cover of episode Best of: The future of culture

Best of: The future of culture

2025/3/14
logo of podcast The Future of Everything

The Future of Everything

AI Deep Dive AI Chapters Transcript
People
M
Michele Gelfand
R
Russ Altman
Topics
@Russ Altman : 我主持了与@Michele Gelfand 教授关于紧密型和松散型文化的讨论。我们探讨了文化对个体、组织和社会的影响,以及如何理解文化差异以更好地适应世界。我们还讨论了文化智力(CQ)在跨文化谈判和领导力中的作用。 Michele Gelfand: 文化是无形的,由规范、价值观和信仰构成。紧密型文化严格执行社会规范,而松散型文化则较为宽松。这种差异影响着个体行为、组织运作和国家发展。历史、生态和人口流动性等因素会影响文化的紧密程度。 文化智力(CQ)是独立于智商(IQ)和情商(EQ)的,它能预测人们在全球商业环境中的表现。高文化智力的人在跨文化谈判中能更好地协调合作,达成更好的交易。文化智力可以通过学习、旅行、培训等方式提升。 文化进化错配是指文化特征在环境变化时可能成为问题。在疫情期间,松散型文化在应对客观威胁方面适应性较差。在没有实际威胁但人们夸大威胁的情况下,也会出现文化进化错配,例如一些民粹主义领导人利用威胁言论。 紧密与松散没有好坏之分,取决于具体的标准和情境。我们需要在不同情境下灵活调整,在保持秩序的同时保持开放性。 Michele Gelfand: 文化是一个多层次的概念,从国家到个人都有体现。紧密型文化通常在高威胁环境下进化,而松散型文化则在低威胁环境下进化。紧密型文化强调秩序和协调,而松散型文化则强调开放性和创造性。 文化智力(CQ)是理解和适应不同文化的能力。它包括认知、动机和行为三个方面。高CQ的人能够更好地在跨文化环境中进行沟通和合作。CQ可以通过学习和实践来提高。 文化进化错配是指文化特征在环境变化时可能成为问题。在疫情期间,松散型文化在应对客观威胁方面适应性较差。在没有实际威胁但人们夸大威胁的情况下,也会出现文化进化错配,例如一些民粹主义领导人利用威胁言论。 在商业领域,文化差异会影响并购和国际合作的成功率。了解文化差异,并进行有效的跨文化沟通和谈判,对于商业成功至关重要。

Deep Dive

Chapters
This chapter defines culture as a set of norms, values, and beliefs that influence our behavior. It highlights that culture is often invisible until we encounter different cultures, leading to culture shock. The chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural differences.
  • Culture is an invisible force shaping our behavior.
  • Culture shock arises from encountering different cultural norms.
  • Understanding cultural differences is crucial for navigating the world.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

Hey everyone, it's your host Russ Altman from the Future of Everything. You know, culture is a force that's always exerting its influence on us. It's typically only when we get outside of our culture, outside of our daily routine, by going to a new city, a new country, or talking to folks we don't usually talk to, that we're confronted with new ways of doing things.

When that happens, we can see that the values, norms, and practices of the culture we mostly live in can be different from others. Well, today we're rerunning a thought-provoking conversation I had with Michelle Gelfand about notions of what she calls tight relationships.

and loose cultures. These are very different, and they're adaptive for different uses. It's a conversation that helps illuminate some of the invisible forces of culture, and also sheds light on how understanding these forces can help us navigate the world in a better way. I hope you'll take another listen and enjoy. Before I get started, please remember to follow the podcast if you're not doing so already, and press the bell icon if you're listening on Spotify. This ensures that you'll get alerted to all of our episodes and never miss anything.

Many of us have had the experience of entering a new culture. Sometimes it's through travel where we find ourselves immersed in a whole different way of setting norms and having rules. Sometimes it's just by making new friends or getting a new job at a company that runs things very differently. In

In all of these cases, your ability to adapt to the norms and rules of the new culture can be critical for success. Well, Michelle Gelfand is a professor of international business studies and psychology at Stanford University, and she's a world expert on culture and how you can measure them and understand the differences so that when you find yourself in a new culture, you can understand

operate optimally. And so when two cultures are having negotiations or interactions, they can find common ground to try to establish ways to work together.

