Why don’t Australians fill up elevators even when there is long queue? The elevator will be labelled for a maximum capacity of 22 people, but once eight people go in, no one else will (except me of course).
I had an interesting experience my first time skiing in Austria. I was being very Aussie and politely letting people fill the gondola in front of me. I wasn’t pushing, and when the gondola looked full I waited for the next one. Unfrotunately, I didn’t get on until my Austrian friends dragged me in with them. My best endeavours at conforming to the cultural norms of my home country were completely inappropriate under the circumstance.
This has led me to wonder, how powerful are cultural norms in determining economic and social outcomes? Economists are gradually realising that cultural norms are often far more powerful incentives than prices. This thought experiment usually helps provoke the idea a little better.
Begin by imagining what you know about German and Greek culture. Now imagine that the German people are all relocated to Greece, and the Greeks relocated to Germany. All the institutions and laws remain the same in each country, as does all the capital (buildings, machinery, vehicles), and all the business relationships. The former German engineer is now an engineer in Greece, the former farmer in Greece is now farming in Germany, while the public servants also swap to hold public service roles in each country.
The question is, would Greece, now populated with the former Germans who have brought with them their cultural norms and behaviour, by a much more productive economy? Would the new Germany, populated with the Greeks, lose its productive edge over time?
I don’t have an answer I can justify with any particular evidence – simply a gut feeling that German culture is more aligned with measureable economic outcomes than Greek culture.
Another example of divergent cultural norms is the social behaviour surrounding alcohol consumption. Why is it that some countries have major problems with alcohol-fuelled violence and binge drinking, while others do not? Many countries are trying to tax their way out of this problem, along with other social ‘sins’ including obesity and smoking.
I found this article had a unique take on the cultural side of binge drinking:
If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem – a nation in which young people would binge-drink coffee every Friday and Saturday night and then rampage around town centres being anti-social, getting into fights and having unprotected sex in random one-night stands.
I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee.
I would make sure everyone knew that even a mere three cups (six “units”) of coffee “can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour”, and sexual promiscuity, thus instantly giving young people a powerful motive to binge-drink double espressos, and a perfect excuse to behave very badly after doing so.
I could legitimately base many of my scary coffee-awareness warnings on the known effects of caffeine, and I could easily make these sound like a recipe for disaster, or at least for disinhibition and public disorder.
It would not take long for my dire warnings to create the beliefs and expectations that would make them self-fulfilling prophecies. This may sound like a science fiction story, but it is precisely what our misguided alcohol-education programmes have done.
Over the past few decades the government, the drinks industry and schools have done exactly the opposite of what they should do to tackle our dysfunctional drinking. I remain perhaps stupidly optimistic that eventually they will find the courage to turn things around and start heading in the right direction.
The writer, anthropologist Kate Fox, is a Director at the Social Issues Research Centre, which appears to be a voice of reason, often calling for evidence based social policy. However, Fox is not immune from criticism. The British Medical Journal has noted the close relationship between the SIRC and a public relations outfit run by the same directors from the same building, funded mostly by the alcohol industry. It makes one suspicious to say the least, particularly about their positions in relation to alcohol policy, but the SIRC seems to have a much broader research focus than alcohol, covering obesity, dining habits, football culture, online habits, safety standard, motherhood, commercialisation of childhood and so on.
In any case, Fox’s claims seems to be supported by anecdotal evidence, as any well travelled wine or beer lover will tell you.
Cultural norms are powerful. They are often deeply connected to people’s identity, and thus economic intervention in the form of relative price changes – to the price of money itself to consumer goods such as alcohol, cigarettes and junk food – may not be as effective as the promotion of modified cultural norms. Indeed, any intervention to encourage productivity at a national level need to be aware of the existing norms driving current conditions.
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