Background

Tightness-looseness refers to the strength of social norms and tolerance of deviation from norms in different communities. Cultures with tight social norms have more rules across more situations with stronger consequences for breaking those rules and more agreement about what the rules are. Norms include formal rules and informal, implicit rules. Many norms are not written down, but they can also include formal laws.

 

Measurement

Researchers have measured tightness using questionnaires and archival measures.

 

Questionnaire

Unlike many scales in psychology, the primary tightness-looseness questionnaire is not a self-report scale. It is typically a “culture report” scale, where participants rate their culture. For example, one question in the scale asks participants how much they agree with the statements, “There are many social norms that people are supposed to abide by in this country” and “People agree upon what behaviors are appropriate versus inappropriate in most situations this country.” Participants rate these statements from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree).

 

Researchers can ask about different types of culture, like their nation (Gelfand et al., 2011), their state/province (Chua et al., 2019), or their company (Di Santo et al., 2021). Any size group can have social norms. That means researchers can adjust the question wordings to fit the research question they’re asking and the sample they have access to.

 

The original paper on tightness-looseness developed three scales measuring tightness:

 

1. General perception scale. The general perception scale is described above. This is the most widely used scale.

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2. Behavior x situation scale. This scale asks 14 items about specific behaviors in specific situations. For example the scale asks about whether it’s appropriate to “eat in an elevator” or “flirt at a funeral ceremony” (Gelfand et al., 2011). Participants rate these items from 1 (Extremely inappropriate) to 7 (Extremely appropriate).

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3. Situation scale. This scale asks about 15 situations, such as “library,” “doctor’s office,” and “own bedroom” (Gelfand et al., 2011). The scale asks, “To what extent does the situation require that people monitor their own behavior or ‘watch what they do’?” Participants rate each situation from 1 (Not at all) to 5 (Very much). Researchers have used the situation ratings to test whether these characteristics of situations can explain variation in people’s behavior, such as whether people are more likely to follow mask rules on public transportation than in public parks (Wei et al., 2024) and eat or laugh out loud in public places (Realo et al., 2015).

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Archival Measures

Three other papers measured tightness-looseness using archival data.

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1. Measurement across U.S. states. Harrington and Gelfand (2014) used a 9-item composite index to measure tightness-looseness across the 50 U.S. states. They included: (1) legality of corporate punishment in schools, (2) percentage of children hit/punished in schools, (3) rate of executions from 1976 to 2011, (4) severity of punishment for violating laws (i.e., selling, using, or possessing marijuana), (5) access to alcohol (i.e., ratio of dry to total counties per state), (6) legality of same-sex unions (r), (7) state-level religiosity, and (8) percentage of individuals claiming to have no religious affiliation (r), (9) percentage of population that is foreign. More details are available on page 7991 of the paper.

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2. Measurement across non-industrial societies. Jackson, Ember, and Gelfand (2020) asked research assistants to read through ethnographies of non-industrial societies and code the strength of norms around (1) law and ethics, (2) gender, (3) socialization, (4) marriage, (5) sexuality, (6) funerals and mourning. Tightness constituted 4 criteria: (a) the degree to which cultural norms constrained behavior, (b) the extent that people followed cultural norms, (c) how often people expected punishment for norm violations, (d) how harsh punishments were expected to be for norm violations. More details are available on page 4 of the paper.

 

3. Measurement across time. Jackson and colleagues (2019) tracked the prevalence of 20 tight words (such as “comply” and “conform”) and 20 loose words (such as “choose” and “leeway”) in words in books over hundreds of year. They identified these words through using word2vec models of word embeddings. More details are available on page 248 of the paper.

 

Limitations/Strengths

One strength of tightness/looseness measurements is that they seem to correlate with real-world outcomes. For example, tight cultures had fewer Covid-19 cases (Gelfand et al., 2021; Talhelm et al., 2023) and measures of creativity, such as patents (Jackson et al., 2019). These results suggest that tightness can help explain real-world outcomes. Another strength is that researchers have been able to use publicly available data to create proxies for tightness without having to survey participants directly. This is particularly useful for understanding how tightness has changed throughout history (Jackson et al., 2019).

 

One limitation of the primary questionnaire is that its single reverse-coded item often loads separately from the remaining items. For this reason, the tightness-looseness scale sometimes shows a two-factor solution in factor analyses, and it can have a Cronbach’s alpha reliability below the common standard of > .70 (Oh, 2022; Wormley et al., 2021).

