Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 148. Oh, oh, oh, oh. And, um, and, uh, and, uh, We are about to sit down with psychologist Michelle Gelfend.

I'm ready to rock and roll.

Oh good, well let's rock and roll. Let me get my guitar.

Okay.

So my name is Michelle Galfan.

I'm a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, and I'm a cross-cultural psychologist so I look at universal and culture specific

aspects of human behavior all around the world and within the United States and

use a wide variety of methods from field and lab and computational

neuroscience methods to understand all things cultural.

Gelfin directs the Culture Lab at the University of Maryland where they study the strength of cultural norms, as well as negotiation, conflict, revenge, forgiveness, and diversity.

In the interview, we will discuss her new book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, How Tight and Loose Cultures

Wire Our World.

In the book, Michelle presents her research into norms and presents a fascinating new idea.

It isn't norms themselves that predict how cultures will react, evolve, innovate, and engaging conflict, but how cultures value their own norms.

She categorizes all human cultures into two kinds, tight or loose, and argues that all human behavior depends on whether a person lives in a

tight culture or a loose culture.

Norms. Unspoken rules of behavior and shared social conventions that we just sort of follow and perform without really thinking about why we do that. For instance, we shake hands with strangers, we applaud at performances and after speeches.

And unless you live in Morocco, Thailand, Yemen, Tunisia, Turkey, or the Maldives,

you probably put a tree inside your living room last year,

decorated it with tinsel and lights, put gifts wrapped in paper underneath which no one was allowed

to open and then watched it slowly die before a special day when it was

...