She'll tell us that an important aspect of culture is this tight, loose spectrum. How tight are the rules? How tight are the norms and the ethics versus how loose are people? This difference is critical in many settings. She's learned how to measure it and she's learned how to change people's cultural intelligence so that they can operate better in a variety of cultures. So Michelle, you study culture and its importance to individuals, to organizations and to societies.

I think it's obvious we should start out with a working definition. What is culture? So it's great to be here. I'm really excited. This is one of my favorite podcasts because you're such a crazy generalist. And I love to learn about everything, like, you know, hyperventilating about any topic. You're very kind. From chemistry to culture. You know, culture is really this invisible force that affects us.

It's omnipresent, but it's invisible. And it's really this set of like norms and values and beliefs that comes to be socialized through both parents and teachers and institutions about what is appropriate. And it's something that was really bizarre because

As I mentioned, it's omnipresent, but it's invisible. So we don't really think about it. It's affecting us all the time, but we don't think about it, which is kind of weird. How is something like affecting you all the time and not something we're aware of? And it's only when we kind of get outside of our cultural bubble, when we travel, whether it's within a different region in our own country or elsewhere, we start having kind of a culture shock. Like, wow, we start realizing that we've been profoundly influenced in terms of values, norms, and assumptions of how we operate in the world.

Okay, great. So that gives us a great foundation. And I'm just going to go right to it because you wrote a great book. And one of the principles, and I'm sure it's very complex, but I think a very important factor is what you talk about a lot is this tight, loose distinction. And of course, it's not the only aspect of culture, but it's an important one. Tell us how you got to that and why it's so important. Okay.

So I'll just kind of back up. I'm a cross-cultural psychologist. My father, Marty from Brooklyn, still does not know exactly what that is, but that's okay. And really this field is trying to understand, conceptualize, and measure different dimensions of culture. That is to say, think about personality. We know that

You know, we vary in various different dimensions of personality, extroversion, introversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness. What if we can build theories of the dimensions of culture that have evolved to affect human beings and then try to understand not only how can we measure them and define them, but how are they influencing us? The what and the why and the consequences of culture.

Tight-loose is one dimension of culture. We can think about this is a dimension about social norms. Social norms are these unwritten rules or behavior that sometimes get more formalized into laws and codes. But what we know is that while all human groups, we think, have social norms to help guide behavior, help us coordinate behavior.

Some cultures are very strict about how much they enforce those rules. They're called tight cultures. And some cultures are more loose. They have much more latitude, more permissiveness. And in fact, this distinction of tight and loose, of latitude and constraint, goes back to even Herodotus, the father of history, who started writing about it, not using those terms, but in the great book, I don't know if you've read the histories. It's a fascinating book. It's

I might have started it.

So I really started thinking about this construct some years ago. An anthropologist started talking about it in the 60s, but then it got kind of lost off the cultural map. And I started really systematically studying it through various different methods, through surveys, experiments, neuroscience, computational models.

Because culture is really complicated, so we need all those methods to show convergence. So that's the kind of big picture. We can think about this as a fractal pattern coming from physics of looking at kaius across different levels of analysis, first looking at more macro patterns.

approach is to look at nations but then we can kind of zoom in and look at states then we can zoom in and look at organizations even our own households yeah that's what i want today that's great and let me i'm sorry to interrupt but i know that you have this great little um survey online and we'll put a link to it in the show notes and and uh you kind of recommended that i do it so i did it uh and i'm moderately loose which actually saying it that way sounds a little funny uh uh

But that's an individual test. And yet you're talking about it also at higher levels like societies and organizations. So I think you were about to do this anyway. But go ahead and tell me how the individual tight, loose relates to what the societal. Are we going to have loose people in tight cultures? And are they going to be stressed out all the time or vice versa? Yeah, this is a great question. So we think about tight was the fractal pattern where you can look at tight was the nations down to the neurons.

