magazine issue 1 2015 / Issue 24

On kissing in elevators and flirting in the office: A cross-cultural perspective on normative behavior.

• written by Marieke van Egmond
• edited by Diana Onu

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known to wear a simple T-Shirt or sweater, be it to public events or a meeting with investors. The degree to which we adhere to social norms in our everyday lives as adults is instilled in us as children. Just like the degree to which parents socialize their children to be competitive, respectful towards older people, and express themselves, parents around the world differ in the degree to which they raise their children to be obedient, cautious, dutiful and able to self-monitor and self-regulate their behavior (Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni & Maynard, 2003; Keller et al., 2006). The cultural environments in which we grow up, thus, influence our psychological development. On this psychological level, people who grow up in more tight cultural contexts are, for example, more likely than people from looser environments to agree with statements such as “I choose my words with care”, “I am very careful to avoid making mistakes” and “I stick to the rules”. Moreover, if it is more common to adjust your own behavior to the expectations of others within a certain situation, as is the case for tighter cultures, it is functional for people to develop a high degree of self-control. If you are able to monitor and restrain your impulses so that they are in accordance with the social norms that govern the situation, you limit the likelihood of being criticized for inappropriate behavior by others. In contrast, if your society is characterized by primarily weak situations, you will have less of a need to develop such self-restraint and are thus likely to be lower in self-control more generally. This relationship between the societal strength of social norms and self-control was, for example, found for the degree to which people indicate to keep their emotions under control and to resist temptations, such as over-eating. Emerging research in the field of cultural neuroscience suggests that there might even be a genetic component to the development of greater societal tightness in the sense that a relationship has been found between genetic variation and social/cultural variables, including tightness (Mrazek, Chiao, Blizinsky, Lun, & Gelfand, 2013).

The tightness-looseness theory, like many other cross-cultural psychological theories, sees these kinds of ‘micro-level’ psychological preferences of people within cultures as embedded in a larger multi-level system. In these theories, the degree to which people’s individual psychological preferences are affected by more general characteristics of the societies and cultures that they live in, are incorporated into the models. Such characteristics range from macro-economic variables such as the wealth of a nation, or the discrepancy in incomes within a society (e.g., Tomes, 1986) to political variables such as whether the country is governed by an autocratic or democratic system. Other societal-level variables may include the level of religiosity within a country, the degree to which the media is controlled or the severity of punishments in the criminal justice system (e.g., the existence of the death penalty). Historical developments that shaped societies to their present day, such as the Protestant vs. Catholic traditions in Europe, are commonly found to have an influence on the way that contemporary people think, feel and act as well (Inglehart & Welzel, 2010; Van Hoorn & Maseland, 2013). The interesting thing about the theory of tightness-looseness is that it addresses all of these levels more explicitly than other theories, into an integrated framework (Gelfand, 2012). It describes the degree to which people adhere to social norms (tightness) as part of a multi-level system in which rather abstract societal variables such as population density, history of conflict, and resource scarcity (the macro-level) are related to the way that socio-political institutions (government, media, education, law, and religion) are organized within societies (the meso-level), to the structure of everyday situations that people engage in and even to people’s psychological adaptations to these environments (the micro-level). For example, it predicts the likelihood that they will restrain their impulse to cross the street when they want to go home quickly, the street is empty, but the traffic light is red.

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