The hidden forces shaping your choices

Summary

Title: The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices Podcast: TED Radio Hour Host: Manoush Zomorodi Release Date: May 2, 2025

In the episode titled "The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices," hosted by Manoush Zomorodi, the TED Radio Hour delves into the unseen systems and influences that dictate our daily decisions. From the food we consume to the infrastructure that supports our lives, and from societal norms to urban design, this episode uncovers the intricate networks that guide our behavior and choices without our conscious awareness.

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1. The American Diet and the Meat Industry

Speaker: Sarah Lake
Timestamp: [01:01] – [06:05]

Sarah Lake, a food system and climate expert, opens the discussion by tracing the historical shift in American dietary habits, particularly the normalization of meat consumption. She explains how post-World War II strategies, including increased government meat subsidies, technological advancements in farming, and the introduction of refrigeration, fundamentally altered the American diet. National initiatives like the school lunch program further entrenched meat as a staple in multiple meals daily.

Notable Insights:

• Marketing Power: Lake emphasizes the pivotal role of marketing in making meat consumption ubiquitous. She states, “No one crosses the street if there's no traffic coming. So I guess I'm curious, like, how do you sort of parse what is a stereotype that people have versus what the science tells you?” [03:03].

• Shift to Plant-Rich Diets: Addressing the need for a dietary transformation, Lake advocates for plant-rich options to be as accessible and affordable as meat. “We need our schools and hospitals to offer plant-based foods as the default where you can get meat. But you have to ask for it as the exception.” [06:05]

Conclusion:
Lake's work with the Tilt Collective focuses on incentivizing the availability of plant-based foods, highlighting that dietary choices are often less about individual preferences and more about the options presented by companies and governments.

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2. Infrastructure and Climate Resilience

Speaker: Deb Chhatra
Timestamp: [16:13] – [25:00]

Deb Chhatra, a professor of engineering at Olin College and author of "How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World," discusses the critical state of our infrastructural systems in the face of climate change. She underscores the vulnerability of essential services like water, electricity, and telecommunications, emphasizing that extreme weather events are pushing these systems to their breaking points.

Notable Insights:

• Decarbonizing Infrastructure: Chhatra highlights the necessity of transitioning to renewable energy sources to decarbonize infrastructure. “Our infrastructure systems are the most powerful tool that we have for how we can respond to climate change.” [19:21]

• Global Efforts: She points to successful models, such as the UK's initiative to shift its electric grid to 95% renewable energy by decade's end and tech companies in the U.S. leading the renewable transition to support industries like artificial intelligence.

• Economic Perspective: “The cost of actually building out the infrastructure that mitigates the impacts of climate change is much, much cheaper than dealing with the effects of climate change.” [22:35]

Conclusion:
Chhatra advocates for a proactive overhaul of our infrastructural systems, leveraging available renewable technologies to create resilient, sustainable, and equitable services that can withstand the evolving challenges posed by climate disruptions.

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3. Social Norms: Tight vs. Loose Cultures

Speaker: Michelle Gelfand
Timestamp: [28:08] – [43:29]

Michelle Gelfand, a cross-cultural psychologist and author of "Rulemakers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World," explores the concept of tight and loose cultures. Tight cultures are characterized by strict social norms and penalties for violations, typically emerging in high-threat environments. In contrast, loose cultures exhibit more permissive norms and greater openness, often found in low-threat settings.

Notable Insights:

• Cultural Continuum: Gelfand explains, “Tight, loose is a continuum. Some groups like Japan and Singapore, Austria and Germany veer tight. Other groups like New Zealand or Brazil, Greece or the Netherlands veer loose.” [29:24]

• Impact of Threats: “When cultures have a lot of chronic threat… they need rules to coordinate to survive.” [31:11] High-threat histories lead to tighter norms to maintain order and cohesion.

• Applications in the U.S.: Gelfand notes regional variations within the United States, where the South and parts of the Midwest tend to be tighter, while coastal states are generally looser. Additionally, social class plays a role, with the working class exhibiting tighter norms compared to the more permissive upper class.

• Interpersonal Relationships: She discusses how understanding tightness and looseness can enhance empathy and communication within families and communities. “We can harness the power of social norms to better our world. Culture isn't destiny.” [42:25]

Conclusion:
Gelfand's framework provides a lens to understand and navigate cultural, regional, and social differences, fostering greater empathy and more effective interactions in diverse settings.

