Part One: “Shame”, “Catholic Guilt”, “Good ol’ Irish begrudgery” and other indicators of Cultural Tightness

First of a five part series presenting key themes of the Women of Ireland Project Interviews

I’m a third of the way through analysing the 36 ‘tell me your life story’ interviews that make up ‘The Women of Ireland Project’. In other words, I’ve analysed 12 interviews. It’s my second pass at it. The first time round, I didn’t feel I did a good enough job. So, last October, I went back to scratch and started all over again. This time round, I feel I’m on the right path; there are patterns and commonalities (emerging themes) between women’s stories coming through strongly now, and I can see a much clearer story beginning to emerge.

It’s quite exciting!

But I’m conscious that it’s just me working away in a room, alone, that is seeing them. For sure, that’s an important part of the process, but now as I arrive at this third-of-the-way point it feels like a good time to share (and say, or write, out loud) what I currently view as five key, and overarching, themes of the Women of Ireland Project and hear your point of view on them.

So, across five posts (this being the first) I’m going to share and present these themes — as I understand them and as they are currently iteratively emerging — to you, starting with something called Cultural Tightness.

Here’s a link to where you can anonymously leave any comments, thoughts, feedback you may have on the below. I’d really appreciate any reflections you may have — it all feeds into and helps weave the fabric of this project — but if you don’t, don’t worry, I’m just delighted to have your presence here. Thank you for reading and following this work.

Photo by Inna Gurina on Unsplash

“Cultural Tightness”: The First Key Theme

“Shame”, “Catholic Guilt”, “Good ol’ Irish begrudgery”, “Gossiping”, “Passing remarks” and “The judgementalism of some people!” are phrases and terms that tend to come up, in one form or another, when women I’ve interviewed describe what Ireland can be like. They’re aspects of Irish culture many of us know and most of the time can dismiss with a roll-of-the-eye and a “leave them on”, but this sort of soft policing of our behaviours can also make us think twice about something we might want to do, or fill us with worry about ‘what will people think’?

They’re also indicative of something known as cultural tightness, or a Tight Culture.

Cultural tightness-looseness is a wordy name for what is a very intuitive theory for explaining why some cultures are fundamentally different to others. Cultural psychologist, Michelle Gelfand, one of this theory’s key thinkers, calls cultural tightness-looseness “the underlying primal template of culture”¹. Basically, whether the culture we grew up in is “tight” or “loose” underlies and informs so much of how we behave, what we value and why we do what we do when we do.

“Tight” cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for behaviours that are seen as going against the norm. They value obedience and conformity over individuality and self-expression, and this goes hand in hand with being tolerant of punitive actions, like gossiping, confrontation and social ostracism, that bring people back in line with the norm and make them, and others, aware of their social deviance.

Unlike “loose” cultures, where such punitive behaviours are frowned upon, if you live in a “tight” culture, there’s probably a little voice in your head that agonises over “What will people say?” when you’re about to do something. That voice did not arrive by chance.

By continuously exposing us to cues about how desirable particular behaviours are, “tight” cultures influence our own psychological processes — the collective voice of “what you’re supposed to do” starts to shape the inner dialogue of “this is what I should do”. This is why individuals in “tighter” cultures are found to be more dutiful (concerned with behaving properly), place greater emphasis on their obligations and responsibilities, are cautious (wanting to avoid mistakes), have greater impulse control and are adept at moderating their emotions and behaviours, and how they present themselves, in response to particular social cues or situations².

Basically, the inner world mirrors the outer world; the greater the social regulation of behaviour at a societal level, the greater the self-regulation at the individual level.

So many women interviewed for this project describe experiences of being negatively judged, punished or shamed when they deviate from social norms, and recount how they have learned to self-regulate and moderate their own behaviours and desires to meet the expectations placed on them, please others and demonstrate “good behaviour”.

As Erin captured it perfectly in her interview:

“In Ireland, they shame you! They shame you if you do not behave the way that is acceptable”

It is because of so many realities such as that expressed by Erin, that I’ve come to conclude that Ireland is “tighter” than it is “loose”, at least when it comes to the social sanctioning of behavioural expectations for women; especially women born before 1990.

However, when I look beyond simply what a “Tight” culture looks like to what makes a “Tight” culture, it is then that I become even more convinced in calling Ireland a “Tight” culture, or at least a culture that is still dealing with the ‘ghost’ of the cultural tightness of times past.

Because “Tight” cultures tend to emerge in societies that:

1. Have experienced threat (ecological or human-made)

2. Are characterised by formal institutions that promote obedience and conformity

3. Tend to be more religious

4. Have autocratic governing systems which censor or suppress media

5. Direct challenges of societal institutions (e.g. through strikes and demonstrations) tend to be less common³

If these were viewed as a checklist for cultural tightness, then Ireland historically ticks all the boxes.

1. It has experienced centuries of threat, both the human-made variety of colonisation and the ecological (and human-made) variety of numerous famines and hungers, the most notable being An Górta Mór (The Great Hunger/The Great Famine/The Great Genocide) of 1845 to 1852.

2. The formal institutions of Ireland, particularly those of the Catholic Church, and its educational and legislative systems have, traditionally, been more focused on generating obedience and conformity than enabling self-expression and individuality.

3. Ireland is world-renowned for its religiosity, and religion has had a long-standing influence on the development of Ireland’s formal institutions

4. In the Republic of Ireland, state censorship of media (books, magazines, films) was rife from the 1930s until well into the 1960s; an estimated 1,600 books were banned between 1922 and 1945, and 266 different magazines are still on the censors banned list today⁴.

5. When it comes to challenging societal institutions, Ireland is no stranger to strikes or demonstrations but direct challenges are not overly common; as many observed at the time of the financial crisis and the government’s introduction of austerity measures, the lack of protest in Ireland was stark compared to the images of Portugal, Greece and Spain erupting in protest and riot⁵.

If Ireland were an individual, I often think, their vagus nerve would be shot!

And they’d probably be hyper-vigilant.

So, is it any wonder then, that Ireland developed a “Tight” culture?

The strict rules and norms of behaviour indicative of a “Tight” culture, I feel, are one way Ireland tried to make itself feel in control and safe. For when threat —threat and fear— inform the unconscious backdrop to daily life, you tend to try and find ways to organise yourself out of it; to apply structures and rules that maintain a status quo that feels safe and secure. Consequently, any deviation triggers the ‘threat’ alarm, resulting in swift rebukes'; ‘get back into the non-confronting safe zone or we’ll shame you, make you feel guilty, stop talking to you, slag you, or full-on punish you’.

In many ways, the more extreme forms of cultural tightness are part of Ireland’s past, but as I have seen in what many women participating in this project have shared, we continue to live in its wake.

The ‘ghost of tight culture past’ lives on.

But maybe, just maybe, if we heal that collective vagus nerve, we can loosen those stricter norms that linger.

What do you think?

And, if you have any feedback or reflections you want to share after reading the above, here’s that link again to do so.

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1. Gelfand, M. (2018). Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World (Illustrated edition). Scribner Book Company.

2. 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

3. 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

4. https://www.thejournal.ie/censored-the-274-books-and-magazines-still-banned-in-ireland-today-455034-May2012/

5. Hourigan, N. (2015). Rule-breakers: Why ‘being There’ Trumps ‘being Fair’ in Ireland. Gill & Macmillan.

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Coming next in the series of “Five Key Themes” from the Women of Ireland Project

2. Segregation and Separation

3. Inner Expansion, Outer Restriction

4. Strong, Stoic, Do-ers

5. Challenging and Questioning