Is Your State or Country Tight or Loose?

[James Brown]

Interesting article. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it seems to be on to something.

For years we’ve parsed our states on a red vs. blue dichotomy. Yet our research finds that the 50 states vary more fundamentally on the degree to which they are tight or loose. Tight cultures are defined by strict rules and social order, tradition and predictability. Loose groups eschew rules, welcome new ideas and embrace tolerance. It’s a primal template that has differentiated groups for millennia....

...the countries with the strongest social norms and strictest punishments were those with a history of warfare, natural disaster and resource scarcity....

This is what I’ve called the tight-loose trade-off: Tight states have a high degree of order, while loose states have a lot of openness....

Analyzing data from over a half million American residents we found that people in tight states are more likely to rank high on a personality trait psychologists call “conscientiousness; and they are more likely to be self-disciplined rule followers who desire structure....

As compared to tight states, people in loose states are more likely view themselves as original, curious, deep thinkers, and imaginative — all indications of a personality trait known as “openness.” ...

Loose states corner the market on creativity. For starters, they have more patents per capita. Lasers, fax machines, microwave ovens and email were all invented in loose states, ranging from New Hampshire to California....

But while tight states produce less creative output, their stricter social order allows them to corner the market on manufacturing, which requires discipline and rule-orientation to be effective....This is the tight-loose trade-off in action.

 

[Politesse]

Sounds a bit like the old social theory about societies being "Apollonian" and "Dionysian". Such reductions generally fail to capture anything real about the societies that fall under their rubric, especially since ethnocentric bias makes it very difficult to speak objectively on how "tight" a given social group is; you always learn more about the speaker than the target. For instance, this article makes the following implicit assumptions:

-Creativity is best measured by number of patents.

-All countries/states have a similar attitude toward patenting.
-And equal access to the patent process.​

-Correlations point meaningfully to causation.
-"Natural disasters" are a easily defined quantum
-Wars between majority-White polities count more than wars with between or with indigenous peoples (necessary to justify calling Brazil and New Zealand more peaceful than Germany, or California more peaceful than Arkansas)
-"Severity" is objectively definable

- For instance, everyone would agree that corporal punishment in schools is always more "severe" than other methods of keeping discipline such as isolation of the student or suspension
-Positions on alcohol are a measure of "lassitude", rather than any other factor​

-The most perceivedly laissez-faire of US states are a good benchmark for a lenient entity, so we can derive "objective" criteria from looking at how they do things
​

I only made it halfway through, but you get the picture. I don't think this "study" means anything, it is fatally compromised by the assumptions made in setting up its criteria. Stating something as a number rather than a feeling cannot turn an assumption into a fact. Consciously or unconsciously, this article and the work underlying were designed from the get-go to confirm common metropolitan assumptions about the American South.

 

[fast]

South Carolina (tight)

 

[phands]

Hmmm...I think this one goes in room 101 with Phrenology and Chiropractors and homeopathy.

 

[lpetrich]

Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study

The study's authors were careful to include several variables, like study size, mean age, and percentage female and students. I found that the confounding due to those variables was not very large.

In the US, the ex-Confederacy turns out to be the tightest region. "Similarly, it’s not surprising that southern states who felt their existence threatened during the Civil War tightened up and remain tight to this day." The Civil War was a momentary event, and there is something about those states that goes back much farther: slavery. The slaveowning states had large populations of slaves, and their free citizens lived in perpetual fear of slave revolts. So it was necessary to keep well-prepared to fight rebellious slaves, and to firmly demonstrate to them who are the ones in charge. After the Civil War, there was a "Redemption" backlash that destroyed all the progress that free blacks had made during Reconstruction. Here also, the white population wanted to firmly demonstrate to black people who was in charge -- the ex-Confederacy had lots of lynchings. By comparison, during that time in some Northeast states, reformers abolished the death penalty for nonlethal offenses.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I don't understand. How is Tight/Loose different from Conservative/Liberal?

That point about liberals (or Loose, more open and creative) people creating businesses and conservatives (or tight, more regimented) people running them well is one of Jordan Peterson's standard talking points by the way.

 

[dismal]

loose-tight was a management consulting buzzword back in the day.

I googled a bit and it appears to come from (or at least have been discussed or popularized in) In Search of Excellence. In management terms it meant be really strict on a few core principles and give people freedom on everything else.

In other words, you didn't pick one or the other, you picked the things on which you were going to be tight.

8. Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties. This was an ugly phrase in 1982, and it's an ugly phrase in 1990. But wise practitioners got the point. Concentrate on a few things (e.g., quality comes first; if you agree to a budget or profit target, you've got to make it happen or suffer some consequence), but allow astonishing freedom for people to play the game within those few bounds. To be sure, "loose-tight" amounts to centralization as well as to decentralization. But given the nature of our staff- and paper-driven empires, the unmistakable tilt is toward much greater autonomy, much less centralization.

http://tompeters.com/columns/in-search-of-autonomy/

I think whomever is trying to apply this to government is making a hash of it. I suppose Texas is supposed to be "tight" but I drive past strip clubs and liquor stores every day. Austin, the center of all the tightness, is a pretty bohemian place. The difference between Austin and River Oaks is more cultural than political.

 

[phands]

I don't understand. How is Tight/Loose different from Conservative/Liberal?

That point about liberals (or Loose, more open and creative) people creating businesses and conservatives (or tight, more regimented) people running them well is one of Jordan Peterson's standard talking points by the way.

It's too imprecise a question to have a meaningful answer....

It doesn't define tight or loose at all well.
It makes the base assumption that a state or country is uniform in whatever tight or loose means, which is just not true.
Creativity is not restricted to the so-called loose states. For instance TV was invented in England first, but Philo Farnsworth in Idaho claimed the first American version a bit later. The Cotton Gin was invented in Georgia.
Manufacturing is not restricted to "tight" states either.

The whole idea is riddled with inconsistencies and false assumptions.