Hello everyone and welcome to the Minescape Podcast. I'm your host, Tron Carroll.

And if you've ever spent time in different cities throughout the United States or anywhere in the world,

as long as they're very, very different kinds of cities, you may have noticed that different cities have different attitudes towards things like J-walking.

Right? Like you need to get across the street, are you at the corner, do you have the light, etc.

In some cities, who cares? What the stoplight is saying? Who cares where you are? You just cross the street when the road is clear.

In other cities, people will wait there very, very politely, not even imagining that it's the right thing to do to cross before the stoplight says so.

So why is that? How should we understand these differences in behavior?

My guest today is Michelle Gelfand. She's a cultural psychologist, distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland College Park.

And she's thinking about not just individual people, but how entire cultures differ in their attitudes toward cultural norms.

She's written a book called Rulemakers, Rulebreakers, How Tight and Loose Cultures, Why Are Our World.

And the claim is that you can classify different cultures into whether they are tight, that is to say everyone observes the norms very, very carefully, or whether they are loose.

There are norms, but eh, we break them a little bit. And of course, there's many different ways you can classify different cultures.

But the idea is that this particular dimension is especially informative, that this tightness, looseness, axis spectrum, if you like, really tells us a lot about different cultures and how they behave.

So Michelle and I talk about why this is true, why there are tight cultures, why there are loose cultures, what kinds of places have different ones.

And in the real world, which cultures are tight and are loose. And she gives her opinion that in fact the best place to be is in between. Both tightness and looseness have their purposes.

Remember that we have a website for the podcast for PosterousUniverse.com slash podcast. There's a Patreon that you can support us where you get monthly, ask me anything episodes, as well as add free versions of every episode.

So with that, let's go.

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Michelle Gelfon, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Great to be here.

So you have this wonderful new book out that I have to say it struck me, even though you're a psychologist, it struck me as something a physicist would want to write.

It's kind of like a grand unified theory of certain aspects of people and cultures. So why don't you just give us the subway pitch for what you're trying to say in that book?

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