ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
A global analysis of cultural tightness in non-industrial societies.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why human societies adopt rigid moral rules: The efficiency-robustness trade-off.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cultural tightness and social cohesion under coevolving beliefs, behaviors, and preferences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Conformity to social norm interventions is not amplified in tighter nations.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Worldwide divergence of values.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Modelling social norms: an integration of the norm-utility approach with beliefs dynamics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Risk, sanctions and norm change: the formation and decay of social distancing norms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cross-societal variation in norm enforcement systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Assessing the effects of pandemic risk on cooperation and social norms using a before-after Covid-19 comparison in two long-term experiments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Material insecurity and religiosity: A causal analysis.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Beyond the surface: accounting for confounders in understanding the link between collectivism and COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Development of the Cultural Tightness-Looseness Orientation Scale for College Students.Psychology research and behavior management · 2023Article
- Conceptual and methodological issues in the study of the personality-and-culture relationship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- A Longitudinal Examination of the Family Stress Model of Economic Hardship in Seven Countries.Children and youth services review · 2022Article
- A research agenda for the study of social norm change.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Review
- Intergroup conflict: origins, dynamics and consequences across taxa.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Profile of Michele J. Gelfand.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
- Exploring gene-culture coevolution in humans by inferring neuroendophenotypes: A case study of the oxytocin receptor gene and cultural tightness.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2022Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Human groups have long faced ecological threats such as resource stress and warfare, and must also overcome strains on coordination and cooperation that are imposed by growing social complexity. Tightness-looseness (TL) theory suggests that societies react to these challenges by becoming culturally tighter, with stronger norms and harsher punishment of deviant behaviour. TL theory further predicts that tightening is associated with downstream effects on social, political and religious institutions. Here, we comprehensively test TL theory in a sample of non-industrial societies. Since previous studies of TL theory have sampled contemporary countries and American states, our analysis allows us to examine whether the theory generalizes to societies in the ethnographic record and also to explore new correlates of tightness that vary more in non-industrial societies. We find that tightness covaries across domains of social norms, such as socialization, law and gender. We also show that tightness correlates with several theorized antecedents (ecological threat, complexity, residential homogeneity) and several theorized consequences (intergroup contact, political authoritarianism, moralizing religious beliefs). We integrate these findings into a holistic model of tightness in non-industrial societies and provide metrics that can be used by future studies on cultural tightness in the ethnographic record.
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