netherlands tended to veer loose even though they might have some tight elements What we also discovered in this research is that there's a really distinct trade-off that Titan loose gives two groups And that is basically order versus openness So when our data what we could see is that tight cultures tend to have a lot of order They have much less crime and more monitoring for example And actually there's a really funny show that many of you might watch an NPR wait wait Don't tell me recent episode Peter Siggles asking people what a Japanese police officers need more of and we're all guessing Maybe they need more pay. Maybe they more vacation time. They're exhausted turns out that they need more crime Japan has one of the lowest crime rates on the planet and apparently some police officers were so bored They were egging people on to try to commit minor crimes of certain cities Tight cultures also have a lot of uniformity and synchrony You find that people wear the same clothes They're more likely to drive the same cars and even you see this uniformity in city streets on clocks And I analyzed city clocks around the country around the world And what you find is that in tight cultures city clocks basically are very highly aligned. They're very synchronized They're off by maybe milliseconds, but if you go to loose cultures like Brazil and Greece You're not entirely sure what time it is because the clocks all say something different Finally tight cultures also have a lot of self control when you live in a context where there's potential punishments You need to manage your impulses and you're taught from a very early age To manage those impulses and that has a lot of consequences for societies tight cultures have less obesity They have lower debt. They have less alcoholism Loose cultures struggle with order. They have less synchrony They have more crime and they have a host of self-regulation problems They even have fatter pets like my beloved Portuguese water dog But loose cultures corner the market on openness There tend to be much more open to different people different religions different races people of different stigmas I showed this in one study I did where I had my research assistants go around the world to 20 different countries Wearing fake facial warts. So I bought them for them off the internet. You can do that Or they were wearing tattoos and nose rings and the simple question was if they go around city streets in their home countries And they asked for directions they asked for help wearing these ridiculous things Do they get help and we found the data were pretty clear It's in loose cultures that they're much more likely to get help Where they're much less likely to get help in tight cultures Loose cultures are also more open to different ideas. They're more creative They're also more open to change our computational models show that when you introduce a new norm or two loose cultures It takes off much more quickly. So you could see that in this case tight cultures struggle with openness So the question is what produces these differences in the first place These no common geography or religion or tradition or language that unites tight loose culture So what predicts it turns out it's a pretty simple principle and that has to do with threat Threat can be from mother nature think constant disasters and famine like Japan has struggled with over the course of its history Threat can be from other humans think constant invasions or the spread of pathogens or even really high population density Cultures that have a lot of threat need stronger rules to coordinate to survive They need that stronger glue and we've shown that in computational models We also see this in data that we collected across a hundreds of years Across these different countries tight cultures have more food deprivation more territorial threat They have more higher population density even dating back to 1500 They're greater chronic natural disasters and more pathogens loose cultures have less threat generally and they can afford to be more permissive This can kind of help us to explain this puzzling issue around why you can't chew gum in Singapore, which from an American point of view sounds preposterous But actually when you think about it Singapore has 20,000 people per square mile That's an astonishing amount of people compare that to Brazil where there's 50 people per square mile and more sheep per capita than people In context with this high population density you need strong rules in order to coordinate and avoid chaos and In a place where there's so many mouths per capita gum was causing a serious problem people chew gum And they like to throw it in the ground and apparently it was causing a very serious mess in the late 80s it was causing sensors to be Getting blocked and having lots of problems with trains and elevators. So finally look one you said guys We're gonna have to ban this tasty treat It's the simplest solution in a place that has a lot of threat and if we accidentally were born in Singapore We might agree with that as well Once you start thinking about tight and loose you can see it in a lot of different places for example instead of red versus blue We published a paper recently in PNIS that we Recalculated how we can think about our differences what we found was that the south and some aspects of the Midwest tended to be your tight The coast tend to veer looser. This is distinct from other types of dimensions like conservativism And also you see remarkable Resemblance between this map and the amount of natural disasters that we see in the United States as well as other indications of threat like pathogens and food scarcity at The state level we see the same order versus openness trade-off in our data We can see that tight states have more conscientiousness more rule orientation They have more order and they have more self-control tight states also according to analysis are more polite and This explains why my beloved New York City in New York State, which is ranked number one on rudeness Has