But I want to be clear that really at different levels of analysis, we're looking at different variables. So in our model that was published in Science some years ago, I was looking at what are the ecological and historical factors that predict how strict or permissive social norms are, these rules, behavior. And then we get

think about if you live in a culture that is quite tight, like Singapore or Japan or Austria, what are the individual level types of processes that are cultivated in those contexts? Like we can call this a tight or a loose mindset. And that's what the quiz measured. So for example, we know from that data that people that live in tight cultures tend to be socialized

to actually look a lot for rules. Like they have high self-monitoring. They also are trained to manage their impulses a lot. And then you also have these contexts where there's a lot of social order, tend to have people who like a lot of structure. Now on the flip side, if you live in a loose culture where there's lots of variants of what you can walk around and see lots of different things going on,

then you need to actually be very tolerant of ambiguity. And so in this case, you might be not as likely to notice rules because it's not as adaptive in that context. You might not be managing your impulses, but you might be more likely to take risks and be a little more impulsive and also be tolerant of ambiguity because those things are actually adaptive in looser contexts. So that's what the quiz is about, tight, loose mindsets.

Okay, so that's really helpful. And, and it kind of, it kind of makes sense. And, and so just thinking about that, and we've kind of, we have a working definition of culture as well. Let me just go right to it. When I look at the United States, should I think about one culture, or 1000 cultures or two cultures, like,

How do you make these distinctions between where cultures begin and end? - Yeah, that's a great question. I think it really depends on your research questions. So at the most macro level, like, okay, we wanna try to differentiate countries in general, but then we can go into very heterogeneous countries like the US, like China, actually. We can start looking at the state level or the province level,

or in Iraq, we have a new book on tight loose in Iraq, regional variation. And we can start reclassifying states as not just red or blue, but tight or loose. And we have a whole paper in PNAS that does that. And then what's really fascinating from my point of view is are

are there similarities in what predicts tight-loose at those different levels and the consequences? And it turns out there's actually a lot of homology or similarity between what predicts tight-loose at the national or state or organizational level. And it has to do with, broadly speaking,

How much threat these contexts have. Threat can be from mother nature. Think like how many natural disasters, famine. It can also be from human nature. Think about how many times your nation's been potentially invaded by its neighbors. In fact, Hannah, my daughter, asked me some years ago if I was worried about Canada and Mexico invading us.

And she was like five years old. And I'm like, sweetie, you need to relax, first of all. Like, why are you thinking about this? But in fact, we quantified how much threat nations around the world, how much states had a lot of threat. You can look at this at the organizational level. And we could see that actually the more threat there is, the greater the tightness that evolves. And it's a very simple idea. When you have a lot of threat, you need rules to coordinate. These are the very, very situations where there's a lot of chaos.

Yes, there's a lot of temptation to defect. And you need strict rules and punishments to help people coordinate in those contexts to survive. And actually, in the science data, we really just look at correlations. OK, when there's a lot of famine or invasions and so forth and disasters, we tend to see people rating their countries as tighter.

We can also then use computational models because this is just correlational. And we can see with evolutionary game theory, when there's threat, actually cooperation and punishment involves. And we can even peer into the brain and look at what's going on when people feel threatened.

And how is that helping them to coordinate their social action? So that's the big picture. I want to say not all tight cultures have had threat, not all loose cultures are on easy street. There's other predictors of this. For example, cultures that have a lot of relational mobility and residential mobility where people moving around all the time tend to be looser because it's harder to agree upon norms in this context.

So there's lots of different predictors and, you know, like height and weight, you know, there's not a one-to-one relationship between these things, but it helps us to understand the kind of puzzle of culture and why sometimes it might make sense to have tight norms or might be more adaptive to have loose norms.

Great, great. So now I, so one great thing is like, you're talking about a lot of kind of this, this is almost scientific discovery work that you're doing in terms of these important distinctions. But I know that you're, you know, you're a professor of international business studies and you also think about how these observations can be kind of reduced to practice to make people more effective in situations where the cultural norms and assumptions might be different. And I know you, you teach science,

negotiation, for example. And I love that because it's like, oh, I'm reading about your background. I said, of course, somebody who understands cultures might be very interested and perhaps good at negotiation. So tell me how the tight, loose or maybe more broadly, the cultural studies

how does that inform people's day-to-day skills, for example, in the business world or in any other kind of world? Yeah. I mean, this is a really great question. I teach a new global leadership class here at Stanford, and it's really exciting to get out there and help people understand how do you understand how and why cultures vary, but then how do you use this knowledge to be a better global leader? And this is what we call, broadly speaking, the field of cultural intelligence, CQ. It's actually- CQ. It's really a field. And cultural intelligence is independent-

of general intelligence. And it's even distinct from emotional intelligence. Right. Because people talk about EQ all the time. This is not EQ. This is not EQ. You could be someone who's able to read each other's emotions and even understand your own emotional life internally. But that's different than knowing...

