How social norms influence cultural behaviour, and why Hong Kong is less ‘tight’ than the UK

I’m British. Soon after moving to Switzerland, where I lived for six years, I threw a housewarming party and was taken aback when all 30 guests arrived exactly on time. Years later, having moved to France, I turned up at the appointed hour for a dinner, only to find that no other guest had arrived and my hostess was still in her dressing gown.

Every culture is riddled with unwritten rules. They are the invisible scaffolding that frames the behaviour of individuals so that the collective can function efficiently. But the rigour of these rules and their enforcement can vary dramatically. Some nations tolerate singing in a lift, swearing during an interview or entering a bank barefoot while others frown upon such behaviours. Maybe these aren’t mere quirks. Perhaps the best way to understand societies is to look at their social norms.

That is the argument being made by cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand, at the University of Maryland, in the United States. She and her colleagues describe societies with strict, rigorously enforced norms as “tight” and those with more laissez-faire cultures as “loose”. They argue that this key difference underpins all sorts of others, from creativity and divorce rates to the synchronicity of public clocks. What’s more, they believe they know why some nations are tighter than others – and how to influence social norms. If they are right, this could clear up many cross-cultural misunder­standings, not just between nations, but also within countries, corporations and households.

Ever since 1961, when Stanley Milgram started persuading people to obey his commands to give others electric shocks, experimenters have manipulated social rules and observed the pressure people feel to conform. However, researchers tended to study norms within societies – usually Western ones – rather than between them. One person to buck the trend was Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede.

Starting in the 1960s, Hofstede developed a model for under­standing cross-cultural differences based on six dimensions. Since then, one of his metrics, individualism/collectivism, has attracted consider­able interest and proved useful in explaining cultural differ­ences, especially those epitomised by typically Western or Eastern modes of thought. But Gelfand believes the focus has been too narrow, and that tightness/looseness is a neglected source of cultural variation that has a huge influence on our behaviour – “a Rosetta stone for human groups”, she says.