The Psychology of Threat and Tightness

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There's something about human nature around being kind of prevention focus or risk Avoidant when you're um, but it's a really interesting question now. We're trying to design experiments to figure out how do you You loosen up a context that's getting too tight because as I mentioned we know the trade-off of tight loose is order openness In general and we know that when cultures are pretty tight they start becoming more ethnocentric so we don't want to be artificially tight. Um, by the way we just recently created a new computational dictionary to assess threat in social media To then track what's happening when we see a lot of threat in presidential speeches or in uh, facebook or otherwise

Physicists study systems that are sufficiently simple that it’s possible to find deep unifying principles applicable to all situations. In psychology or sociology that’s a lot harder. But as I say at the end of this episode, Mindscape is a safe space for grand theories of everything. Psychologist Michele Gelfand claims that there’s a single dimension that captures a lot about how cultures differ: a spectrum between “tight” and “loose,” referring to the extent to which social norms are automatically respected. Oregon is loose; Alabama is tight. Italy is loose; Singapore is tight. It’s a provocative thesis, back up by copious amounts of data, that could shed light on human behavior not only in different parts of the world, but in different settings at work or at school.

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Michele Gelfand received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Illinois. She is currently Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and affiliate of the RH Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a past president of the International Association for Conflict Management. Among her numerous awards are the Carol and Ed Diener Award in Social Psychology, the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association.

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