Do we want to be tight or loose?

This being prompted by an article by one Michele Gelfand on the front of the Journal section of the Guardian of Monday 17th September, 2018. Seven years after the publication of what might be called the founding paper (reference 1). A Monday morning space filler! Entertainments along the way include references 2 and 3.

Gelfand appears to be a media-savvy academic from the University of Maryland. She also appears to attract a noticeable amount of funding from defence flavoured institutions – something which one was more aware of twenty or thirty years ago than one is now. See reference 4.

She appears to be the inventor, or at least the propagator, of tight-loose (TL) studies. That is to say the study of countries, states and provinces organised by looking at their position on the tight-loose spectrum. Tight being lots of rules, lots of acceptance of rules; loose being much more open and sloppy. I quote:

‘Tight cultures have strong norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures are the opposite. In the US, a relatively loose culture, a person can’t get far down their street without witnessing a slew of casual norm violations, from littering to jaywalking to arguing loudly on the street. By contrast, in Singapore, gum is banned, streets are pristine and jaywalkers are rare. Or consider Brazil, a relatively loose culture, where arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. In fact, if you want to be sure someone will arrive on time in Brazil, you say ‘com pontualidade britânica’, which means ‘with British punctuality’. Meanwhile, in Japan, a tight country, there’s a huge emphasis on punctuality – trains almost never arrive late. On the rare days that delays do occur, some train companies will hand out cards to passengers that they can submit to their bosses to excuse a tardy arrival’.

She argues first that position of this spectrum has considerable explanatory power; second that different positions on this spectrum bring different costs and benefits; and, third that any particular place’s position will often be explained by history or justified by circumstances.

She tells a good story – but stretching it to cover the Brexit vote here in the UK – a matter which she probably knew was very important to the Guardian and its readers – was stretching things a bit thin. Nevertheless, I was sufficiently impressed with it all to find myself a copy of reference 1. But here the impressing stopped and I was disappointed at what I thought was the poor standard of presentation and the apparent banality of some of the associations.

We start with the work of anthropologists on what used to be called primitive people, where there does indeed seem to be an association between tightness of institution and high levels of threat, of one sort or another. The theory has promise. And I associate to the sprawling, brutal and rule-bound empires of the Austro-Hungarians (see Švejk), the Russians (both Romanov and Soviet varieties) and the Ottomans (see Armenians). All empires which might be said to have suffered from agoraphobia on account of their size and lack of natural boundaries.

Figure 1

In the present exercise, covering 33 nations, TL is measured by means of questionnaire, with about 200 filled in for each country, the content of which is illustrated at Figure 1 above, but while the authors had clearly done quite a lot of work to come up with this questionnaire (described in the supplementary material), I did not ferret out the method of selection of respondents or the way in which the questionnaire was administered, both presumably online. The outcome of this part of the work is summarised at Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 (more legible if you click to enlarge)

I thought alphabetic presentation was unhelpful here and that descending or ascending tightness might have been more helpful – going so far as to move the thing into Excel for the purpose myself, an operation which took perhaps half an hour. Together with some narrative accounting for the oddities therein. For example, the top six being Pakistan (tightest), Malaysia, India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway and the bottom six being Brazil, Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, Estonia, Ukraine (loosest). While what was West Germany is right in the middle.

We then got a rather dense section which I think purported to show how TL score was related to all kinds of indicators about history, society and economy. It is suggested, for example, that tightness is associated with more law and order and more church. Quoting a little loosely: ‘in tight nations there are more police per capita, stricter punishments, and lower murder rates and burglary rates and overall volume of crime. Tight nations are more religious, with more people attending religious services per week’. I felt that they could have made this section a lot more accessible than they did.

Nevertheless, the story does seem to be that there is some interaction between the personalities of people and the institutions of the countries in which they live. The TL score, as it were, pervades the life of a country, from top to bottom, from distal (glossed as foreign affairs) to proximal (glossed as home affairs), 24 by 7. There is hope for those of us on the left who hope for a similar interaction between collectivist personalities and collectivist institutions – like state run schools and railways. Bearing in mind the counter example of the Soviet authorities failing to drive the deity into extinction or even disuse in near a hundred years of institutional denial. A counter example perhaps countered by the observation that deviant religion can sometimes be a reaction to harsh, colonial or otherwise unpopular regimes – thinking here particularly of Ireland and Poland.

With the paper ending on a rather platitudinous note. I quote the closing words:

‘… Such beliefs fail to recognize that tight and loose cultures may be, at least in part, functional in their own ecological and historical contexts. Understanding tight and loose cultures is critical for fostering cross-cultural coordination in a world of increasing global interdependence’.

I associate to unkind colleagues in a branch of government through which I once happened to be passing, who would talk of  ‘all motherhood and apple-pie’, when taking a pop at someone else’s work.

But the upside was all the interesting by-ways which I was prompted to explore, reminding me that the nominal subject or conclusion of a paper is not always where one gets the benefit. Some papers can do rather badly on the first count and do very well on the second; despite appearances the authors have done good work!

Furthermore, one can only admire the pluck and energy of someone – presumably Gelfand – who drives through the collation and analysis of statistics of this sort from so many different countries. Just think of all the team work involved. Just think of all the definitions of population and murder one has to grapple with – with four or five definitions of population in the UK alone. One shudders to think there how many there might be when it comes to murder.

References

Reference 1: Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study - Michele J. Gelfand, Jana L. Raver, Lisa Nishii, Lisa M. Leslie, Janetta Lun, Beng Chong Lim, Lili Duan, Assaf Almaliac and others – 2011.

Reference 2: Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals - Robinson, W.S. – 1950. A classic attack on the then all too prevalent practise of making inferences about people from analyses of areas.

Reference 3: The Big-Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives - John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. – 1999. A history of the widely used ‘Big-Five’ model of personality and the elicitation of that personality from questionnaires.

Reference 4: https://www.michelegelfand.com/.