to understand that culture exists, that we can actually be having thinking about culture, like metacognition about culture or trying to understand the rules of culture. That's cognition. Motivation is also part of this contract. How much do we feel comfortable? Do we feel efficacious dealing with people from different

cultural settings? And are we able to adapt as a behavioral aspect of CQ? What's really incredible is that we can measure this and then predict how well people do in global business context. So for example, I did a study with my former student, Lynn Amai, where we measured CQ and we looked at how well people negotiated in intercultural contexts.

And it was really powerful to see that people who had high CQ were able to better coordinate cooperative sequences that got better deals. And this is independent of IQ or EQ. You could be super smart technically, but you could be a schmuck about culture. And really, this is trying to help people to feel empowered to have a higher CQ. I do want to mention that when I first went to Champaign-Urbana to get my PhD, I went to work with Harry Triandis.

who was the founder of my field. I would have gone to the moon. If he was on the moon, I would have been like, I'm going to work with Treantus on the moon. And I went there because I wanted to work at the State Department. It was around the time when the Baker and Aziz negotiations were going on, like the early 90s. And I was like, I'm going to go work for the State Department. I'm going to train these knuckleheads how to negotiate.

But I'm first going to go learn from the best. And Harry was a great mentor, both just incredible intellectual and also deeply a wonderful mentor personally. But he said, no, I think you should not go work in the State Department. Go become an academic and study this stuff and then train people after you've learned as much as possible. And that's kind of where my career path took a real turn. So it was really serendipitous. And now I teach negotiation, as you mentioned, at the GSB2. And I'm quasi-religious about it because it's

It's something we do all the time. And most of us don't really know much about it. And a well-done negotiation can really literally lead to world peace. I mean, in fact, that's what's-

It could be. And also you can think about the household. You talked about your score being moderately loose. I actually score moderately loose on my own scale. This is kind of the Muppet quiz inspired by Diablo Wittnick. You know, you have the kind of chaos Muppets and the order Muppets. And of course we could switch up our tight or loose mindset, depending on the context. When we go to a symphony, we're tightening up, you know, our inner Bert is coming out, you

You know, when we go to a party, like our inner Ernie is going to come out. Like we can miraculously change up our tight-wist mindset. But we each have our own defaults that we feel much comfortable with based on our own background, our own culture, gender, class, et cetera. And so I want to get back to this, that you can also think about negotiating tight-loose even in the household. So, for example, my husband from the Midwest is also a lawyer. He veers pretty tight. And, in fact, he gets deeply disturbed at how I load the dishwasher.

And also the spice rack is a serious. Oh, spice rack. Don't get me started. You know, we've been married 29 years, so we kind of can handle it. But we negotiate tight use all the time. This is like any other negotiation. There's some domains in the household that were like, hey, these have to be tight.

even with our two girls. And there's other domains that we can say can be loose. And that negotiation can actually change over time. And we now have two kids that are one in college, one just graduated college. Like the negotiation is different now around tightrope. But it can change over time. And

you know, we can decide what domains need to be tight or loose. We can negotiate tightness. And that's also not just in the household. It could be in the organizations. That's something that we're starting to really do a lot of work on is how do you pivot when you need to be? How do you be ambidextrous? Yes. That really rings true because I know just as you say, there are domains in our relationship with my wife there where I feel very comfortable with the rules because it

Basically, because they match my personality. And then there are other areas where I feel like that's a gift that I'm giving because I hate the rules, but she feels strongly about it. And I'm just going to let it be. And exactly. This is how things have gone. Yeah, I wanted to go ahead.

