Cultural Differences May Affect The Outcome Of A Pandemic: New Research : Goats and Soda : NPR
Some Interesting societal comparisons.... I would call us a loose agglomeration of feline propensities...
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
February 23, 20216:54 PM ET
Fran Kritz
On Monday, the U.S. reached a heartbreaking 500,000 deaths from COVID-19.
But widespread death from COVID-19 isn't necessarily inevitable.
Data from Johns Hopkins University shows that some countries have had few cases and fewer deaths per capita. The U.S. has had 152 deaths per 100,000 people, for example, versus .03 in Burundi and .04 in Taiwan.
There are many reasons for these differences among countries, but a study in The LancetPlanetary Health published last month suggests that a key factor may be cultural.
The study looks at "loose" nations — those with relaxed social norms and fewer rules and restrictions — and "tight" nations, those with stricter rules and restrictions and harsher disciplinary measures. And it found that "loose" nations had five times more cases (7,132 cases per million people versus 1,428 per million) and over eight times more deaths from COVID-19 (183 deaths per million people versus 21 per million) than "tight" countries during the first ten months of the pandemic.
Michele Gelfand, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in cross cultural psychology, previously published work on tight- and loose- rules nations in Scienceand in a 2018 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.
Gelfand says her past research suggested that tight cultures may be better equipped to respond to a global pandemic than loose cultures because their citizensmay be more willing to cooperate with rules, and that the pandemic "is the first time we have been able to examine how countries around the world respond to the same collective threat simultaneously."
For the Lancet article, the researchers examined data from 57 countries in the fall of 2020 using the online database "Our World in Data," which provides daily updates on COVID-19 cases and deaths. They paired this information with previous research classifying each of the countries on a scale of cultural tightness or looseness. Results revealed that nations categorized as looser — like the U.S., Brazil and Spain — experienced significantly more cases and deaths from COVID-19 by October 2020 than countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, which have much tighter cultures.
NPR talks to Gelfand about the findings and about how understanding the concepts of "looser" and "tighter" nations might lead to measures that help prevent COVID-19 cases and deaths as the pandemic continues.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your past research bring you to your current findings about the pandemic?
One of the things I've been looking at for many years is how strictly cultures abide by social norms. All cultures have social norms that are kind of unwritten rules for social behavior. We don't face backward in elevators. We don't start singing loudly in movie theaters. And we behave this way because it helps us to coordinate with other human beings, to help our societies function. [Norms] are really the glue that keep us together.
One thing we learned during our earlier work is that some cultures abide by social norms quite strictly. And these differences are not random. Tight cultures tend to have had a lot of threat in their histories from Mother Nature, like disasters, famine and pathogen outbreaks, and non-natural threats such as invasions on their territory. And the idea is when you have a lot of collective threat you need strict rules. They help people coordinate and predict each other's behavior. So, in a sense, you can think about it from an evolutionary perspective that following rules helps us to survive chaos and crisis.
Can you change a culture to make it tighter?
Yes, but you need leadership to tell you this is a really dangerous situation. And you need people from the bottom up being willing to sacrifice some of the freedom for rules to keep the whole country safe. And that's what's happening in New Zealand, where they had few cases and few deaths per million, and where they're really very egalitarian. My interpretation is that people said look, "We all have to follow the rules to keep people safe."
Can you give us some examples of how tight and loose cultures operate when there's not a pandemic going on?
Tight cultures have a lot of order and discipline — they have a lot less crime and more monitoring of [citizens'] behavior and [more] security personnel and police per capita. Loose cultures struggle with order.
Loose cultures corner the market on openness toward people from different races and religion and are far more creative in terms of idea generation and ability to think outside the box. Tight cultures struggle with openness.
Do you think it's possible to tighten up as needed?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean I would call that ambidexterity — the ability to tighten up when there's an objective threat and to loosen up when the threat is diminished. People who don't like the idea of tightening would need to understand that this is temporary and the quicker we tighten the quicker it will reduce the threat and the quicker we can get back to our freedom-loving behavior.
I imagine people are worried, though, about long-term consequences of tightening up.
We shouldn't confuse authoritarianism with tightness.
Following rules in terms of wearing masks and social distancing will help get us back faster to opening up the economy and to saving our freedom. And we can also look to other cultures that have been able to open up with greater success, like Taiwan for example. Increased self-regulation and [abidance of] physical distancing, wearing masks and avoiding large crowds allowed the country to keep both the infection and mortality rates low without shutting down the economy entirely. We need to think of this as being situation-specific in terms of following certain types of rules.
It requires using cultural intelligence to understand when we deploy tightness and when we deploy looseness. And my optimistic view is that we're going to learn how to communicate about threats better, how to nudge people to follow rules, so that people understand the danger but also feel empowered to deal with it.
[In the U.S., for example, we] need to have national unity to cope with collective threat so that we are prepared as a nation to come together like we have in the past during other collected threats, such as after September 11.
