Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 172. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, and do me. 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.

Galfin 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 engage 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

okay to tear open the paper and reveal what was inside.

Then you took off the decoration, threw away the tree, or if it was artificial, you stored it for next year,

...