[ Cultural Norms ]

Borrowing some ideas from Sam Harris’s recent podcast with Michele Gelfand, culture is like a computer operating system.  It’s there in the background, running the show, even though we don’t see the details or the moving parts.  It’s there, but it’s entirely invisible. 

Cultural norms exist in nations, in households, and in organisations.  Cultural strength is differentiated by how closely rules are followed.  A tight culture is often co-identified with a collective threat level, such as chronic natural disasters. There’s an interesting link between threat level and rule-following: higher threat levels result in more consistent rule-following as the cultural norm.