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4. Walkable Cities and Urban Design

Speaker: Jeff Speck
Timestamp: [44:05] – [52:30]

Urban planner Jeff Speck, author of "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time," discusses the principles of creating walkable urban environments. He outlines four essential criteria for walkability: usefulness, safety, comfort, and interest.

Notable Insights:

• Four Pillars of Walkability:

  1. Useful: “Useful has to do with the proper mix of uses… active around the clock.” [46:52] Ensuring that residential, commercial, and recreational spaces are in close proximity.

  2. Safe: Emphasizing lower vehicle speeds and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. “The biggest impediment often in cities to making them safe and comfortable to walk around is a traffic engineer who is trained on highway design and has brought it into city design.” [48:43]

  3. Comfortable: Creating spatial definitions where buildings flank the sidewalks, providing a sense of enclosure and safety. “Comfortable is the most designy aspect of the discussion… the small blocks of all. That gets us into the comfortable walk.” [48:51]

  4. Interesting: Incorporating diverse architecture, human activity, and aesthetic elements to make walks engaging. “Nothing interests us more than other humans, and that's what causes us to walk.” [49:41]

• Challenges with Car-Centric Design: Speck highlights the prevalent infrastructure that prioritizes cars over pedestrians, leading to safety issues and reduced walkability. He also addresses rising pedestrian and cyclist fatalities as cities transition towards more walkable designs without adequate safety measures.

• Economic and Health Benefits: Walkable cities contribute to reduced obesity rates, lower healthcare costs, decreased crime, and enhanced community engagement.

Conclusion:
Speck advocates for intentional urban planning that prioritizes pedestrians and cyclists over vehicles, creating environments that are not only walkable but also foster healthier, more connected communities.

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5. Additional Insights and Applications

Speaker: Various

Throughout the episode, the interconnections between these hidden forces reveal a comprehensive picture of how systemic factors shape individual and collective behaviors. From the normalization of meat in diets to the rigidity or flexibility of social norms and the design of our physical environments, each element plays a crucial role in guiding our choices.

Notable Themes:

• Systemic Influence vs. Free Will: Guests emphasize that many of our daily decisions are less about free choice and more about the options and systems presented to us.

• Empathy and Understanding: Recognizing the underlying systems can foster greater empathy towards others' behaviors and choices, understanding that differences often stem from varying systemic influences.

• Proactive Change: Whether it's shifting dietary norms, redesigning infrastructure, or rethinking social policies, proactive efforts can lead to more sustainable and equitable outcomes.

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Conclusion

"The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices" provides a thought-provoking exploration of the unseen systems influencing our everyday lives. By understanding the intricate networks of marketing, infrastructure, cultural norms, and urban design, listeners gain valuable insights into how to navigate and potentially reshape these forces for a healthier, more sustainable, and more connected future.

The episode serves as a reminder that while individual choices matter, they are deeply embedded within and influenced by broader systemic frameworks. Recognizing and addressing these hidden forces can empower us to make more informed decisions and advocate for changes that align with our collective well-being.

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References:

• TED Radio Hour Episode: "The Hidden Forces Shaping Your Choices"
• Speakers: Sarah Lake, Deb Chhatra, Michelle Gelfand, Jeff Speck
• Additional Insights from the transcript provided.

Transcript

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

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[Sarah Lake]

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

Why is it noteworthy and even change you? I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and npr. I'm Minouche Zamarodi. Today on the show Hidden Forces My.

[Sarah Lake]

Grandma Toots was a big meat eater. She was a classic 1950s style housewife in the US and grew up in a time when meat was everywhere.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

80 or so years ago when Sara Lake's grandma was running her household and feeding her family, meat was served at pretty much every meal.

[Sarah Lake]

You would have breakfast with maybe perhaps sausage offered. You'd have lunch where it would be deli meat sandwiches and you'd have dinner that would center over a large cut of meat. And so my grandma was a product of her time.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Time now to tell you ladies how to keep father happy. Sarah says it wasn't like grandma Toots was a meat obsessed carnivore real man type steak sandwich. In mid century America there was a strategy to make meat the norm. Starting after the second world war as.

[Jeff Speck]

Savory beef stew when it's armor it.

[Sarah Lake]

Was impossible to avoid and it was advertised Heav pushed on consumers.

[Jeff Speck]

Hormel bacon stays fresh longer when Saran Wrap.