Fran Kritz is a health policy reporter based in Washington, D.C., who has contributed to The Washington Post and Kaiser Health News. Find her on Twitter: @fkritz
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NOT from the article - the article says it in a different way, but it still means the same thing. A society wherein the people are more concerned about the collective, where the health and life of others is more important than an individual's rights and freedoms, has pretty well contained the virus. I've been saying that on this site now and then for almost a year, because I have personally experienced the benefit of living where the cultural tradition has contained the virus, whereas I have witnessed from afar the horrific result of selfishness, lack of leadership and a total mixture of application of and adherence to effective guidlines. .
Thank you, Buzz, for reiterating that which should be painfully obvious to the casual observer.
What I still do not get is why some people of the US did not look at the mask wearing, social distancing thing as a means of mitigation of Covid, but instead looked upon it as an affront to their rights and an attempt to force them to comply just because.?
Morning Thomas.... Your question is easily answered...... Because their boy in the WH told them so.
Just imagine how many fewer would have died at this point if Trump had decided to not play down the pandemic in an effort to get reelected....
I think it is more symbiotic than that. The reason (Maybe? Probably?) that Trump stood up and said, "I've got it under total control." was as much for his own benefit as it was to signal to his base, because of his narcissism. In other words, he was projecting his control so he could be seen as being in control. Followers then took that and said, "Look! No Problem!" .... A positive feedback loop with no means of modulation.
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We're aligned Thomas.....
Good piece. Having traveled as much as I have I would agree with what was put forth.
Our country, our people, and our way of governing is still a work in progress, and the jury is still out on if we are the long term solution to provide a best way to organize a society. How do you think the US would fair if we had 1.4 billion people to organize like China does? I always come back to the fact that both China and India obtained their opportunity to organize themselves by their choice of governmental rule at the same time. Take a look at where each of them as a country is.
Hopefully not murder tens of millions of them to properly "organize" them like China did.
30-55 million dead during the "great leap forward". Mao just making sure that his "little red book" was the unchallenged law of the land.
I'm sure you applied the word "organized" very loosely Sean.....
Good article,
I've lived in a number of countries other than the US and done business in dozens more and would have to agree with the article. I'm not sure why people in the US consider wearing a mask during the pandemic to be an affront to their liberties even though it killed over 500,000 Americans. But ''by god'' it's my right to be a frickin' idiot.
Ummm ... What the article highlights is that 'tight' cultures are based upon very conservative expectations of conformity to social standards. Social conservatism has been demonstrated to provide better response to the pandemic than social liberalism.
So you admit that you are "all in" on the social conservatism practiced say in China..... or by religious "murican" wingnuts contrary to what the First Amendment to our constitution outlines..... Not that we had any doubts.
So you admit that you want to eliminate social standards altogether and become an anything goes society. It's rather amazing that someone claiming a military background is advocating social liberalism. When did the military become an anything goes democracy?
I uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States..... What's your excuse Nerm?
Upholding the Constitution is quite different than interpreting the Constitution so that anything goes. What's your justification for twisting the Constitution into something it's not?
What's your excuse for not not understanding that the founding fathers who wrote the constitution were liberals...?
But they weren't anything goes social liberals. They weren't neoliberals. They weren't even secular liberals.
Well the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights sure are full of Socially Liberal statements....... So guess what they hoped for in the new nation they were trying to build...
Yes. That is the exact premise of the article.
Unfortunately, being socially conservative means different things in different spaces. Socially conservative, or strict culturally, in the context of this article, means abiding by rules that you may not agree with if even if you see them as not directly applying to oneself, and not, "I'm going to do it if I damn well want to," attitude of many of what Americans consider to be "socially conservative."
I disagree. Social conservatism is an expectation of conformity to social standards. Cultural cohesion is a determinant for those social standards. Different cultures have different social standards but the conservative expectation within each culture is to conform to that culture's social standards.
When cultural cohesion begins eroding then the social standards fall apart. Sub-cultures will fill that vacuum with their own social standards. And those sub-cultures will be in conflict with each other. That's the difference between a big tent and a campground made up of a coalition of smaller tents.
Psssst..... By the way.... Even Christ was a social liberal Nerm!
Depends on who you ask what the social standards are. That, in the context of the article, leads one towards the realization that the US has Loose social standards. A lot of the people who self define (as well as are defined within and by American culture) as socially conservative were out protesting mask wearing and social distancing because they felt that their rights, which many consider the basis of American culture, were being infringed by the government. In this case, the socially conservative expectation would be to not follow the guidelines, which would not help with the containment of COVID 19. So, are they actually socially conservative or just a splinter group of sub-culture?
Correct. The loose social standards (in the context of the article) in the US points to a lack of cultural cohesion within the US. That's why cultural appeals to diversity won't unify the US.
At one time there was a unifying cultural foundation within the US. Yes, that American culture was more of an arbitrary creation based upon myths and legends but, nevertheless, provided sufficient commonality to allow cultural cohesion and unity within the US. IMO being an American was a distinct cultural identity grounded primarily in patriotism and national pride.
Yes, the United States has splintered into sub-cultures, each striving to maintain their specific cultural identity while demanding equal participation. The United States has become a separate-but-equal society. An American culture based upon patriotism and national pride no longer provides adequate cultural cohesion to unify the country.
