Loose or Tight

Contrary to what you might think, the relative effectiveness of countries in handling the pandemic has little to do with government competence, political ideology or even geography (let alone their supposed preparedness). According to the social pyschologist Michele Gelfand, "It turns out Covid’s deadliness depends on something simpler and more profound: cultural differences in our willingness to follow rules." She's been pushing this dubious line since the publication of her 2018 book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. To date she has managed three Guardian puff-pieces. The first claimed that the Brexit vote and election of Trump could be attributed to a "tight culture" feeling under threat, the second that authoritarian leaders like Trump thrive on fear, while her latest claims that the high Covid-19 death-rate in the US is due to its loose culture and "rule-breaking spirit". She's careful not to claim that one type is superior to the other - America's "maverick spirit" also makes it more creative and innovative - but she's happy to talk of "tight nations" and "loose nations", despite the obvious inconsistency in her reading of the US and UK. 

Gelfand's position - indeed much of the discipline of social pyschology (as opposed to actual sociology) - is premised on stereotypes, both in the sense that the citizens of a particular nation tend to share some fundamental dispositions and that nations are distinct enough to be grouped. That this grouping invariably reduces to a simple dichotomy shows its commonality with theories of society that divide us into two antagonistic camps, from Jonathan Haidt's belief that liberal and conservative temperaments are hardwired rather than socially-determined, to David Goodhart's attempt to explain Brexit through the cultural differences of "somewheres and anywheres". As Gelfand put it in her first puff-piece: "My research across hundreds of communities suggests that the fundamental driver of difference is not ideological, financial or geographical – it’s cultural." While she isn't as overt as Haidt or Goodhart in privileging the conservative worldview, her "fundamental driver of difference" excludes any socioeconomic explanation. 

The Marxist perspective on sociology has long been criticised for reducing social phenomena to the binary of class, but this does at least have an objective reality: you either rely on your capital or your labour (or in a few cases both - homoploutia). The problem with Gelfand's approach is that it lends itself to an abstraction of social behaviour that ignores variation within society, i.e. not only normative differences between class fractions (e.g. middle class versus working class values) but eccentricity and sub-cultures. It also rules out the possibility that adherence to societal norms may exist on a spectrum, rather than being polarised into tight and loose. Consider the following: "All cultures have social norms, or unwritten rules for social behaviour. We adhere to standards of dress, discipline our kids, and don’t elbow our way through crowded subways not because these are legislative codes but because they help our society function. Psychologists have shown that some cultures abide by social norms quite strictly; they’re tight. Others are loose – with a more relaxed attitude toward rule-breakers." 

These are odd examples to pick. Standards of dress have dramatically relaxed in most Western and Asian societies over the last century. Does this mean that the world as a whole has become "looser", or is it down to increased living standards and commodity fashion? Perhaps it's also evidence that the boundary of the domain of norms changes over time. How many pedestrians today would stop walking and face the road to show respect if they saw a hearse go by, let alone doff their hat. But what has changed here: the norm or the fashion for headwear? Or did both change independent of each other? How we discipline our kids has long been a bone of social and political dispute, rather than an agreed norm, and is currently being legislated for in the UK. The reason why we don't barge through crowded subways is that it is counter-productive in a confined space and possibly dangerous. This is a norm, in the sense of a shared standard of behaviour, but it reflects rational calculation and environmental constraints rather than some intrinsic characteristic. 

It is for this reason that platform etiquette and how we behave on trains tends to be common across nations, or more accurately across those metropolitan light rail systems where over-crowding is routine. Breaches of etiquette, e.g. school trippers forming obstructive clumps near the platform entrance or people eating food in a packed carriage, tend to reflect differences in values and behaviours within society more than between nations (the self-absorption of teenagers, how over-work compresses eating and commuting etc). Ironically, the most obvious norm breaking you see on such systems is the behaviour of people who visit the big city only occasionally from elsewhere in the country: the old farmer who offers up his seat to the young female professional to her mild irritation, or the boisterous sports fan who loudly complains that nobody talks to each when they're just trying to block out his tedious singing. If you live in London and visit Tokyo or New York, you'll feel right at home on the subway. If you live in a former pit village in Wales and visit London for the first time, you won't. 

Many social norms are in fact specific to subsets of the nation, and those subsets are largely determined by age, geography and socioeconomic class. This makes obvious sense in that norms arise from the observation of the behaviours of others at key points in our development: they're fundamentally local and generational. The norms we are meant to share as a nation and across all age-groups are often either banal (i.e. we discover other nations share them too, such as saying please and thankyou or avoiding cannibalism) or myths embedded in an often nostalgic media narrative (e.g. the British love of an orderly queue, which was largely a learnt behaviour of the 1940s). In reality, we are all selective about which norms we observe, and the choices we make are often contingent. For example, as David Graeber pointed out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, whether we return the favour when someone buys us lunch or a drink depends on how inferior or superior we feel to them. Norms not only change over time - new ones arise, old ones mutate or disappear - but they are socially dynamic.

In trying to provide a solid foundation for her claim, Gelfand appeals to both tradition and science: "This distinction, first noticed by Herodotus, is in modern times capable of being quantified by psychologists and anthropologists." In fact Herodotus makes no such distinction between tight and loose cultures, or anything remotely similar. His only collective distinction is between Greek and non-Greek speakers (barbaroi). He certainly compares nations in The Histories, such as the Egyptians and Scythians, but the purpose is to highlight variety not commonality. Herodotus is known both as the father of history and the father of lies, but the latter epithet isn't simply a critique of his honesty or credulity. It means he is the first writer to deal in what today we would call national stereotypes. Gelfand's second claim, that her distinction is quantifiable, is neither here nor there. Not everything that is measurable is meaningful. She needs to explain the mechanism: how social attitudes to rule-breaking have governed the pandemic response.

Her attempt to do so is little more than correlation: "Relative to the US, the UK, Israel, Spain and Italy, countries like Singapore, Japan, China and Austria have been shown to be much tighter. These differences aren’t random. Research in both nation-states and small-scale societies has shown that communities with histories of chronic threat – whether natural disasters, infectious diseases, famines or invasions – develop stricter rules that ensure order and cohesion. It makes good evolutionary sense: following rules helps us survive chaos and crisis. On the flipside, looser groups that have faced fewer threats can afford to be more permissive." This is obviously selective, hence the omission of the nominally "loose" but successful New Zealand. Then there's the claim that Israel isn't a "tight" society despite its conscription, bunkers and military occupation of the West Bank, not to mention the role that "chronic threat" plays in its national identity. The US is famously founded on a story of chronic threat - the slowly expanding frontier of the "Wild West" - but instead of leading to stricter rules to ensure order and cohesion it led to Civil War and loose gun control.

Though published by a liberal newspaper, Gelfand's theory is essentially conservative. It claims that the governments of "loose" countries were slow to act and unwilling to be frank about the dangers of the virus because they feared this would be difficult to sell to their "risk-taking", obstreperous populations (Plato's ship of fools). It also accentuates national stereotypes and so feeds into the growing chauvinist narrative around pandemic management and vaccination. The one suggests that the government was constrained, so it's essentially the fault of the people; the other that the success of Far Eastern countries reflects a more repressive and communal society, so we should be prepared to accept a higher death-toll as the price of our individual liberties. The more mundane truth is that the countries that have done best either already had a relatively well-funded public health infrastructure that had been tested in previous epidemics (not only in Asia but in parts of Africa too), or they took the decison to implement strict measures early in 2020 as a precaution. In other words, it was down to planning and experience or pre-emption. Both of these ultimately reflect political decisions, not broader cultural norms.