[Sarah Lake]

This is when they first started creating national ad campaigns. And when you see these ads that meat is essential for your amino acids, it's essential for a well balanced diet.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Found that man must have food which furnishes energy, food to build muscle and other things.

[Sarah Lake]

And this is where we started getting this idea that meat was normal to eat every day in multiple meals. When in reality even 10 years prior to that it was an exception to have meat at a meal rather than the norm.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

But three factors completely flipped what was for dinner. First, the US government increased its meat subsidies. Second, new technology led to larger farms that could raise and slaughter more animals faster. Plus people could refrigerate and store more meat. Finally, the national school lunch program launched.

[Jeff Speck]

Lunches are designed to be nutritious.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

With a mandate to serve protein meats.

[Jeff Speck]

And other foods rich in protein.

[Sarah Lake]

We saw the fastest and largest shift in our diets that has ever really happened.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, I guess that's when it became like the American thing to do. You have meat and potatoes at dinner. You grill a hamburger in the summertime. For me, I just remember when I was growing up, beef, it's what's for dinner. The ad that like is branded in my brain. And I guess that's the power of marketing.

[Sarah Lake]

Absolutely, it's a huge power of marketing. And when we say meat is so American, it has been created to be American by the meat industry. And there's industry associations not just for beef, but for pork and for chicken. We had, you know, pork, the other white meat, as an infamous campaign. And all of these are industry funded. We don't see this right. This is one of the many invisible forces that's shaping us is the way in which these companies are influencing our choices.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Every day we make choices, but who and what exactly are behind them? When are our decisions guided by desires and when are they guided by design? Well, today on the show, hidden forces from the food we eat to how we power our homes and even communicate with each other. An exploration of some of the systems that guide our everyday behavior. For Sarah Lake, a very personal health crisis made her consider how the American food system needed to be transformed to lead people to eat differently. It happened back when she was a kid and her dad had a heart attack.

[Sarah Lake]

He had really high cholesterol. He had several blocked arteries that required a six way bypass surgery. Oh God. And yeah, it was apparent that so much of this was linked to his eating. And while he was having surgery, my mom had me and my brother and my sister and she took us to get dinner. At that point, it was late at night and the only place in the hospital lobby that was Open was a McDonald's. And we sat there eating this greasy food in the hospital while the floor above me, my dad was having heart surgery that I had just learned was caused by him having a really unhealthy diet.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Today, Sarah is a food system and climate expert. She heads up the group, the Tilt Collective. Their goal is to make it easier for people to eat less meat and more plants without even realizing it.

[Sarah Lake]

And the way in which we go about this is asking the question of how we can offer and incentivize more plant rich foods. We recognize that many consumers are quite limited in their choices, limited by how much food costs or where it's available, if they can access it. So our approach is to say, how do we get companies and governments, whether that's schools and hospitals or it's grocery stores and fast food restaurants, to offer and incentivize plant rich foods. What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what's offered to us.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Sarah Lake continues from the TED stage.

[Sarah Lake]

And companies and governments today still make it really hard for us to choose anything other than meat. I mean, it's offered everywhere and it's cheaper than other options. What we need now is the same fundamental shift in what we eat, but in the opposite direction, back towards plants. We need to grow more food on less land by 2050, and to do that we need to shift from land intensive animal protein to land efficient vegetable protein.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

The story that I've been hearing from people is like, oh yeah, you know, fake meat and burgers and hot dogs and things like that had a moment, but people just didn't want them. Is that what happened?

[Sarah Lake]

It is partially what happened. Part of the challenge is we're actually talking about a dozen different products with a dozen different technologies behind them. Things like black bean burgers and you have others that are things like lab grown meat, which couldn't be farther apart in terms of what they're made of and what the experience is eating them. The other part is just simply figuring out how to market these to consumers. One of my favorite opportunities is around what we would call sort of plant rich meats or blended meats, where you have a burger and instead of it being 100% beef, you actually make it 50% beef and 50% mushrooms or beans. And these products are available today, but we don't yet know how to present this. If you advertise a blended burger or a plant rich burger, consumers don't know what that is. And quite frankly, a blended burger sounds disgusting. That's not really a product that we see as tasty and desirable. So a lot of this is a marketing challenge, some of it's an investment challenge. And part of it is just the time it takes to get consumers familiar with these products and start building up the demand where people can have healthier, more plant rich options without having to give up meat. Cause ultimately this isn't about no meat, this is about less meat. What we need is for companies and governments to offer and incentivize plant rich diets the same way they did for meat decades ago. I need to walk into a McDonald's and see a menu full of plant rich options and have them be just as cheap or cheaper than the Big Mac. And we need our schools and hospitals to offer plant based foods as the default where you can get meat. But you have to ask for it as the exception. And we need just as much money to flow into the plant based industry as currently makes meat wildly and artificially cheap. We know that this can work because it has before. Take Lidl. It's one of the largest supermarkets in Europe. They decided to put their plant based meat next to the conventional meat in the meat section and make it the same price. So when you went to grab a package of ground beef, you had a healthier, sustainable plant based option right next to it that costs the same. Within six months of making this change, the sale of their plant based products went up by 30% and shows no sign of flagging. Companies and governments have been telling us for decades what to eat. They have the power to help us choose differently.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

