Cultural tightness–looseness and national innovativeness: impacts of tolerance and diversity of opinion

Deckert, Carsten; Schomaker, Rahel

doi:10.1186/s13731-022-00219-2

“…Following the launch of the campaign in 2014, the effect of innovation initiatives became significantly positive, resonating with the notion that government involvement plays a critical role in stimulating innovation (Dosi, 1988;Geffen, 1995). Moreover, the negative moderation effect of cultural tightness on the relationship between innovation initiatives and general innovation decreased, suggesting that the campaign was able to alleviate some of the barriers to innovation imposed by cultural tightness (Chua et al, 2015;Deckert & Schomaker, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Examining the Effects of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Government-led Innovation Initiatives on Regional Innovation Outcomes in China

Li

2024

Preprint

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In this study, we investigated the influence of cultural tightness-looseness on general, incremental, and radical innovation in China over 15 years, with a focus on the interaction between cultural factors and government initiatives, particularly the "Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation" campaign initiated in September 2014. Using a longitudinal dataset of annual government reports from 31 provinces between 2007 and 2021, we found that cultural tightness and government innovation initiatives positively impacted general and incremental innovation but not radical innovation. The nationwide campaign modified the relationship between tightness/looseness and innovation initiatives, with tightness' negative moderating effect diminishing after the campaign. Additionally, innovation initiatives significantly affected all innovation types only after the campaign, while the interaction between looseness and innovation initiatives changed from positive to negative. These results emphasize the importance of examining the interplay between cultural factors and government policies in fostering different forms of innovation and highlight the influence of nationwide campaigns on local government policies for driving innovation outcomes.

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“…Another trait related to the task at hand (circulation of information) is cultural tightness. This measures the propensity of a society to conformity 56 , and has been associated with a variety of aspects concerning information sharing practices, such as digital engagement, knowledge sharing, and acceptance of diverse opinions [57][58][59][60][61] . This latter variable reflects also the propensity of holding adherence to norms in high regard 59 , and might well be hindering the spreading of misinformation.…”

Section: State-level Attributesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users

Bozarth

¹

,

Quercia

²

,

Capra

³

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

2

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Past research has attributed the circulation of online news to two main factors—individual characteristics (e.g., a person’s information literacy) and social media effects (e.g., algorithm-mediated information diffusion)—and has overlooked a third one: the critical mass created by the offline self-segregation of Americans into like-minded geographical regions such as states (a phenomenon called ‘The Big Sort’). We hypothesized that this latter factor matters for the online spreading of news not least because online interactions, despite having the potential of being global, end up being localized: interaction probability is known to rapidly decay with distance. Upon analysis of more than 8M Reddit comments containing news links spanning four years, from January 2016 to December 2019, we found that Reddit did not work as an ‘hype machine’ for news (as opposed to what previous work reported for other platforms, circulation was not mainly caused by platform-facilitated network effects). Rather, news circulation in Reddit worked as a supply-and-demand system: news items scaled linearly with the number of users in each state (with a scaling exponent $$\beta$$ β $$\approx 1$$ ≈ 1 , and a goodness of fit $$R^2\approx 0.95$$ R 2 ≈ 0.95 ). Furthermore, deviations from such a universal pattern were best explained by state-level personality and cultural factors ($$R^2\approx \{0.12, 0.39\}$$ R 2 ≈ { 0.12 , 0.39 } ), rather than socioeconomic conditions ($$R^2\approx \{0.15, 0.29\}$$ R 2 ≈ { 0.15 , 0.29 } ) or political characteristics ($$R^2\approx \{0.06, 0.21\}$$ R 2 ≈ { 0.06 , 0.21 } ). Higher-than-expected circulation of any type of news was found in states characterised by residents who tend to be less diligent in terms of their personality (low in conscientiousness) and by loose cultures understating the importance of adherence to norms (low in cultural tightness). Interestingly, the combination of those factors with low levels of education was then associated with the circulation of a particular type of news, that is, misinformation. These results suggest that online interactions are geographically bounded and, as such, news circulation cannot be studied purely as an Internet phenomenon but should be grounded into a user’s offline cultural environment, which has become increasingly segregated over the decades, and is admittedly hard to change.

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“…In a subsequent piece, Jackson et al (2020) corroborated earlier results by extending the argument to non-industrial societies. Cultural tightness has been found to be associated with diverse outcomes such as support for authoritarianism (Jackson, Van Egmond, et al, 2019), perceptions of effective leadership (Aktas et al, 2016), proclivity for social comparison (Baldwin & Mussweiler, 2018), country-level innovation (Deckert & Schomaker, 2022), and compliance with public health protocols (Gilliam et al, 2022).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For historical reasons, the US states have evolved to generate and sustain adaptive cultures of varying tightness/looseness. A critical observation is that today tighter cultures are generally less inclusive, diverse, and permissive (Deckert & Schomaker, 2022; Gelfand et al, 2011; Jackson, Van Egmond, et al, 2019). By extension, this geographic distinction implies that cultural tightness operationalized at the state level, net of compositional characteristics, may be predictive of Americans’ views on unauthorized immigrants.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional Variation in Social Norms and Domestic Anti-Immigrant Hostility

Kim

2023

Cross-Cultural Research

1

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Why are some ingroup members (i.e., natives) more tolerant of, or hostile toward, outgroup others (i.e., immigrants)? A large volume of evidence exists attempting to address this issue. The bulk of findings from observational and experimental research focuses on the dual concept of ‘realistic’ and ‘symbolic’ threat, operationalized in terms of migrant stock or percentage of foreign-born population. According to the literature, a higher stock generally indicates a higher threat, which in turn implies greater xenophobic sentiment. Against this backdrop, the present study shifts the analytic emphasis to a novel explanatory mechanism in the US context: strength of social norms at the state level. Specifically, by drawing on the concept of cultural tightness-looseness, it asks whether American citizens in a geographic region characterized by strong social norms and stringent sanctioning of deviance are, on average, more xenophobic. Results from mixed effects models provide substantial support. Based on nationally representative data collected by the Pew Research Center (2018) during the height of Trump administration, the analysis reveals that cultural tightness has a contextual effect: net of controls, residency in a state with a higher index score is associated with greater levels of anti-immigrant prejudice and stronger preference for anti-immigration policy.

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Cultural tightness–looseness and national innovativeness: impacts of tolerance and diversity of opinion

Cited by 8 publications

References 49 publications

Examining the Effects of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Government-led Innovation Initiatives on Regional Innovation Outcomes in China

Examining the Effects of Cultural Tightness-Looseness and Government-led Innovation Initiatives on Regional Innovation Outcomes in China

The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users

Regional Variation in Social Norms and Domestic Anti-Immigrant Hostility

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