Well, we can get into this a little later, but I think that one of the things that I've become really aware of is that there's no good or bad to tight-loose. It really depends on your criteria. And we started looking at this at the macro level across nations, but it also applies at different levels where tightness gives you a lot of order. It gives you a lot of self-regulation, a lot of discipline. It gives you a lot of coordination. Even in city streets, we measured how...

aligned are clocks and city streets. In tight cultures, they're off by milliseconds. This is like Japan and Austria. In loose cultures like Brazil, Greece, you're not totally sure what time it is. Like they are really off, but clocks and city streets, it's remarkable.

Tight cultures have a lot of order. Loose cultures struggle with order. They have less coordination. They have more variance. They have more discipline problems, more so self-regulation failures in terms of debt, in terms of obesity. Even research in my book showed that 50% of dogs and cats tend to be overweight in loose cultures, including my own beloved cats.

you know, Pepper, my dog Pepper who passed away last year, like really fat dog. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. They have more tolerance for different people. They have more idea generation, more creative, they're more adaptable. And tight cultures struggle with that.

They struggle with openness. So one of the interesting questions I think we have as social scientists is how do we try to maximize both order and openness in any system? We might need to veer tight or loose for good reasons, whether it's at the societal level or organizations. Think banks or lawyers or airlines or hospitals. They need to emphasize openness.

They need to emphasize accountability more. But if we get too tight, then we actually lose out on openness and on empowerment. Right, right. No, it makes good sense. And if we get too loose, then, and this happens sometimes in social systems, we have too much empowerment, not a lot of accountability. So part of, I think, our trick as humans at any different level of analysis is to try to think about how to pivot when we need to, when we're getting too extreme in either direction.

This is the Future of Everything with Russ Altman, more with Michelle Gelfand, next.

Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Professor Michelle Gelfand of Stanford University. In the last segment, Michelle told us what culture is. She told us why it's important to understand the differences between cultures, and she introduced this tight, loose continuum that is a very useful initial describer about how cultures are similar or different. And she also told us about cultural intelligence.

In this segment, she's going to tell us how cultural evolutionary mismatch can be a big problem and can sometimes explain why negotiations or mergers and acquisitions fail. She'll also tell us how we can change our cultural intelligence to be more flexible and adaptable in this pretty complicated world. Michelle, you mentioned in our previous segment, culture evolutionary mismatch.

Cultural evolutionary mismatch. That sounded interesting. So tell me about that and tell me how we can use that for our own advantages. Yeah. So in evolution and biology, there's this idea of evolutionary mismatches where this kind of traits that work really well in one environment, when the environment changes, it could be really a serious problem. The famous example is the dodo bird that was like hanging out, very friendly bird. And Mauritius like

you know, having a time of its life. And then like humans come in and they're very friendly to them because they have this trait that worked well in this very stable, friendly environment. And they got wiped out because of this. And this is cultural, cultural evolutionary mismatch would be now thinking about this in terms of human traits, like that we've been socializing tight or loose, for example, what happens if you're, you know, very loose and then you have an objective threat that happens.

Now, what's interesting is that during COVID, I started thinking about this. I wrote about it for the Boston Globe and other outlets and said, hey, guys, we need to tighten here in the U.S. Already this is a hot mess, this place, right when COVID happened. And then I said, you know, a lot of our computational models show that when there's threat, groups tighten. It's an evolutionary advantage. And they loosen when it's safe. It's a pretty reasonable principle.

But then I thought about, well, we never tested whether loose cultures take longer to tighten when it's real threat. And particularly this was a germ. This is not like warfare or terrorism that's really objective. And so people can be motivated to distort it and kind of ignore it because let's face it, being in a global pandemic is pretty inconvenient. So we started doing a lot of research on this cultural evolutionary mismatch in one direction, that when there is an objective threat and loose cultures might not be as willing to sacrifice

That freedom for constraint and not all loose cultures, of course, but in general, what we did find eventually through both computational modeling and analyzing cases and deaths published in The Lancet Planetary Health is that loose cultures had about five times the cases and about nine times the deaths as tighter cultures across 57 countries. And did they also resist lockdown?

