Similarly to people, cultures have a “personality”. A distinction that has recently become popular is “tight vs loose” cultures by Michele J. Gelfand, who investigated 33 nations regarding their tightness. The distinction itself is quite similar to conservative vs liberal. In tight cultures, people are made to follow the rules in a more stringent way. School uniforms are an example. It is not a coincidence that the UK and Japan score quite high on Gefland’s tightness scale, both at 6.8 vs the Netherlands at 3.3. On the upper end of tightness countries like China and Malaysia, where smoking in restaurants can be punished with up to half a year of imprisonment. While most people in European countries wouldn’t approve of smoking in restaurants, they wouldn’t approve of such harsh punishments, either.
How come cultures are so different from each other? The strongest link is to our ancestral mode of subsistence. Hunter-gatherer societies emphasized individual achievement, i.e. self-reliance, whereas high food accumulating societies reinforced compliant behaviour, obedience and responsibility to optimise collective achievement. From an evolutionary point of view, we can assume that genes fostering compliance were selected for in agricultural societies.
One area where this becomes obvious is child-rearing. Farmers had strict child-rearing practices (authoritarian) to make the children help with the daily and prepare them for their adult routine. Hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, have a permissive parenting style and children are not required to do adult work until grown-up.
Later research indeed showed that agricultural societies (e.g., the Temne of Sierra Leone), which require strong norms to foster the coordination necessary to grow crops for survival, had strict child-rearing practices and children who were high on conformity. Hunting and fishing societies (e.g., the Inuit) had lenient child-rearing practices and children who were low on conformity (from Gefland et al. 2011)
It is therefore hardly surprising that the San hunter-gatherers are among the loosest societies with ambiguous norms and greater permissiveness for norm violation.
Of course, nowadays most societies are a mix of people carrying hunter-gatherer, pastoralist and farmer genes. Even so, modern hunter-gatherer minds can still be identified due to assortative mating (hunter-gatherer minds and farmer minds don’t mix easily!):
hunter-gatherer | farmer |
High on personality trait “openness”, low on “conscientiousness” | High on personality trait “conscientiousness”, low on “openness” |
Strongly (actively) egalitarian | status-seeking |
Tendency towards out-group sociality, more accepting of diversity (e.g. different sexuality, refugees, etc.) | Tendency towards in-group sociality (identifies more strongly with a core group, like family, religious group or sports team) |
More liberal ideology | More conservative ideology |
Less sexual dimorphism | More (display of) sexual dimorphism |
Later onset of puberty | Earlier onset of puberty |
More monogamous tendencies | Less monogamous tendencies |
Tendency to wanting fewer children | Tendency to wanting more children |
Relaxed child-rearing attitude | Authoritative child rearing, “helicopter parenting” |
Night owls | Early risers |
“Lazier” (when it comes to physical work and chores) | More hard-working |
highly rebellious when feeling personal freedom and values are threatened | individualistic, but also more conformist and highly loyal to their core group |
Less interest in small-talk and gossip | Higher interest in small-talk and gossip |
One of the most significant hallmark of hunter-gatherer minds is their openness. This personality trait has been shown to be diminishing in Western societies Jokela (2012). I have argued that hunter-gatherer minds prefer to have fewer or nowaday often no children at all. The disappearance of hunter-gatherer genes will inevitably lead to tighter societies. With each visit to the United Kindom, I have the feeling it has been a little bit more “farmerized” since my last stay. Of course, it is important that people respect rules and each other, but hunter-gatherer minds like me get very uneasy when everything is overregulated. What’s more, there seem to be many more rules nowadays, but less respect among people for each other. In hunter-gatherer societies, people get along just fine, with a minimum of rules: egalitarianism is the main principle to go by.
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