Michele Gelfand: The Secret Life of Social Norms

In this video, take an epic journey through human cultures with cross-cultural psychologist, Michele Gelfand, PhD, as she describes how tight and loose cultures wire our world. Michele Gelfand, PhD is a distinguished University professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She uses field, experimental, computational and neuroscientific methods to understand the evolution of culture and its multilevel consequences for human groups. Gelfand’s work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in The Washington Post, The NY Times, The Boston Globe, NPR, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist and De Standard. She is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology Annual Series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press) and the co-author of The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (2004, Stanford University Press), Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (2017, Oxford University Press) and Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire our World (2018, Scribner). 

In eye-opening and fast-paced presentations that hit on the “cultural DNA” driving and guiding the way we act at work, Gelfand explores why certain companies veer tight while others veer loose. She explores how social norms are informed by these invisible guidebooks, and what that means for not only employee experience but also for our customers, markets, stakeholders, and clients. Gelfand uses real-life examples from the organizations she’s studied to explore how we should be thinking about our work cultures and how to establish the optimal tight-loose balance to create the high-performing culture we all strive for.