Tighter nations, for instance, have encountered more historical or ecological threats, like wars, natural disasters, and famine. A cross-cultural study involving 33 countries demonstrated that both ecological and historical factors, as well as proximal and contemporaneous processes, vary across tight vs. Tight cultures have clear and pervasive social norms and severe sanctions for deviant behavior, whereas loose cultures have weak norms and high tolerance of deviant behavior. In this paper, we focus on tightness-looseness as a promising dimension for understanding cultural variation. Since the emergence of comparative studies of culture, social scientists have been trying to find general cultural dimensions or orientations, not just colorful single details, to capture major cross-cultural differences (e.g., ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īcross-Time Change and Variation in Cultural Tightness-LoosenessĬulture is often seen as a set of learned and shared meanings that distinguishes one group of people from another. Anu Realo was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) during the writing of this article. įunding: This study was supported by institutional research funding (IUT2-13) from the Estonian Ministry of Education and Science. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: Data (in SPSS format) can be downloaded from the following link. Received: SeptemAccepted: DecemPublished: December 18, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 Mandel, Realo. PLoS ONE 10(12):Įditor: Kimmo Eriksson, Mälardalen University, SWEDEN Future studies about across-time change and within-country variance in tightness-looseness should target more culturally diverse and socially divided societies.Ĭitation: Mandel A, Realo A (2015) Across-Time Change and Variation in Cultural Tightness-Looseness. Our results suggest that tightness-looseness, similarly to cultural value orientations, is a relatively stable and robust characteristic of culture–that is, change indeed takes place, but slowly. A significant within country variance in 2002 had disappeared by 2012. Using data from two nationally representative samples of Estonians, we found that the general tightness level had changed over a period of 10 years but the effect size of the change was small. Although several studies have compared different cultures on this domain, this study is the first that targets both within-country differences and across-time variation in tightness-looseness. Cultural tightness-looseness, a dimension which describes the strength, multitude, and clarity of social norms in a culture, has proved significant in explaining differences between cultures.
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