Cultural appeals to diversity cannot unify the United States. A separate-but-equal society will partition itself until the United States becomes like Europe, Africa, or South America.
Actually, I think that the loose standards do not point to cultural norms but rather point to the political divisions and the politicians who exploit these divisions to create groups of "others." This fracturing is not due to culture, it is by design and can be laid directly at the feet of such individuals as Rush Limbaugh, who really started the "I am a poor, abused white guy and I am going to tell you just how to think," followed by his clones all the way up to Tucker Carlson, who could not tell the truth if you wrote it on tape and stuck it across his mouth. And those are only the disingenuous from the right side of the spectrum. I note them in particular because they seem to hold sway with a large portion of the people on the right, whereas the left-tern side of the political spectrum has a more diffuse and divided presence. The birth of the internet also figures in to this political, not cultural, difference.
I think culturally we are more alike than different. When I say that, I mean that the number one cultural identifier for Americans is probably "Freedom". We, for the most part and with some glaring exceptions, can do as we see fit. That is and should be our unifier. As long as we do not restrict the rights and freedoms of people, they will come together. As was mentioned above, there are groups who do not want this to occur, so they continually foment distrust between all the different groups for the sake of political traction.
We don't need more walls built between people or canyons dug to separate the groups. We need the leaders of these groups and the members themselves to actually talk to one another, one to one. This is sometimes difficult (Ha! Now there is an understatement!), but by actually talking we can can open doors in the walls and build bridges over the chasms. It works. I have seen it work. We must start soon.
IMO that is a malformed argument due to the isolating and confining nature of freedom. One person's freedom ends where another person's freedom begins. Freedom, in its simplest form, actually requires anti-social behavior that cannot unify.
The idea of granting more freedoms either necessitates building walls between people - or - allowing disparities in the granting of freedoms. Political divisions arise when the power of government is used to selectively encroach upon freedoms of some for the benefit of others.
A cultural identity based upon freedom would be a disaster. Society would become splintered over trying to protect freedoms and obtain freedoms.
Only if one is an ass and does not flip over the coin that says "Freedoms" to read the other side that says "Responsibilities". One does not come without the other. It is not all Dionysian play time at the Stew and Brew. Responsible behavior is what is necessary. Respectful behavior. That is what is missing from the political side. People watch the politicians behaving in disrespectful, non-mannerly waysand inculcate that into their system of norms, their cultural mindset. You and I see the result of this every day on this forum. Disrespect of not just the ideas, but disrespect of the messengers of the ideas, because they bear the ideas and give them voice. That is what needs to change. That is the problem, and the solution starts with politicians who will lay down there swords and talk. Not fight to the death. Talk.
I did not mention granting new freedoms.
Cultural standards and values that include responsibility toward each other and respect for each other would be a characteristic of a 'tight' society, as described in the seed article. Cultural enforcement of a social contract based upon mutual responsibility and respect would necessitate imposing conservative limitations on individual freedom.
IMO a 'tight' nation, in the context of the article, values society over self. As we have seen throughout history that unifying cultural cohesion can be abused by concentrating authoritarian enforcement of cultural standards and values in elite institutions. Without checks and balances, democracy will disrupt a social contract based upon mutual responsibility and respect and erode unifying cultural cohesion.
IMO 'loose' nations, in the context of the article, value self over society. 'Loose' nations devolve into elitism and democracy as the means to weaken conservative imposition of societal standards and values on individual freedoms which naturally erodes cultural cohesion.
Consider that what is considered traditional American culture emphasized independence rather than freedom.
Attempting to explain the difference between independence and freedom would require a rather lengthy discussion. IMO the American idea of independence has its roots in the Protestant Christianity of northern Europe that had incorporated northern European pagan beliefs and values. That doesn't mean American independence is a Christian concept but rather that American independence is based upon northern European cultural traditions that reject orthodoxy.
Northern Europeans imposed Protestant beliefs and values (which are not religious) upon Christianity; reshaping Christianity according to northern European cultural traditions and values. Those Protestant beliefs and values imposed upon Christianity came from pagan and secular cultural traditions and values of northern Europe.
American culture has been shaped by northern European Protestant cultural traditions just as those northern European Protestant cultural traditions shaped Christianity in a rejection of orthodoxy. The United States was founded as a Protestant nation but that doesn't mean the United States was founded as a Christian nation. American independence is modeled upon the tradition of independence exemplified by John the Baptist rather than the orthodox conformity advocated by St. Peter.
I think natural selection plays a role. For instance, everyone knows that congregating and projecting your voice is a proven way to spread the virus. Yet there are fat, old people with multiple comorbidities who insist on going to church in a pandemic and singing their little weak hearts out, presumably because god will protect them. Thinning the herd is part of life on earth.
Well, if they are over 75, they have probably done most of their gene passing anyway.
But, in a society with stricter social norms, these people would stay in, and more than likely for more than one reason. They might be overall more respectful of their gov't's pronouncements. They may be afraid of the social stigma of doing discouraged actions. They might have some fear of retaliation from their gov't or society. Overall, I should think that it is the idea that, though we may not know what exactly the right mitigatioin efforts are, the socially conscious will be more apt to do all of them in a more consistent manner.