Rule Makers, Rule Breakers

How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World

Michele Gelfand

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501152955
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Teoria sociale

A celebrated social psychologist offers a radical new perspective on cultural differences that reveals why some countries, cultures, and individuals take rules more seriously and how following the rules influences the way we think and act. In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, Michele Gelfand, "an engaging writer with intellectual range" ( The New York Times Book Review ), takes us on an epic journey through human cultures, offering a startling new view of the world and ourselves. With a mix of brilliantly conceived studies and surprising on-the-ground discoveries, she shows that much of the diversity in the way we think and act derives from a key difference—how tightly or loosely we adhere to social norms. Just as DNA affects everything from eye color to height, our tight-loose social coding influences much of what we do. Why are clocks in Germany so accurate while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why do New Zealand's women have the highest number of sexual partners? Why are red and blue states really so divided? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? Why is the driver of a Jaguar more likely to run a red light than the driver of a plumber's van? Why does one spouse prize running a tight ship while the other refuses to sweat the small stuff? In search of a common answer, Gelfand spent two decades conducting research in more than fifty countries. Across all age groups, family variations, social classes, businesses, states, and nationalities, she has identified a primal pattern that can trigger cooperation or conflict. Her fascinating conclusion: behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat. "A useful and engaging take on human behavior" ( Kirkus Reviews ) with an approach that is consistently riveting, Rule Makers, Ruler Breakers thrusts many of the puzzling attitudes and actions we observe into sudden and surprising clarity.

PART I

Foundations: The Power of a Primal Social Force

1

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A Cure for Chaos

Imagine a world where people are always late. Trains, buses, and airplanes don’t abide by any fixed schedule. In conversations, people interrupt each other frequently, get handsy with new acquaintances, and never make eye contact. People wake up whenever they want and leave their houses with or without putting on clothes. At restaurants—which are open whenever—people demand food that isn’t on the menu, chew with their mouths open, belch frequently, and, without asking, eat off of strangers’ plates. Board a crowded elevator, and you’ll find people singing, shaking their wet umbrellas on each other, and facing the wrong direction. In schools, students talk on their phones throughout lectures, pull pranks on the teachers, and cheat openly on exams. On city streets, no one pays attention to stoplights, and people drive on both sides of the road. Pedestrians litter heedlessly, steal strangers’ bicycles off racks, and curse loudly. Sex isn’t reserved for private settings like bedrooms; it happens on public transportation, on park benches, and in movie theaters.

This is a world without social norms—a world where people don’t have any socially agreed-upon standards of behavior.

Luckily, humans—much more than any other species—have an uncanny ability to develop, maintain, and enforce social norms to avoid the above scenarios. In fact, we’re a super-normative species: Without even realizing it, we spend a huge amount of our lives following social rules and conventions—even if the rules don’t make any sense.

Consider a few examples: In New York City on the last day of every year, millions of people stand in the freezing cold and cheer wildly at a ball dropping from a pole. There are the equally bizarre New Year’s practices of eating twelve grapes at midnight with great passion in Spain, eating a spoonful of lentils for good luck in Chile, and filling barbed wire with flammable material and swinging it around one’s head in Scotland. And every year, thousands of people excitedly crowd into stadiums to cheer, holler, and even scream as they watch other people tackle each other, play music, or tell jokes.

These routines are mostly carried out in large groups, but many of our behaviors that are less crowd-encouraged are just as odd. Why do women wear a colorless white dress on one of the happiest days of their lives? Why do people cut down perfectly good trees in December, decorate them, and then let them die in their living rooms? In the United States, why do we forbid our children from talking to strangers but, on October 31, encourage them to put on costumes and roam the streets begging adults for candy? Around the world we observe equally puzzling behaviors. For example, why on certain days in India do millions of people joyfully gather to wade in a frigid, polluted river in celebration of Kumbh Mela?

From the outside, our social norms often seem bizarre, but from the inside, we take them for granted. Some social norms are codified into regulations and laws (obey stop signs; don’t steal someone’s bicycle); others are unspoken (don’t stare at people on the train; cover your mouth when you sneeze). They can manifest in daily, mundane behaviors, such as putting clothes on or saying hello when you answer the phone and goodbye when you hang up. Or they can take the form of the ritualistic, learned behaviors we perform at out-of-the-ordinary, special occasions, such as the Kumbh Mela or Halloween.