You know, I think what we found was that what they had is a psychological resistance in the sense that they didn't perceive it to be that serious. They didn't get the memo. The memo, the threat memo got interfered with more often in loose cultures. Now, tight cultures that have had a lot of history of threat.

actually have gotten the kind of sense that, well, sacrificing freedom and constraint during threat makes sense. We need to coordinate and so forth. I'm not saying, again, that all loose cultures did poorly. New Zealand's a good example of an ambidextrous culture that tightened and then loosened when it was safe. Not all tight cultures got it right. Now, there's another kind of evolutionary mismatch we can think about, which is a what if there's not a lot of real threat, but people are amping up the threat and telling people there's a lot of threat.

That we could sort of argue is happening with a lot of populist leaders. There's no like, you know, Trump is not particularly unique in this. It's happened across history that leaders will really,

Really, use a lot of threat talk. Ring the alarm. Ring the alarm. Use a lot of threat talk. Target the groups that are already feeling really threatened and promise to return to a tight order. That's kind of a very obvious cross-cultural psychology application that leaders probably know about. And we now recently started to really quantify threat talk. We have a new threat dictionary. It was published in PNAS recently. It's actually on my website. You can actually upload text. We actually analyze all presidential speeches for how much threat they used.

We could look at what happens when societies feel like they're being threatened. Does it produce the same kind of psychology as objective threat? It turns out it does. So, you know, we really need to be mindful when we're online, when we're listening to speeches, how much is our neurons getting activated based on threat? And is it real or is it imagined? And I think that's a really big challenge that we're having.

right now. But the more tools we have to assess it, the better we are. Now, I think some of these ideas also came into play when you've looked at business applications in terms of the compatibility of organizations. Can you tell us some stories in that area? Yeah, sure. You know,

It's so interesting because, you know, culture is invisible and even the smartest leaders don't necessarily know to think about this deeper cultural iceberg that they're going to really encounter like the Titanic. You know, when they start merging across cultures and again, not all business leaders fall prey to this, but a lot of times we're looking for like strategic compatibilities. Like Daimler Chrysler is a famous example of a merger that was like perfect strategic.

strategic compatibility between the German carmaker and the United States carmaker in terms of cracking into the European market and also lowering costs. But it turns out there are a lot of cultural differences that were making this merger really difficult. And of course, as you know, it went south, it divorced after it had a big honeymoon period. We set out to quantify just how much do these mergers affect the bottom line, affect financial performance?

And we tracked mergers and acquisitions over 30 plus years across 5,000 cross-border organizations. And we wanted to see like, are they, the bigger the tight loose differences in their cultures, are they having financial problems? And for sure they were. Even a small difference in tight loose could cause millions of dollars in financial performance.

And so this is a really important thing to think about before you start merging. Diagnose the cultural differences that you have and be prepared to negotiate them, just like you would negotiate any other aspects of the deal. The same applies to when we send expatriates abroad. We often send the most technically competent people abroad, not the people who are necessarily culturally intelligent.

And this could cause a lot of problems. We've done a paper on this, on tight, loose expatriation. And it turns out that people that have very loose mindsets that go to really tight cultures really struggle, for example. And in part, it could cause lots of psychological problems with the employees

their families, but also it can cost money in terms of returning home early, leaving the organization and so forth. So culture matters and we need to talk more about it. It's really empowering to think about how do we not just understand it, but then use it.

harness the power of these norms that we invented for the betterment of society, organizations, and households. So I want to build on that expatriate example, because you said something, you talked about a CQ, and I had a million questions, and we kind of, the conversation continued, but let's come back to this cultural intelligence. Now, when you think about IQ, I mean, IQ, obviously, as you know very well, is a very controversial measure, but in general, people feel that it's

fairly fixed like you're not going to change your iq in general you can change how much you know you can change a lot of things and i and i hate even saying this but i and then emotional intelligence i don't actually know if people consider it to be something that you can improve or get worse but talk to me about cultural intelligence is this the kind of thing that somebody could manipulate if they take one of your tests and by the way we'll link to your your cq test uh

on your website. But if they take a test and if they're disappointed with their level of CQ, can they work on it or is it a just deal with it type situation? Oh, of course. Yeah, this is a great question. And you know, you can think about CQ in terms of four different dimensions. How much are we thinking about culture? Do we even notice it? That's metacognition. How much do we know about other rules and values and norms of other cultures?

