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

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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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.