There's always something a little disturbing when you realize you've been making choices not because you were conscious of them, but because the system was set up to push you a certain way. So I guess I'm wondering the next time someone listening goes to the grocery store, what do you want them to be aware of?

[Sarah Lake]

It's always hard to realize that we might not be making choices out of free will. And it's not just about meat or just about a grocery store. This happens all the time where certain products trend and we learn about new things. So when you walk in a grocery store and you want to be aware of what's shaping your forces, one of the things is understanding how grocery stores aren't as so there is a strategy that is if you put products in well lit displays with good signage and at eye level, it's easier to want those products. And that is how a meat display is set up. It takes up a large portion of the store. It's very well lit, you have signs for each type of product. You also have a butcher counter.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Right.

[Sarah Lake]

We have a dedicated space to getting your customized choice choice of meat. If you think about that compared to say beans, beans are often bottom shelf in a small ugly metal can. And so it makes certain products quite hard to find. And we're seeing the same challenge with many plant based options that there's no standard place to put plant based options. Sometimes they're in the freezer section, sometimes they're in a vegan section, sometimes they're next to the meat, sometimes they're not next to. And so this is one of the main ways in which we can help people choose these products is by figuring out where exactly they should be in a store and having a standard display. And ultimately I think this is the heart of the issue. We should have consumer freedom of choice. But what we have now is actually the opposite. Consumers. When you poll them and ask them what they want, they want healthy and sustainable foods. They will largely say they want to be buying more plant based products. But the challenge is they're not offered and they're not affordable and many of the products aren't quite there in terms of taste parity. But consumers want this.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, on the plus side, when did we start saying plant based? I just remember vegan and vegan always had this connotation of, you know, you were missing out on something. There was a scarcity to it. Whereas I don't know, when did this happen? Plant based sounds kind of bountiful in its own way. Much more positive.

[Sarah Lake]

Yeah, it's been an intentional decision to use the word plant based and I think to move away from this vegan mentality. I think it's all or nothing. Often we hear, well, it's so difficult to make this change. It's so difficult to go from a food system that relies on meat to one that relies on plants. And what I always say back is it's going to happen anyways. Our food system is going to be wildly disrupted, whether that's from the impacts of climate change or zoonotic disease or even tariffs and trade wars. And we can instead proactively plan and we can start transitioning towards a more plant rich food system that is better for farmers and ranchers, better for consumers and all around better for the planet.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Sarah Lake is a global food system and climate expert. She's also CEO of the Tilt Collective, a philanthropy working to shift consumer eating habits. You can see her talk. Also, we reached out to the beef, poultry and pork associations for their thoughts on changing consumer eating habits and meat consumption. The beef and poultry associations didn't get back to us, but we did hear from the National Pork Board which represents over 60,000 pig farmers. Their spokesperson told NPR that the USDA oversees their promotional materials which are science backed and explain the benefits of pork as part of of a balanced diet. I'm Minouche Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio hour from npr. We'll be right back.

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[Deb Chhatra]

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

I'm Minouche Zumarodi. On the show today, the hidden forces behind our everyday habits. So think about your typical morning routine. Maybe you start your day with a nice hot shower. Then you head to the kitchen where you flip on the lights, grind up some coffee beans, turn on the stove to make breakfast. Oh, and it's a little hot out today, so you turn on the fan or crank up the AC while you listen to the day's headlines.

[NPR News Anchor]

Live from NPR News in Washington.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Whatever your routine, every single morning, pretty much everything we do relies on a vast network of hidden infrastructure.

