469. The U.S. Is Just Different — So Let’s Stop Pretending We’re Not

469.美国只是不同--所以让我们停止假装我们不是

Freakonomics Radio

社会与文化

2021-07-15

50 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

We often look to other countries for smart policies on education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc. But can a smart policy be simply transplanted into a country as culturally unusual (and as supremely WEIRD) as America?

单集文稿 ...

  • How much time have you spent thinking about what makes America America?

  • It may help if you're not originally from here.

  • When was that moment that America became the most american America it could possibly be?

  • Have you ever noticed how Americans are not stupid?

  • I was so excited to be in America, I couldn't sleep.

  • John Oliver, Hannah Gadsby, and Kumail Nanjiani all grew up outside the US.

  • When you are trying to understand the nature of something, an outside view can be extremely helpful.

  • Did you know there is an entire academic field called cross cultural psychology?

  • It's a subfield of psychology that tries to understand what's universal, what's similar, and what's culture specific.

  • Michelle Gelfand is one of the premier practitioners of cross cultural psychology.

  • After 25 years at the University of Maryland, she is moving to the business school at Stanford.

  • Why the business school?

  • We are fiercely interdisciplinary.

  • We do lab experiments, field experiments, computational modeling.

  • We bring in neuroscience to understand all things cultural.

  • You might think that someone who studies cross cultural psychology also grew up abroad, or at least in some big city with a melting pot vibe.

  • But no, our group on Long island, you have to pronounce it right.

  • Long Island, New York, is the birthplace of the american suburb.

  • And I had that typical New Yorker view of the world, the cartoon where there's, like, New York and there's New Jersey and then there's, you know, the rest of the world.

  • When it was time for college, Gelfand went all the way to upstate New York, Colgate University.