Social norms are all around us—we follow them constantly. For our species, conforming to social norms is as natural as swimming upstream is for a salmon. Yet, ironically, while social norms are omnipresent, they're largely invisible. Many of us rarely notice how much of our behavior is driven by them—or, more important, how much they're needed.
This is a great human puzzle. How have we spent our entire lives under the influence of such powerful forces and not understood or even noticed their impact?#5893•
At what age would you guess children start picking up on social norms? At age three, when many enter preschool, or at age five, when they go to kindergarten? It turns out that our normative instincts manifest much earlier: Studies show that babies follow norms and are willing to punish norm violators even before they have formal language.#5923•
In a groundbreaking study, researchers demonstrated that infants will indicate a clear preference for animal hand puppets that engage in socially normative behavior (those that help other puppets open a box with a rattle inside and those that return a toy ball that another puppet has dropped) relative to puppets that engage in antisocial behavior (those that prevent other puppets from opening a box and who take toy balls away from them).#5906•
Being in sync with others actually enables us to coordinate to perform complex tasks. In one study, pairs of participants who moved synchronously were later better able to work together to maneuver a ball through a challenging maze as compared to those who didn't. These results tell us how extraordinarily important it is for human groups to follow social norms, especially if they want to succeed at collective activities that require good coordination, such as hunting, foraging, or warfare.#5961•
Chapter 2
The daily life of Spartans likewise resembled life in a military camp. In addition to following highly regulated diets, men and women were expected to frequently exercise to maintain a fit physique. The Spartans found obesity grotesque, so those who were overweight were banished from the city-state. Men and women who failed to pass physical exams (along with those who engaged in illegal activity or didn't marry) were shunned, lost their citizenship, or had to wear special clothing as signs of societal disgrace.
Sparta's cutthroat physical standards even applied to newborn babies: If an infant was deemed weak or deformed, it was left at the foot of a mountain to die.#5959•
This was Athens: a loose place where new ideas clashed, dissolved, and altered, and where dissent was celebrated. The Spartans—prizing order and discipline—would have found Athens to be a pestilent scene of abject eccentricity.#5957•
The tight-loose distinction recurs throughout the history of human societies. Consider how tightness manifested among the Nahua culture of central Mexico in the early to mid-1900s. An ancient culture derived from the great Aztec Empire, the Nahua valued restraint and discipline. Ethnographers living among them documented their many rules and strict punishments, which share some remarkable similarities with Sparta and Singapore.
Guarded and reserved in their interactions, the Nahua believed mannerisms should reflect self-control, a trait that helped them fulfill their society's intense agricultural duties.#5960•
Unlike the Nahua, the Copper Inuit were known to be easygoing about sexual matters. Intercourse was fairly common among adolescents, who had sex even in their parents' house. If and when couples eventually did get married, the process was rather informal: They established a separate home, but returned to their respective families' homes if things didn't work out.
Open marriages were tolerated, including wife-swapping in some cases, which promoted alliances with members of unrelated families.
Men and women had their own roles within the home, but these roles were flexible: women sometimes went hunting, and men learned how to cook and sew.
Within the broader community, only "rudimentary law" existed, according to the legal anthropologist E.
Adamson Hoebel; there was no centralized power to resolve conflicts between community members.
The fact that individuals were left to manage conflict on their own undoubtedly contributed to the high rates of homicide and blood feuds among the Copper Inuit.#5963•
In the twentieth century, anthropologists started to notice these distinctions in many other cultural groups. In the 1930s, American anthropologist Ruth Benedict contrasted cultures as either "Apollonian" or "Dionysian" after the sons of Zeus. Like Apollo, the god of reason and rationality, tight "Apollonian" cultures, such as the Native American Zunis, valued restraint and order.
And like Dionysus, the god of wine, who emphasized abandon, letting go, and excess, loose "Dionysian" cultures, such as the Plains Indians tribes, were prone to wildness and a lack of inhibition.
Later, in the 1960s, Pertti Pelto, a Finnish American anthropologist, officially used the terms tight and loose to differentiate traditional societies.#5962•
Chapter 3
As these studies show, tightness and looseness both have their pros and cons depending on your vantage point. Broadly speaking, loose cultures tend to be open, but they're also much more disorderly. On the flip side, tight cultures have a comforting order and predictability, but they're less tolerant. This is the tight-loose trade-off: advantages in one realm coexist with drawbacks in another.#5966•
Psychologists at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom tested the effectiveness of this "eyes are upon you" practice in fostering norm-compliant behavior. In their university coffee room, the researchers hung a banner with an image of a large pair of eyes above the coffee maker. Next to the machine, there was an "honesty box" as a collection receptacle for people's payments for coffee, tea, or milk.
During weeks when the banner with eyes hung above the coffee machine (as compared with weeks when there was simply a picture of flowers), people put almost three times more money into the honesty box, on average.
In another study, researchers found that hanging up a poster of eyes around a university cafeteria reduced student littering by half.#5965•
Synchronization is also found in the most unexpected of places: the stock market. Analysts had long assumed that behavior on the stock market was primarily related to economic or political variables, like a country's wealth or information transparency. But a group of U.S. professors had a hunch that culture might play a role.
In a paper published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Cheol Eun and his colleagues found that investors in tight cultures are more likely to make similar buying and selling decisions—what they call stock price synchronicity.
In their study of stock price movements across forty-seven countries from 1990 to 2010, tighter countries, such as China, Turkey, and Singapore, featured greater synchronicity than loose nations such as the United States, New Zealand, and Brazil.
Investors from tight areas evidently have more common experiences and perspectives, and are generally more sensitive to peer influence (or "herd behavior"), which leads them to make similar trading decisions.#5964•
Tight cultures generally have low crime, high synchrony, and a high degree of self-control. Loose cultures, on the flip side, can be highly disorganized and suffer from a host of self-regulation failures. Yet loose cultures have a significant edge when it comes to being open—to new ideas, different people, and change—qualities that tight cultures sorely lack.
This is the tight-loose trade-off in action.#5967•
In one study, management professors Roy Chua, Yanning Roth, and Jean-François Lemoine analyzed eleven thousand responses to ninety-nine creativity contests on a crowdsourcing platform where large monetary prizes were given to the best ideas. Creativity challenges posted included designing a new shopping mall in Spain, creating a TV commercial tailored to Egyptian culture, rebranding instant coffee for Australians, and designing a water bottle that was quintessentially "French." People from tight countries weren't only less likely to win these competitions, but also less likely to enter.
Even more telling, judges in tight cultures gave fewer awards to foreign participants' ideas, presumably because these ideas were more radical than those the judges were accustomed to.#5968•
Psychologist Kathleen Vohs and her collaborators found that people who spent time in a messy room performed better on a brainstorming task—specifically, listing more innovative uses for Ping-Pong balls. In another study, people in a messy room indicated that they'd rather order a menu option that was labeled "new" (the creative option) versus one labeled "classic." Tight rooms—and tight cultures—enhance the status quo; by contrast, loose, messy environments may seem chaotic, but they encourage unconventional thinking.#5958•