BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
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NORTON META TAG
12 July 2014
Forget Red State, Blue State: Is Your State "Tight" or "Loose"? & Tightness and Looseness: A New Way to Understand Differences across the 50 United States 7&2JUL14
HERE is a very interesting map and report on which states are tight or loose. Not surprisingly the tight states are overwhelmingly repiglican / tea-bagger country, extremely controlling of their citizens private lives but not of their rich and corporations. The researchers mention religiosity as a causal factor in a state being tight or loose, the more religious a state's population the tighter the state. I believe the actual religious factor in this is the level of religious hypocrisy in tight and loose states. If one considers the lack of social justice in tight states and the actual teaching of the predominant religion in these states then the conclusion is the citizens preach but do not practice their religion. The result? Lower wages, greater income inequality, racism, fear, pollution, fewer workers rights, more environmental and work place disasters, less and lower quality health care and more. Those in loose states may not be (on the surface) great proselytizers but many of the rules and regulations in place in their states reflect the compassion and social justice teachings of their faith, a better way to attract people to their faith rather than the tight state mantra of 'do as I say, not as I do'. From +Mother Jones & +Scientific American .....
It
is obvious to anyone who has traveled around the United States that
cultural assumptions, behaviors, and norms vary widely. We all know, for
instance, that the South is more politically conservative than the
Northeast. And we at least vaguely assume that this is rooted in
different outlooks on life.
But why do these different outlooks exist, and correspond so closely to different regions? In a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (and discussed more here),
psychologists Jesse R. Harrington and Michele J. Gelfand of the
University of Maryland propose a sweeping theory to explain this
phenomenon. Call it the theory of "tightness-looseness": The researchers
show, through analysis of anything from numbers of police per capita to
the availability of booze, that some US states are far more
"tight"—meaning that they "have many strongly enforced rules and little
tolerance for deviance." Others, meanwhile, are more "loose," meaning
that they "have few strongly enforced rules and greater tolerance for
deviance."
The 10 tightest states? Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma,
Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and North
Carolina. The 10 loosest, meanwhile, are California, Oregon, Washington,
Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and
Vermont. (Notice a pattern here?)
The 10 tightest states? Mississippi,
Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky,
South Carolina, and North Carolina. (Notice a pattern here?)
Harrington and Gelfand measure a state's tightness or looseness based
on indicators such as the legality of corporal punishment in schools,
the general severity of legal sentences, access to alcohol and
availability of civil unions, level of religiosity, and the percent of
the population that is foreign. But really, that's just the beginning of
their analysis. After identifying which states are "tighter" and which
are more "loose," the researchers then trace these different outlooks to
a range of ecological or historical factors in the states' pasts (and
in many cases, lingering into their presents). For as the authors write,
tighter societies generally have had to deal with "a greater number of
ecological and historical threats, including fewer natural resources,
more natural disasters, a greater incidence of territorial threat,
higher population density, and greater pathogen prevalence."
That applies nicely to the United States. The "tight" states, it
turns out, have higher death rates from heat, storms, floods, and
lightning. (Not to mention tornadoes.) They also have higher rates of
death from influenza and pneumonia, and higher rates of HIV and a number
of other diseases. They have higher child and infant mortality. And
then there's external threat: The South, in the Civil War, was defending
its own terrain and its own way of life. Indeed, the researchers show a
very strong correlation between the percentage of slave-owning families
that a state had in the year 1860, and its "tightness" measurement
today.
It makes psychological sense, of course, that regions facing more
threats would be much more inward-looking and tougher on deviants,
because basically, they had to buckle down. They didn't have the luxury
of flowery art, creativity, and substance abuse.
Tight states have higher incarcertation and execution rates and "lower circulation of pornographic magazines."
Still not done, Harrington and Gelfand also show that their index of states "tightness" and "looseness" maps nicely on to prior analyses
of the differing personalities of people living in different US states.
Citizens of "tight" states tend to be more "conscientious," prizing
order and structure in their lives. Citizens of "loose" states tend to
be more "open," wanting to try new things and have new experiences.
Other major distinguishing factors between "tight" and "loose" states:
Tight states have higher incarceration rates and higher execution rates.