Social norms are all around us—we follow them constantly. For our species, conforming to social norms is as natural as swimming upstream is for a salmon. Yet, ironically, while social norms are omnipresent, they’re largely invisible. Many of us rarely notice how much of our behavior is driven by them—or, more important, how much they’re needed.

This is a great human puzzle. How have we spent our entire lives under the influence of such powerful forces and not understood or even noticed their impact?

BORN TO RUN . . . OR FOLLOW

At what age would you guess children start picking up on social norms? At age three, when many enter preschool, or at age five, when they go to kindergarten? It turns out that our normative instincts manifest much earlier: Studies show that babies follow norms and are willing to punish norm violators even before they have formal language.

In a groundbreaking study, researchers demonstrated that infants will indicate a clear preference for animal hand puppets that engage in socially normative behavior (those that help other puppets open a box with a rattle inside and those that return a toy ball that another puppet has dropped) relative to puppets that engage in antisocial behavior (those that prevent other puppets from opening a box and who take toy balls away from them).

In fact, by the time we’re three years old, we’re actively berating norm violators. In one study, two-year-olds and three-year-olds drew pictures or made clay sculptures next to two puppets who also made their own crafts. When one of the puppets left, the other puppet began to destroy the picture or the sculpture that the puppet had made. Two-year-olds seemed almost entirely unperturbed at seeing this, but approximately one-quarter of the three-year-olds spoke up, saying to the rude puppet things like “No, you’re not supposed to do that!” Young children will declare their disapproval in situations that are not ethically charged as well. After being taught a certain arbitrary behavior and then witnessing a puppet incorrectly imitating it, three-year-olds vigorously protested. Quite clearly, children learn not only to interpret social norms from their environment, but also to actively shape and enforce them.

Humans have evolved to have a very sophisticated normative psychology that develops as soon as we leave the womb. In fact, it makes us unique among species. To their credit, many species do engage in highly sophisticated social learning. The nine-spined stickleback fish, for instance, will prioritize feeding spots where other fish are feeding over relatively empty locations. Norway rats will eat food that they see a demonstrator rat eating. And birds are also keenly attuned to their flock’s didactic songs when making foraging decisions. But there’s no evidence so far that animals copy others for social reasons such as simply fitting in and belonging.

Researchers in Germany conducted a very creative experiment that illustrated just this point. They designed a puzzle box with three compartments, each with a small hole at the top. At the experiment’s beginning, subjects—both young children and chimpanzees—learned that dropping balls into one of the box’s compartments would get rewarded with a tasty snack. Next, they were shown another child or chimpanzee interacting with the box, and they saw that he could get food after dropping pellets into a completely different compartment. When the subjects took their turn at the puzzle box, an experimenter took note of where they dropped the balls. Children often changed compartments to match the behavior of other children, especially when those children were watching them. This suggests that children don’t just change strategies because they think their peer’s strategy is better; they also do it for social reasons—as a sign of affiliation and conformity. By comparison, few chimps switched strategies to match the behavior of their fellow chimps. Chimpanzees, like many nonhuman animals, might have the ability to learn from each other, but they don’t generally apply that social learning absent a material benefit. Only humans appear to follow social norms to be part of the group.

THE POWER OF SOCIAL NORMS

Imagine you’ve signed up to participate in a psychological study. After arriving at a laboratory, you’re asked to sit in a room with about eight other participants. The researcher comes in and gives each person a piece of paper showing one line on the left side of the page and multiple lines of differing lengths on the right side of the page labeled Line A, Line B, and Line C, as seen in Figure 1.1. He asks you all to determine independently which line on the right side of the page is the same length as the line on the left. It’s completely obvious to you that Line A is the correct answer. He then calls on participants one by one to give their responses. The other participants all answer Line B; no one says Line A. You’re the second-to-last person to state your answer. Will you stick with A or switch to B?

