Cultural tightness and individualism

The podcast explores the conundrum of economic development leading to individualism in the West, but not in many prosperous places like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and South Korea. The speaker presents a theory with four parts to explain this global cultural divergence. The first part of the theory suggests that cultural change occurs when bold rebels champion radical alternatives and successfully encourage wider defiance. In close-knit, collectivist societies, people care intensely about social approval, suppressing individualism. Cultural tightness is higher in societies with labor-intensive agriculture, strong kinship intensity, or authoritarian governance.