 

One question that comes up is whether tightness-looseness is the same as collectivism. Culture scores for collectivism and tightness are correlated, r = .49, p = .01 (Gelfand et al., 2011). However, researchers have argued that tightness has predictive power beyond collectivism for outcomes that are closely linked to norm tightness (Harrington & Gelfand, 2014), such as wearing masks during the Covid pandemic (English et al., 2022). Cultures with tight norms also tend to have low relational mobility, such as a correlation of r = -.39, p = .063 for the original tightness scall and r = -.70, p < .001 for a measure of tightness based on the variance (SD) in people’s survey responses (correlations reported in the supplemental materials of: Thomson et al., 2018). However, the two are distinct.

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Author(s) and Reviewer(s): Prepared by Thomas Talhelm, PhD., Reviewed by Joshua C. Jackson, PhD. Please direct suggestions and feedback to Dr. Talhelm (talhelm@uchicago.edu).

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Version date: September 2025.

 

References

Chua, R. Y., Huang, K. G., & Jin, M. (2019). Mapping cultural tightness and its links to innovation, urbanization, and happiness across 31 provinces in China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(14), 6720–6725.

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Di Santo, D., Talamo, A., Bonaiuto, F., Cabras, C., & Pierro, A. (2021). A multilevel analysis of the impact of unit tightness vs. Looseness culture on attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.652068

 

English, A. S., Talhelm, T., Tong, R., Li, X., & Su, Y. (2022). Historical rice farming explains faster mask use during early days of China’s COVID-19 outbreak. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 3, 100034. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2022.100034

 

Gelfand, M. J., Jackson, J. C., Pan, X., Nau, D., Pieper, D., Denison, E., Dagher, M., Van Lange, P. A., Chiu, C.-Y., & Wang, M. (2021). The relationship between cultural tightness-looseness and COVID-19 cases and deaths: A global analysis. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(3), e135–e144.

 

Gelfand, M. J., Raver, J. L., Nishii, L., Leslie, L. M., Lun, J., Lim, B. C., Duan, L., Almaliach, A., Ang, S., Arnadottir, J., Aycan, Z., Boehnke, K., Boski, P., Cabecinhas, R., Chan, D., Chhokar, J., D’Amato, A., Ferrer, M., Fischlmayr, I. C., … Yamaguchi, S. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332(6033), 1100–1104. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1197754

 

Harrington, J. R., & Gelfand, M. J. (2014). Tightness–looseness across the 50 united states. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(22), 7990–7995.

 

Jackson, J. C., Gelfand, M., De, S., & Fox, A. (2019). The loosening of American culture over 200 years is associated with a creativity–order trade-off. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(3), 244–250.

 

Jackson, J. C., Gelfand, M., & Ember, C. R. (2020). A global analysis of cultural tightness in non-industrial societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 287(1930), 20201036. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.1036

 

Oh, S. (2022). Cultural tightness, neuroticism, belief in a just world for self, gender, and subjective well-being: A moderated mediation model. Current Psychology, 41(12), 8300–8311. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03652-4

 

Realo, A., Linnamägi, K., & Gelfand, M. J. (2015). The cultural dimension of tightness–looseness: An analysis of situational constraint in Estonia and Greece. International Journal of Psychology, 50(3), 193–204. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12097

 

Talhelm, T., Lee, C.-S., English, A. S., & Shuang, W. (2023). How rice fights pandemics: Nature-crop-human interactions shaped COVID-19 outcomes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(11), 1567–1586. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221107209

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Thomson, R., Yuki, M., Talhelm, T., Schug, J., Kito, M., Ayanian, A. H., Becker, J. C., Becker, M., Chiu, C., Choi, H.-S., Ferreira, C. M., Fülöp, M., Gul, P., Houghton-Illera, A. M., Joasoo, M., Jong, J., Kavanagh, C. M., Khutkyy, D., Manzi, C., … Visserman, M. L. (2018). Relational mobility predicts social behaviors in 39 countries and is tied to historical farming and threat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(29), 7521–7526. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713191115

 

Wei, L., English, A. S., Talhelm, T., Li, X., Zhang, X., & Wang, S. (2024). People in tight cultures and tight situations wear masks more during the post-pandemic era: Evidence from three large-scale studies in China. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231210451

 

Wormley, A. S., Scott, M., Grimm, K., Li, N. P., Choy, B. K. C., & Cohen, A. B. (2021). Loosening the definition of culture: An investigation of gender and cultural tightness. Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, 2, 100021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2021.100021