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

These days, pedestrians standing at the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change in places as diverse as Bremen, Boston, or Buenos Aires are unlikely to have lived in this city their whole life. Instead, they could have traveled or migrated from a cultural environment that shaped the likelihood that they will wait for the light to change differently than for the locals of that particular city. My own relatively ‘loose’ Dutch way of navigating the streets of the slightly ‘tighter’ German city of Bremen by bike has, for example, resulted in more than just a few remarks from my fellow road users about how I ought to stick to the rules and turn on my light, use the correct lane or wait for the light to change on a deserted street. Such intercultural interactions are more and more likely to occur under the influence of globalization. People from around the world are in increasing contact with each other, either virtually or in real-life. One of the critical questions for future research is, therefore, how people from tight and loose cultures perceive each other and with what consequences. You might, for example, just be scared for the person in front of you who dares to cross the red light, but you might morally condemn somebody who dares to flirt in the workplace (also see Haidt, Koller & Dias, 1993 for cultural differences in moral judgments).  

The relative tightness or looseness in your own culture, thus, becomes a lens through which you evaluate others’ behavior. As the ancient Greek historian Herodotus already remarked (Holland, 2003), we all tend to be ethnocentric in the sense that we believe that our own culture is ‘better’ than others. Yet all cultural systems have strengths and weaknesses depending on the criterion of interest and one’s vantage point. Judging from a moral standpoint of looseness, tight cultures might, for example, be seen as too restricted, limiting individual freedom, and traditional. From the vantage point of tightness, loose cultures on the other hand are too permissive, chaotic and morally defunct in general.

An illustrative case in point is to think of the lenient Dutch drugs-policies, which can be condemned from a tightness perspective, and the application of capital punishment for drug trafficking in Indonesia, which is morally debatable from a looseness perspective on the other hand. Cross-cultural research that examines these vantage points therefore faces the task of doing justice to this cultural diversity, while at the same time not over-generalizing its findings across members of the cultural groups at study. The multi-level theory of tightness-looseness is a good example of one of the theories that contribute to the development of such an understanding.

Despite the contribution that the theory of cultural tightness makes to our understanding of behavior across cultures, it also raises many questions. Although we now know that there is a significant relationship between the value that is placed in societies on norm-consistent behavior and the degree to which societies are governed by more strict political institutions, it is unclear what the direction of this relationship is exactly (Norenzayan, 2011). Do people create a more structured society because they have a preference for tightness? Or do people prefer tightness because that is the way in which their society is organized? Additionally, it would be meaningful to examine how the theory of cultural tightness relates to other social psychological theories. Recently, Van Kleef and colleagues (2011) as well as Belezza, Gino and Keinan (2014), for example, found that non-normative behavior can in fact have rather positive consequences. People who wear unconventional attire (sweatshirts or sneakers in a business meeting) or act inappropriately (putting their feet up on the table) are perceived as possessing higher social status and higher competence under certain conditions. Interestingly, both of these studies were conducted in countries that were identified as rather ‘loose’ by Gelfand and colleagues: the United States and the Netherlands. Would these effects be found in tighter societies as well? Moreover, what about the countries that form an exception to the general pattern of high population density and high levels of natural or territorial conflict as factors that predict a higher level of tightness? Two countries that score high on the ecological and historical indicators of threat and population density are actually found to rank in the top 5 of most ‘loose’ countries: Israel and the Netherlands (Gelfand et al., 2011). Are there unique elements to the histories of these countries that make them stand out? Or, does this perhaps mean that there is a turning point in the level of ‘optimal’ tightness that a society is willing to develop in order to assure survival? Another phenomenon that illustrates the potential need for societies to achieve a balance between tightness and looseness is the phase of ‘rumspringa’ among certain sects of Amish Baptist communities. During this time of an Amish adolescent’s life, the enforcement of the typically strict parental norms is somewhat relaxed, which allows adolescents to engage in rebellious behavior before they actively choose baptism and become a formal community member.