Loosening the definition of culture: An investigation of gender and cultural tightness.

Abstract

To date, the study of cultural tightness has been largely limited to exploring the strictness of social norms and the severity of punishments at the level of nations or regions. However, cultural psychologists concur that humans gather cultural information from more than just their nationality. Gender is a cultural identity that confers its own social norms. Across three studies using multi-method designs, we find that American women feel the culture surrounding their gender is “tighter” than that for men, and that this relationship is mediated by perceived gender-related threats to the self. However, in a follow-up study in Singapore, we do not find measurement invariance, suggesting future work is necessary to refine the study of gender tightness cross-culturally. We close with an important discussion of understanding how tightness looks across a variety of cultural identities and introduce a novel, qualitative method for the study of the tightness of social norms within groups.

Keywords

• Gender
• Tightness-looseness
• Culture
• Psychology