Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World
In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, celebrated cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand 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.
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Praise for Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
“Groundbreaking…Anyone interested in our cultural divides will find tremendous insight here.”
—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now
“A brilliant and timely book….Michele Gelfand has exposed a universal fault line running beneath nations, states, organizations, and even families. Cultures that face threat and uncertainty seek order and precision. Cultures with firmer footings revel in ambiguity and risk taking. This idea, at once so simple and so powerful, will forever change how you see the world.”
—Daniel H. Pink, bestselling author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing and Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
“Endlessly impressive…In figuring out what causes various tribes and factions to clash and sometime come to blows—whether at the U.N. or in a stadium’s upper deck—Gelfand has left no cultural stone unturned. To read this book is to see both yourself and your neighbor for the first time—guided by rules of which you’ve both been unaware.”
—Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking
“Completely fascinating….[Gelfand] reveals how political divides, happiness and suicide rates, and the coexistence of crime and creativity can all be traced to a fundamental but neglected dimension of social norms. You’ll never look at a workplace, a country, or a family the same way again.”
—Adam Grant, bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg
“A delightful, insightful, and fascinating look at the remarkable diversity of human customs— where they come from and how they shape our lives.”
—Daniel Gilbert, bestselling author of Stumbling on Happiness
“Offers a powerful new way of seeing the world. Gelfand's deceptively simple thesis becomes increasingly compelling as her research unfolds across politics, class, and organizational behavior. Best of all, she provides a new toolkit for change."
—Anne Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of New America, former director of Policy Planning for the State Department, and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family
"Remarkable. Not just an enlightening book but a game-changing one. By uncovering the inner workings of tight and loose cultures, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers suddenly makes sense of the puzzling behavior we see all around us—in colleagues, family, and even ourselves."
—Carol Dweck, bestselling author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
“Fascinating and illuminating…Rule Makers, Rule Breakers sheds light on everything from why we embrace new ideas to how culture makes us who we are. We all build order into our days, but as Gelfand shows, some of us like hewing to a line, and others enjoy crossing it.”
—Jonah Berger, bestselling author of Contagious and Invisible Influence
Excerpt from Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
It’s 11:00 pm in Berlin. Not a single car is in sight, yet a pedestrian waits patiently at the crosswalk until the light turns green. Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away in Boston, at rush hour, commuters flout the “Do Not Cross” sign as they dart in front of cabs. To the south, where it’s 8:00 pm in Sao Paulo, locals are frolicking in string bikinis in public parks. Up in Silicon Velley, it’s mid-afternoon and T-shirted employees at Google are playing a game of ping pong. And in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Swiss bank UBS, which for years mandated a 44-page dress code, executives burning the midnight oil have barely loosened their ties.
We may tease Germans for being excessively orderly or Brazilians for showing too much skin, but we rarely consider how these differences came about. Far beyond dress codes and pedestrian patterns, people’s social differences run deep and broad—from politics to parenting, management to worship, and vocations to vacations. In the past several thousand years humanity has evolved to the point where there now exists 195 countries, and more than 7,000 languages and many thousands of religions. Even within a single nation, such as the United States, there are countless differences in fashion, dialect, morals, and political orientation—sometimes among those who live in close proximity. The diversity of human behavior is astonishing, especially since 96% of the human genome is identical to that of chimpanzees whose lifestyles, unlike humans, are far more similar across communities.
We rightly celebrate diversity and condemn division, yet we’re shockingly ignorant of what underlies both of these things: culture. Culture is a stubborn mystery of our experience and one of the last uncharted frontiers. We’ve used our big brains to accomplish unbelievable technical feats. We’ve discovered the laws of gravity, split the atom, wired the Earth, eradicated fatal diseases, mapped the human genome, invented the iPhone, and even trained dogs to ride skateboards. But somehow, despite all of our technical prowess, we’ve made surprisingly little progress in understanding something equally as important: our own cultural differences.
Why are we so divided, despite the fact that we’re more technologically connected than ever? Culture is at the heart of our divisions, and we need to know more about it. For years, policy experts and lay people alike have struggled to find a deep underlying factor to explain our sprawling, complex cultural traits and distinctions. Many times we focus on superficial characteristics that are the "symptoms of culture." We try to explain our cultural divides in terms of geography, thinking that people behave the way they do because they live in blue states or red states, in rural or urban areas, in Western or Eastern nations, in the developing or developed world. We wonder if culture can be explained by differences in religion or our different “civilizations.” These distinctions have typically left us with more questions than answers because they miss the deeper basis of our differences—they don’t get at the underlying primal template of culture.