And how much do we feel efficacious to be dealing with cultural differences? Can we adapt our behavior? These are all things that are eminently changeable through research, through travel, through reading, through taking my class. There's a big pitch. Take my global leadership class. Hire a cross-cultural trainer and learn as much as humanly possible about culture. These are not easy things to change, especially now.

at adapting to cultures. It takes practice. It's a lifelong journey, but it's eminently learnable. We can even manipulate it in small ways and see big influences. In one of my classes, I have my students doing a negotiation case, which is between the US and Mexico. And in one condition, I tell them, hey, you're an American, go in, diagnose a

problem. Time is money. What's going on in this factory? You've got to fix this. And I know what's best. I've been doing this a long time. This is kind of a very American mentality, not all Americans. And then on another condition, I say, your goal here is to be culturally intelligent. You've got to figure out what's going on there. Let them talk. Talk indirectly. It literally is a prime that is

I give them, it takes about five minutes to read. And it profoundly affects their performance during this particular negotiation. So even small dosages of this can make a big difference. Really interesting. It also makes me think a little bit of the old police tactic of good guy, bad guy. And you could reframe that as tight guy, loose guy, right? I'm thinking of Steve Martin in the famous Good Cop, Bad Cop.

in the movie, the Pink Panther, where he comes in, he's like, you can just see the same person, you know, it's tight and loose in different contexts, you know, it's just,

Great. Well, so just to finish up, are there – I think everybody's thinking – we touched upon it a little bit. Is this a useful skill when thinking about politics in the United States? We know that right now there's a lot of division in the country. Is this a tight, loose division or is that way too simplistic? Right.

I think it's part of it. I think that we are increasingly in many countries, not just the U.S., but in England, in Poland. I mean, it used to be that it was, you know, kind of the state level, but now it's sort of rural and urban kind of cultures that we see around the world that are very different ecologies. You know, rural contexts are much more stable. They're contexts where the networks are really tight. And urban areas require definitely different schools. They require a loose mindset. They're very dense. They're very...

heterogeneous. There's a lot of unpredictable. I think the more we kind of understand why people have tight or loose mindsets, what about their histories, the more we can negotiate this. And also that we could see that we're actually even more similar than we are different. I want to just give you an example. We published a study a few years ago where we were trying to help understand how to train people in the U.S. and Pakistan to better understand each other.

And in this study, what we did was we actually collected daily diaries from people for about seven days in Pakistan and the US. And we told them, tell us everything what's going on. Like we didn't edit these diaries. And then we randomly assigned people in Pakistan to read for seven days American diaries or Pakistani diaries and vice versa Americans. And the reason why we did this is they had really extreme stereotypes of each other. Right.

When we did the initial qualitative interviews, we asked Pakistanis, they thought Americans were half naked all the time and having beer for breakfast and calling the police on their parents because they were too strict. And Americans, if they knew where Pakistan was, that was a big if. They just only associated Pakistanis as being in mosques all the time.

They didn't think about that, well, they might be playing sports, reading poetry, listening to music. The sampling that they had of each other was so small and it was so extreme in a stereotype. So these diaries, we randomly sent Americans also to read either American or Pakistani diaries. And what was astonishing is to see that people really shifted their perceptions. The amount of distance they saw between each other was really affected by them broadening their sample of situations that they saw.

each other in. And the response at the end of the study was really interesting because they say, hey, we know we're different, but we're not as different as we thought. And so maybe we can do a daily diary study within the U.S. Yes. And then I'll report back on it. Thanks to Michelle Gelfand. That was The Future of Culture.

Thank you for tuning into this episode. Don't forget, we have more than 250 back episodes, so you can explore the future of everything for a long time. Please remember to hit follow in whatever app you're listening to. That'll guarantee that you get alerted to all of the new shows and you never miss the future of anything.

You can connect with me on many social media, usually at RB Altman or at Rust B. Altman on Blue Sky, Mastodon and Threads, and of course, LinkedIn. And you can also follow Stanford Engineering at Stanford Engineering or Stanford ENG.