The New Norm

Invisibilia

NPR

Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Science

4.5 • 22.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2016

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

You probably don't even notice them, but social norms determine so much of your behavior - how you dress, talk, eat and even what you allow yourself to feel. These norms are so entrenched we never imagine they can shift. But Alix Spiegel and new co-host, Hanna Rosin, examine two grand social experiments that attempt to do just that: teach McDonald's employees in Russia to smile, and workers on an oil rig how to cry.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Invisibilia Amali Spiegel, and I'm Louis Miller.
0:03.4	So let's begin in Moscow, Pushkin Square.
0:08.0	Okay, I'm Igor Karaganov, Russian guy.
0:11.9	Russian guy, Igor Karaganov was there.
0:14.7	He was standing in front of a restaurant where he'd worked in the early 90s when he was just a teenager.
0:19.7	A place he said that was so popular, his employer had a higher security to control the crowd.
0:25.3	Two of them would stay here, two of them would stay there at the entrance and at the exit.
0:32.0	They would hear all the time.
0:34.4	Had to be there because this restaurant was the beginning of a very unexpected revolution in Russia.
0:41.5	Now you've probably heard of this restaurant.
0:43.8	It's pretty famous and so is its logo.
0:46.3	You couldn't see on the building right behind you a shadow of Big M. You see?
0:56.8	The Big M of McDonald's.
0:59.6	In America it's so common it feels as inevitable as sky.
1:03.6	But the thing you need to know is that bringing the McDonald's M to Russia was the opposite of inevitable.
1:10.9	After my first trip when I was asked can we open McDonald's in Russia, I said no.
1:16.1	It's impossible.
1:18.7	Impossible says Michael Girling.
1:20.7	One of the guys charged with opening that first McDonald's in Russia in the late 80s for three main reasons.
1:27.6	Number one bureaucracy in Soviet Russia was so insane that getting even a single day's worth of yeast
1:35.4	required massive paperwork.
1:37.8	You had to write an application and then turn an order and then the delivery papers and then the
	...

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