A more compelling answer has been hiding in plain sight. Just as simple principles can explain a whole lot in fields such as physics, biology, and mathematics, many cultural differences and divides can be explained through a simple shift in perspective.
Recent Press
April 26, 2019
Listen to Dr. Gelfand on The Femsplainers Podcast
The Femsplainers Podcast
Knowing which can solve your problems -- and the world's. Author Michele Gelfand joins Danielle and guest co-splainer Meghan Cox Gurdon to discuss her new book "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World," over a cosmo (or three).
April 3, 2019
An Introduction to Cross Cultural Psychology
Audioboom
Why is it okay - in some cultures - to jaywalk, while in others you could get arrested for jaywalking? Why was marijuana was sold - legally - for years in the streets of Amsterdam when it is only now become legal in the US? The reason: some cultures are what author Michele Gelfand calls "loose" and others are "tight". Here's my first episode on cross-cultural psychology and I think you're going to really enjoy listening to professor Gelfand to find out how our culture's norms shape our attitudes and behavior.
April 2, 2019
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers – Balancing Tight and Loose Cultural Norms in Your Workplace with Michele Gelfand
Talentgrow
Workplace cultures vary greatly in terms of how strict or loose they are. Ideally, where a given workplace falls on this spectrum reflects the values and necessities of that business or organization. This raises a crucial question for us as leaders: how do we determine what is just the right amount of tightness or looseness in our workplace cultures? Professor Michele Gelfand of the University of Maryland (my alma mater!) joins me on this episode of The TalentGrow Show to discuss the high impact role of cultural norms in the workplace. Listen to find out what factors tend to determine tightness or looseness in both organizations and nations, how leaders can harness the power of cultural norms to promote a higher level of effectiveness in their workplaces, and how you can use an understanding of Michele’s ideas to help you become a better negotiator. Plus, discover how these ideas can translate usefully on an individual level as well! Be sure to tune in and share what you learn with others.
April 2, 2019
Women Don't Just Face a Pay Gap at Work. They're Also Punished Far More Than Men
TIME
On Equal Pay Day, we rightly focus on how a woman would have to work over three months more in order to make what her male counterpart did last year for the same full time work — a gender pay gap that amounts to about $900 billion in annual lost earnings for women holding full-time jobs. But inequities in the workplace go far beyond wage disparity.
March 20, 2019
Michele Gelfand: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers
Work and Life Podcast
Michele brings her considerable academic expertise to help us understand our own tight-loose mindsets, the degree to which we adhere to or are more comfortable flouting social norms. She observes that those who veer toward a tight mindset are stricter in their adherence to rules and they value punctuality, order, and accountability. Those who are closer to the other end of the tight-loose continuum are more comfortable with ambiguity, creativity, spontaneity, messiness. Michele wants to help us understand the mindsets of those around us at work, at home, and in our communities. Her aim, as she and Stew discuss in this episode, is to help increase self-awareness as well as an understanding of others’ perspectives so we can better prioritize what we truly value, convey this to others in a way that they can grasp, and come to a negotiated agreement that honors the important contributions of those with both tight and loose mindsets. They discuss how tight and loose mindsets vary across national cultures, organizational cultures, as well as within marriages and families and the critical role that perceived threats play in whether we veer toward a tight or loose mindset.
March 13, 2019
Wisdom & Social Norms (with Michele Gelfand)
On Wisdom
Michele Gelfand joins Igor and Charles to discuss the role of threat in ‘tight vs loose’ societies, the goldilocks principle, ‘real vs perceived’ threat’s in Trump’s America, autocratic recidivism, rum-fuelled meetings, transgressive hand puppets, and the case for recalibrating the internet.
Events
Dan Pink hosts "Booze and Books" event with Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, January 20th.
Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy February 1, 2019 Charlottesville, VA
February 16, 2019 Savannah, GA
Dan Pink hosts "Booze and Books" event with Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, January 20th.
Share Your Tight-Loose Story
In my lab, we are researching the differences found across cultures all over the world. Our lab is particularly interested in social norms, and how some cultures have more restrictive or permissive norms than others. If you have stories to share about your tight-loose cultural experiences--we would love to hear them! Of course we are excited to hear about cultural phenomena of any kind.