much many problems when going to the south New Yorkers like to flip people off We see this kind of affectionate gesture I would not recommend that doing that in the polite context of the south because I have some stories in my book about this Loose culture struggle with order in the state level, but they also again counter the market on openness They have more creativity. They have more tolerance and even if they're more rude. They tend to be more fun according to surveys Once you sit thinking about these you can start zooming into states and one interesting area has to do with social class Often it's time we think about differences between the working and upper class in terms of our bank accounts But actually we had the idea that maybe these deeper cultural codes are also driving some differences across class lines. I Want you to think for a moment about this phrase follow the rules If I give you that phrase what just comes up in your mind what words and phrases come from your mind This is something that we did with many different people from the working class and upper class all around the country And we found striking differences across these groups and how they make meaning around this very phrase for the working class They found very positive nature of this kind of phrase Offering words like good structure safe The upper class participants in our studies have very different more negative views like nuisance goody-two shoes In fact if you look at American bookstores, you see a lot about break the rules We tend to be a culture that celebrates that that's definitely comes from this kind of middle and upper class mentality When we measure these kinds of attributes in these classes We could see that they really differ on tight and loose and it makes sense again The working class tends to experience a lot of threat. They're worried about falling into hard living or poverty They go to occupations that tend to have more danger where rules help keep keep people safe And they live in neighborhoods where rules can help kids say out of trouble The upper class has more of a cushion and it can afford to be more permissive and can be afford to break the rules Sometimes in fact, that's what some studies out of you California Berkeley show when they measured what kind of cars break the rules including cutting off pedestrians What they found was that it was the upper-class cars like BMWs and Jaguars that cut people off much more as Compared to pummer vans. I hate to say this because I drive a BMW and it's I think the car has a mind of its own We we also see although the upper-class tends to break more rules They also have the same order openness trade-off we saw in other levels of analysis. They tend to be more tolerant They tend to be more creative What's astonishing is that we see these differences very early This is a study that we did with three-year-old kids in our lab We brought in working-class kids and upper-class kids into our laboratory and we can't exactly ask them What do you think of rules? But we can have them interact with a puppet This is max the puppet and they're playing a game with max the puppet and all the sudden max starts Violating the rules of the game and starts announcing that he's playing the game correctly And what we can do is videotape these kids and see how they react when max becomes a norm violator Turns out that working-class kids are much more likely to tell him to stop doing is do what he's doing And it's more of upper-class kids who have been socialized even by age three To let max off the hook even laugh at his behavior Even in our own organizations this distinction of tight-loose is very much Important in terms of the kinds of behaviors that we see as normal We know that for example loose tight organizations tend to have that same sense of order and predictability Strong training alignment in people's mental models people who are prevention focused on avoiding mistakes These tend to live in industries where rules should be important where coordination is really important like manufacturing hospital airlines And also these contexts as I mentioned make sense because they have greater threat Loose organizations have a very different ecology. They tend to have much more flexibility in experimentation more informality Less monitoring more promotion focus if not some impulsivity they tend to operate and live in industries like startups and tech And these contexts have much more safety and less threats so it makes sense These organizations and units within them also have very different leaders We've studied leadership and tight and loose cultures and we can see that people across many different countries and across thousands of managers When we ask them what attributes contribute to effective leadership, they're very different responses for tight cultures People want autonomous leaders who call the shots loose cultures like people who are charismatic and are team oriented So you can see that the people and the practices and the leaders that are running these shows are very different in tight and loose cultures And it causes not surprisingly a lot of conflict within organizations and between organizations in a recent paper I published in Harvard Business Review We actually document to the price tag in cross-border acquisitions for big differences in tight loose across those organizations It's remarkable because often companies don't do that due diligence to understand What's the cultural DNA that we're really buying into and they only later stumble into that iceberg without realizing it And I could say that in the biggest differences we can see a reduction in ROA in over 200 million dollars So the question is which is better tight or loose by show of hands who would vote for tightness There's always a lot of people also who would vote for looseness Who's gonna abstain? Okay, so this is a fascinating question that has occupied us for many many centuries Should we organize groups to have a lot of freedom or a lot of constraint? Plato Confucius Hobbes who had a very