Tight states have "lower circulation of pornographic magazines."
Tight states have "more charges of employment discrimination per capita."
Tight states produce fewer patents per capita, and have far fewer "fine artists" (including "painters, illustrators, writers").
Most striking of all, the authors found "a negative and linear
relationship between tightness and happiness" among citizens. Put more
simply: People in loose states are happier.
In sum: It's a very interesting theory, and one with quite a scope.
Or as the authors put it: "tightness-looseness can account for the
divergence of substance abuse and discrimination rates between states
such as Hawaii and Ohio, reliably predicts the psychological
differences…between Colorado and Alabama, helps to explain the contrasts
in creativity and social organization between Vermont and North Dakota,
and provides some understanding concerning the dissimilarity in
insularity and resistance toward immigration between Arizona and New
York."
In these days of extreme political dysfunction, America itself is in increasing need of an explanation. Now, maybe, we have one.
Jonathan
Haidt on the psychology of politics, the emotions behind the Tea
Party—and why as a self-described centrist, he thinks a Republican
crackup may be coming.
Credit: ThinkstockE pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—was the first official
motto of the United States, adopted by the founding fathers and
enshrined in the nation’s Great Seal in 1782. In its statement of unity,
it exemplifies the differences inherent in the United States—a fitting
description for a singular nation defined by innumerable internal
divergence. Yet, few organizing principles exist to explain these
differences, which find their expression in divergent ecologies,
histories, average personality traits, and various state outcomes. Why,
for instance, is the incidence of illicit substance use greater in
states like Hawaii, Alaska, and New Hampshire relative to Mississippi,
Ohio, and Oklahoma, but incidents of discrimination much higher in the
latter than the former? Why do states like Colorado and Connecticut
exhibit traits associated with greater impulsivity and greater
tolerance, while other states, such as Alabama and Kansas, exhibit the
opposite patterns? What might shed light on the difference in
anti-immigrant attitudes between Arizona and New York, states with
similarly large populations of illegal immigrants? In all, what does
this seemingly diverse and wide array of state-level differences have in
common?
Although the United States is often parsed on a red versus blue dichotomy, our lab suggested another framework by which to understand differences amongst the states in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: states vary in terms of their tightness or looseness,
which captures whether states have strong norms and little tolerance
for deviance (tight) or weak norms and greater tolerance. As anyone who
has traveled widely in the United States can attest, the range of
behavior across states is incredibly diverse. Finding a singing cowboy
playing the guitar in his underwear may indeed be a hard thing to find
outside of New York City, for instance. In this study, we document not
only how states vary in tightness-looseness, but why they vary—in large part based on the ecological and historical differences between the states.
The strategy of examining how cultures vary harkens back as far as Herodotus in his classic, Histories. More recently, Geert Hofstede greatly spurred these efforts with the publication of his book Culture’s Consequences,
detailing the extent to which certain values (for instance,
collectivism versus individualism) are endorsed across nations. More
recently, we have broadened the toolkit even more and begun to study how
cultures vary beyond values. For instance, we showed
that cultures vary in the strength of social norms (i.e., tightness)
across 33 nations and demonstrated that this cultural dimension is
distinct from the various value dimensions proposed by Hofstede and
others (e.g., the GLOBE research project).
Consistent with the idea that cultural differences often arise from
differences in ecological and historical conditions, we found that tight
countries have experienced a wide range of ecological and historical
threats whereas loose countries experienced fewer. The strong norms that
characterize tight nations help humans coordinate their social action
in the face of numerous survival threats. Loose nations can ”afford”
more latitude and permissiveness because they face far fewer natural and
human made threats.
