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Is Your State Tight or Loose?

Beyond Red State/Blue State
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A reader sends a link to an interesting politics and social psychology paper by Dr. Jesse Harrington and Dr. Michele Gelfand. Here’s a precis; if you follow that link, you can hear a radio interview with Gelfand:

We show that there is a common principle by which we can understand many differences across the 50 states, namely that states vary in the degree to which they are “tight” (have many strongly enforced rules and little tolerance for deviance) versus “loose” (have few strongly enforced rules and greater tolerance for deviance). This distinction has been applied to explain differences in traditional and modern societies (see our Science paper in 2011). Now we show it can explain variation in the 50 states.

We calculated state tightness index, compiling a number of variables including the strength of punishments in states (for example, the percentage of students hit/punished in schools) and the degree of permissiveness in states (for example, legality of same-sex civil unions). Like our international study, we found that tight states have more threatening ecological and historical 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 degrees of external threat, including 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, which makes tightness adaptive in these circumstances.

This study also helps to explain the vast differences we see in personality and state outcomes across the United States. Tighter states had a higher average of conscientiousness but lower openness than 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, depending on your vantage point.

Here’s a link to their scientific paper.  For some reason I can’t cut and paste excerpts here. Unsurprisingly, the tight states correspond closely with the conservative states, but the authors say that tightness and conservatism are separate and distinct phenomena. Tightness refers to a general unwillingness to tolerate much deviance from social norms. The loosest states are in New England and in the far West. I don’t have time to read the whole paper this morning (I have a funeral to attend), but I’m interested to hear an analysis for you who do read it.

Scanning it, though, I have to wonder if it might be an example of Jon Haidt’s point about social psychology results being skewed by the biases of the scientists. Let me be clear: I don’t know that this is the case, but some of the language in the paper did raise some concern. For example, the researchers say that “cosmopolitanism” corresponds with “looseness” because cosmopolitans are more open to those not like themselves. I think that might be generally true, but as a conservative who has lived for much of his life in loose social environments, I think that those people this paper identifies as “loose” are less so in practice. And Louisiana is a weird example. We are overall a tight state, but the difference between the Catholic south and the Protestant north in tightness is noticeable. We are all fairly tight, I think, but people in the southern part of the state profess conservative norms, but tend to be a lot more tolerant of deviation.

But again, my very mild and instinctual skepticism is only a hunch. I note this earlier paper, in which Gelfand was the lead author, examining 33 nations for their tightness/looseness scores. The only one I know anything about is the Netherlands, which is, by American standards, a very liberal society, but which in practice is highly conformist in its liberalism. (This can be explained in large part because the Dutch, historically, have had to be socially cohesive to protect the collective against encroachments by the sea.) In fact, the super-liberal Netherlands, in the paper, scores above average in tightness. That tells me there is something to this scale.

In general, I think this is an interesting way to frame our political differences. Talk amongst yourselves about it.

 

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