negative view of humans thought we need rules Then you have John syrup mill and Freud who was kind of crazy Think that rules make you neurotic and we should have more freedom. So which is correct after centuries of three Where is the data? Well, we wanted to look at this question and our hunch was what if it's neither What if too tight and too loose is maladaptive? Surely groups need to lean tight moves for good reasons evolutionary reasons But what we were Intuiting was that as groups get too extreme either too loose where everything's chaotic and you can't predict It to this behavior like we talked about very early in this talk or too tight Which is really repressive Maybe that's where the problem is and this is what we call the Goldilocks principle of tight loose Goldilocks, of course is that silly little storybook about not too hot not too cold not too soft not too hard What about if we pride this principle to social norms in our own lives and sure enough We could see this curvilinear pattern across many different data points too tight and too loose cultures have higher depression They have higher suicide that higher blood pressure. They have lower happiness This Goldilocks principle as I talk about in the book applies not just to organizations and to nations It applies to our own households We know that parents that are too tight who are very helicopter-like or parents who are too laissez-faire Who are just let their kids do whatever produce maladaptive kids in a recent pink cast that I did with Dan pink I talk about in two minutes my approach to trying to negotiate tight loose in the household How do you achieve that you try to negotiate? Which domains need to be tight and which need to be loose? This is something that can is eminently negotiable and that's what I want to end my talk on is How do we think about achieving tight loose balance in our own lives? Because this is something that we invented social norms. We can't actually negotiate them We can identify context where we need to tighten loose norms We need to also identify context where we might need to loosen tight norms that have become Maybe maladaptive. This is what I call tight loose ambidexterity The best leaders know how to balance tight loose in their companies Even when it comes to innovation Innovation requires both tight and loose it requires looseness to create new ideas But it really requires tightness to implement those ideas on a large scale groups that can't manage those Dualities don't tend to be as innovative and we have data on that again curvilinear effect When I talk about tight loose ambidexterity, we have some specific prescriptions of how leaders can actually help reduce This kind of balance in some cases. We need to tighten up loose organizations that perhaps have not been Organized and have too much disorder In this case, we need to centralize and have more monitoring and emphasize reliability set benchmarks This is what I call structured looseness. We don't want to lose the looseness in this context But we might need to inject some structure on the flip side. There's many times we might have to loosen a tight organization This is the context of airlines or manufacturing where we do want rules We don't want people doing crazy things in airlines, but we might have gotten too rural oriented I wrote in op-ed about United Airlines. We want United Airlines to have rules But arguably a couple years ago people were following the rules blindly and we need to loosen up in that context and non-safety domains In this case, we need to decentralize encourage pushback and exploration Promote individual agency something I call flexible tightness and United actually has been doing that they don't call for that But that's what we can do in organizations where we need to Create more balance So I'm just gonna end With one final slide and that kind of gets back to the sense of self of how can we use this in terms of understanding our own mindsets? because each of us Falls on the continuum of veering tight or loose truth be told. I'm moderately loose Husband is a lawyer. He veers moderately tight. We've been married 25 years We seem to be able to manage it But we have a lot of conflict over tight loose when it comes to things like parenting when it comes to finances when it Comes to messiness around the house. I talk about that in the pink cast So you can hear about that but the important point here is to first of all do a self-assessment on my website Which is at Michelle gal fan comm you can take a tight loose mindset quiz and think about where you fall on this continuum Even if we change by situations, we each tend to have a certain default Are you for example a mop order muppet or a chaos muppet? Many of you will remember Sesame Street. You have people like Bert and Kermit who veer tight Bert or and Kermit Kermit likes to collect paper clips and other things like that and they like rules They like to control their impulses. They like structure. They crave structure Chaos muppets among us are people like cookie monster and Ernie an animal Who don't tend to notice rules as much we might not manage our impulses. Maybe you have some Impulsivity. We also enjoy ambiguity. We can we can accept ambiguity Once you understand where you fall on this continuum naturally It helps to illuminate and empower us to understand ourselves and also can help us to understand the kinds of conflicts We might have with our co-workers or spouse our neighbors are in-laws number one answer on Vacations is tight loose conflict in that context So we can start thinking about How other people are on this continuum and why might they have evolved me the case? There's usually good reasons why people veer tight or loose and Ultimately, we can then start negotiating tight loose conflict in our own daily lives So I want to thank you so much. I think I'm over by a little bit by about 30 seconds but I'm gonna be up at the coffee hour and Signing books and I would love to hear your tight loose stories visit my website and just be in touch Thank you