In this study, we wanted to see whether tightness, and its predictors
and outcomes, could be applied to the state level. We reasoned that
while the U.S. is generally a loose culture, we might find that there is
wide variation in tightness across the 50 states. For inspiration, we
drew on Vandello and Cohen’s classic study
which created an index of state level collectivism using archival data
and we created a new index that measures the strength of norms and
punishments across the states. Check out the map
of tightness to diagnose where your state is. Tighter states—those with
stronger rules and greater punishment for deviance—are located
primarily in the South and the Midwest, while looser states are located
in the North East, the West Coast, and some of the Mountain States. We
calculated state tightness with a composite index, compiling multiple
variables. This includes items that reflect the strength of punishments
in states, including the legality of corporal punishment in schools, the
percentage of students hit/punished in schools, the rate of executions
from 1976 to 2011, and the severity of punishment for violating laws, as
well as the degree of permissiveness or deviance tolerance in states,
which includes the ratio of dry to total counties per state and the
legality of same-sex civil unions. The index also captures the strength
of institutions that constrain behavior and enforce moral order in
states, including state-level religiosity and the percentage of the
total state population that is foreign, an indicator of diversity and
cosmopolitanism.
Like our international study, our research on the 50 states shows
that some striking similarities in why states vary in the strength of
their social norms: Tight states have more threatening ecological
conditions, including a higher incidence of natural disasters, poorer
environmental health, greater disease prevalence, and fewer natural
resources. Tight states were also found to have greater perceptions of
external threat, reflected in the desire for more national defense
spending and greater rates of military recruitment. This may have a
historical basis, as states with a large amount of slave-owning families
in 1860—those states that were “occupied” by the North and lost the
backbone of their slave-based economy following the Civil War—are
tighter. In all, we argue that ecological and historically based threats
necessitate greater coordinated action to promote collective survival.
One might use this construct to predict, for example, that states that
increasingly have natural disasters, resource threats, or even terrorism
threats might start to become tighter.
This study also helps to explain the vast differences we see in
personality across the United States. Tighter states had a higher
average of conscientiousness—a personality characteristic associated
with lower impulsivity, greater self-control, orderliness, and
conformity—relative to looser states. In contrast, looser states had
greater average openness—a personality characteristic associated with
non-traditional values and beliefs, tolerance toward difference, and
cosmopolitanism. There are many other interesting differences between
tight and loose states. Tight states have greater social organization
(less instability and greater cohesion), better indicators of
self-control (lower alcohol and illicit abuse), and lower rates of
homelessness relative to loose states. However, they also exhibited
higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination, lower creativity,
and lower happiness, as compared to loose states. Tight and loose states
each have their own advantages and disadvantages.
As you might expect, the map of state-level tightness-looseness
approximates the electoral map of the past few decades, with states
voting for conservative, Republican candidates falling on the tighter
side and states voting for the more liberal, Democratic candidates
falling on the looser side. Yet, conservatism and tightness are
distinct, with tightness being a different and broader construct.
Conservatism and liberalism are value systems that take the form of
individual beliefs, while tightness and looseness describe an external
social reality that exists independently of any one individual.
Our study is not without potential criticisms. First, it is important
to note that our results are purely correlational, and accordingly, we
can’t infer causation in the data. We have been using some other
methods, including laboratory experiments and computer modeling, to
strengthen the causal case that tightness is an adaptation to ecological
and historical threats. Second, this study was only done in the context
of the U.S. which is relatively loose, and in effect, allows for a lot
of state variation. It remains to be seen whether other tight countries
(e.g., Japan) have as much variation. S. Finally, we focused on the
state level, but clearly there is also some interesting within-state
variation that could be examined. For example, although Louisiana is a
tight state, New Orleans may be a fairly loose city with a lot of
behavioral flexibility. Likewise, although California is loose, it has
pockets of tight counties. In our case, we were interested in broad,
state level differences rather than specific localities. Other
researchers may be interested in other levels of analysis to explore the
construct.
In conclusion, E pluribus unum is an accurate descriptor of
the United States. Out of many, seemingly disparate variables, it is
important to seek a general, unifying principle to explain their
concordance. We show that tightness may be one such candidate.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Jesse Harrington is a doctoral student in the Department of
Psychology at the University of Maryland and National Science Foundation
Graduate Fellow Recipient.
Michele Gelfand is a Professor of
Psychology and Distinguished University Scholar Teacher at the
University of Maryland. Her work can be found at www.gelfand.umd.edu
It
is obvious to anyone who has traveled around the United States that
cultural assumptions, behaviors, and norms vary widely. We all know, for
instance, that the South is more politically conservative than the
Northeast. And we at least vaguely assume that this is rooted in
different outlooks on life.
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