A global analysis of cultural tightness in non-industrial societies
A global analysis of cultural tightness in non-industrial societies
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2020.1036
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发表时间：
2020-07-08
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Ember, Carol R.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jackson, Joshua Conrad;Gelfand, Michele;Ember, Carol R.
长期以来，人类群体一直面临着资源紧张和战争等生态威胁，还必须克服日益复杂的社会所带来的协调与合作压力。从紧-从松（TL）理论认为，社会对这些挑战的反应是在文化上变得更紧，对越轨行为采取更严格的规范和更严厉的惩罚。TL理论进一步预测，紧缩与对社会、政治和宗教制度的下游影响有关。在这里，我们在一个非工业社会的样本中全面检验了TL理论。由于先前对TL理论的研究以当代国家和美国各州为样本，我们的分析使我们能够检验该理论是否可以推广到民族志记录中的社会，并探索在非工业社会中变化更大的紧密性的新相关性。我们发现，紧密度在社会规范的各个领域，如社会化、法律和性别，都是协变的。我们还表明，紧密性与几个理论化的前因（生态威胁、复杂性、居住同质性）和几个理论化的后果（群体间接触、政治威权主义、道德化的宗教信仰）相关。我们将这些发现整合到非工业社会紧密度的整体模型中，并提供了可用于未来民族志记录中文化紧密度研究的指标。
Human groups have long faced ecological threats such as resource stress and warfare, and must also overcome strains on coordination and cooperation that are imposed by growing social complexity. Tightness-looseness (TL) theory suggests that societies react to these challenges by becoming culturally tighter, with stronger norms and harsher punishment of deviant behaviour. TL theory further predicts that tightening is associated with downstream effects on social, political and religious institutions. Here, we comprehensively test TL theory in a sample of non-industrial societies. Since previous studies of TL theory have sampled contemporary countries and American states, our analysis allows us to examine whether the theory generalizes to societies in the ethnographic record and also to explore new correlates of tightness that vary more in non-industrial societies. We find that tightness covaries across domains of social norms, such as socialization, law and gender. We also show that tightness correlates with several theorized antecedents (ecological threat, complexity, residential homogeneity) and several theorized consequences (intergroup contact, political authoritarianism, moralizing religious beliefs). We integrate these findings into a holistic model of tightness in non-industrial societies and provide metrics that can be used by future studies on cultural tightness in the ethnographic record.