If you’d taken part in this experiment, it’s likely you would have questioned your judgment and agreed with the group at some point. That’s what social psychologist Solomon Asch found when he ran this now classic study in 1956. In Asch’s study, each participant, unbeknownst to them, was in a group made up of pretend research subjects, who were told to give a clearly incorrect answer on a number of trials. Asch’s results showed that out of the 123 participants across groups, three-quarters sided with the group on at least one occasion. That is, the majority changed their answers to match the wrong but popular choice.

Figure 1.1. Solomon Asch’s line-judgment task.

The results of this quirky little experiment speak to a broader truth. Without even realizing it, we’re all prone to following group norms that can override our sense of right and wrong.

Outside of the laboratory, we follow many norms that arguably seem irrelevant. Take, for example, the handshake, arguably the most common mode of greeting people in the world. Scholars speculate that the handshake may have originated in ancient Greece in the ninth century BC as a gesture designed to show a new acquaintance that you weren’t concealing any weapons. Today, few of us walk around with axes or swords hidden under our sleeves, but the handshake continues to serve as a physical accompaniment to how we greet others. Its original purpose disappeared, but the handshake remained.

Figure 1.2. Handshake between King Shalmaneser III of Assyria and a Babylonian ruler found on a ninth-century BC relief.

Perhaps even more puzzling is that we sometimes follow social norms that are downright dangerous. Take the festival of Thaipusam, a Hindu celebration engaged in by Tamil communities around the world. As part of Thaipusam, participants take part in the “Kavadi Attam,” which means “Burden Dance” in English, and for good reason. A testament of commitment to Lord Murugan, the Hindu god of war, the Kavadi requires people to choose their “burden,” or method of self-inflicted pain. It’s fairly common, for example, to pierce one’s skin, tongue, cheeks, or all three with “vel” skewers—holy spears or hooks. Others elect to wear a portable shrine, which is decorated and attached to the body with up to 108 vels piercing the skin. On the island of Mauritius, which serves as a major site for the Thaipusam festival, participants must climb a mountain to reach the Temple of Murugan. The trip is over four hours, during which participants must carry their burden while walking barefoot on uneven surfaces. To make things more difficult, some choose to conduct the entire walk while strapped to planks of nails.

Although few rituals can stack up to the torturous Kavadi Attam, many others are similarly arduous. For example, in San Pedro Manrique, Spain, June 23 marks the beginning of a summer solstice ritual. Each year, around three thousand spectators pack into the tiny village of six hundred residents to watch volunteers walk across twenty-three feet of burning coals as part of a long-standing local tradition. Some people walk in fulfillment of a community vow, while others simply get caught up in the excitement. Volunteers often carry relatives on their backs as they cross the white-hot walkway, which can reach temperatures as high as twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit. After the ritual is over, people rejoice and celebrate for the rest of the night.

The question is, why do they do it?

THE TIES THAT BIND

Whether it’s something simple like the handshake or a complex ritual like the Kumbh Mela, social norms are far from random. Rather, they evolve for a highly functional reason: They’ve shaped us into one of the most cooperative species on the planet. Countless studies have shown that social norms are critical for uniting communities into cooperative, well-coordinated groups that can accomplish great feats.

Social norms are, in effect, the ties that bind us together, and scientists have collected evidence to prove it. For example, a team of anthropologists had a rare opportunity to study the actual physiology of the fire-walking ritual’s attendees in San Pedro Manrique. They strapped transmitter belts to fire-walkers and attendees to measure their heart rates during the ritual. The results showed a remarkable synchronization in the heart rates of ritual participants, as well as their friends and family in the audience. Specifically, when participants’ hearts began to beat faster, their friends’ and families’ hearts also sped up. Quite literally, the fire-walking ritual resulted in many hearts beating as one, suggesting that rituals can increase community cohesion.

Some of the same anthropologists who studied heart rates during fire-walking also conducted research on performers in the Kavadi Attam. In these investigations, an experimenter approached participants immediately after their march and asked them how much they’d be willing to anonymously donate to their temple. The result was a powerful testament to the social glue of ritual: Those who performed in the Kavadi Attam donated significantly more than did people who’d been praying in the temple three days earlier—about 130 rupees as compared with 80 rupees, a difference equivalent to half a day’s salary for an unskilled worker.

We needn’t travel to faraway places to see how following social norms, like participating in rituals, can...