[NPR News Anchor]

So things like water, it could be things like electricity, sewage, gas, distribution, telecommunications, all kind of collectively in the space of what we think about as infrastructural systems. And we take these systems for granted and we just work on top of them.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

This is Deb Chhatra. She is a professor of engineering at Olin College and the author of the book How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems that Shape Our World.

[NPR News Anchor]

There's kind of a truism that our infrastructural systems are invisible until they break. And when they break, they're sort of at the forefront of our attention, Right. If you don't have clean water coming out of your tap or if you have an electricity outage or even if the Internet goes down.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Right.

[NPR News Anchor]

Which is not a survival need. Right. It's not a life threatening thing in most cases. Right. And it still really upends your day when that happens, because we have learned to rely on these systems as our infrastructure buckled. Roadways, melted electrical cables, public transit shutdowns.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

But these systems that we rely on are being pushed to their breaking point. The extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest.

[Jeff Speck]

West this past weekend was brutal for the region's infrastructure.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In Texas, millions of people are enduring.

[NPR News Anchor]

Their third day without electricity in freezing cold temperatures. Many families are being advised to boil.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

What little tap water they have. Others just have no water at all. As the climate changes and severe weather events become more common, Deb says our infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

[NPR News Anchor]

So one of the things which we can't kind of lose sight of is that we want these systems to remain functioning and resilient because they underpin what we can do with our days and how we do it. Rather than spending our days thinking about, well, where am I going to get clean water from or how am I going to function without electricity?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And I think for many of us laypeople that we've taken for granted that, you know, we turn on the tap and clean water comes out, or that we always have electricity, this is quite a wake up call. How much has a realization set in that the way we've set up our infrastructure has to change?

[NPR News Anchor]

Well, I would say there's two pieces to that story. So the first one is that almost all of the systems that I describe require energy to work. And most of the energy that we use comes from fossil fuels. So that's the first thing, that if they're powered by energy, and that energy is coming from fossil fuels, it produces greenhouse gas emissions, mostly carbon dioxide. The second thing, though, is that we now know that that landscape is changing, that climate change is being felt as climate impacts or climate disruptions. That's really meaning that things that we took for granted about how the landscape works, what weather would be like, what 100 year storms are changing. And what that means is that the infrastructural systems, the networks that we build thinking that they were in a stable landscape, well, that landscape may not be stable. In fact, most likely is not stable. So they're just not going to work very well anymore. And whether we like it or not, we need to rethink our infrastructural networks. But these are physical systems that are embedded in the landscape. And that means that we need to think about these landscapes as a whole.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Here's Deb Chatra on the TED stage.

[NPR News Anchor]

Our landscapes, of course, have been stable, and we know that that's not the case anymore. Right. Climate change, that's what climate change is. It's making our landscapes less stable. And that means this is longer heat waves, this is stronger hurricanes, this is fires, this is flooding. Everything that we think about as extreme weather events. This idea of a natural disaster, the thing that makes it a disaster is precisely that it's not natural. Right. It's that it affects humans and human communities. And because our landscapes are becoming less stable, sooner or later, the who's affected will be all of us. But we can flip this around, because as we decarbonize these systems, as we transform them, we have the opportunity to make them resilient, to make them responsive, to make them more equitable. I mean, our infrastructure systems, they are the most powerful tool that we have for how we can respond to climate change. We know that we can do this because after decades of policy commitments, we've done the research, we have the renewable energy technology to transform this. We know that there's at least a pathway. And once we know that a pathway exists, we know that many pathways exist, but we can only choose to walk those pathways together. This is no longer an engineering problem to be solved.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So in light of changing climate, unstable weather, unstable landscapes, we need to decarbonize our infrastructure systems. And you say that this actually presents a lot of opportunity.

[NPR News Anchor]

Yeah. We now know how to use renewable energy at scale in a way we didn't 20 or 30 or so years ago. It's hard to pin a date on it because there's two main things. One is the Danish wind turbine, the standard wind turbine that I'm sure you and almost everyone who's listening has seen. And the other is the ability to produce solar panels relatively inexpensively and at scale. What those two changes mean is that we are now capable of using renewable energy at the same kind of scale that we use fossil fuels at. So 20 years ago, I would be saying at some point in the future, we will be able to harness all of the abundant renewable energy that is arriving at the planet, and we will be able to rebuild our infrastructural systems to use that energy instead someday. And now I get to say that day is here.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And in some places, the work is being done. In the uk there's a massive effort underway to shift the electric grid to have 95% renewable energy by the end of this Decade countries like Costa Rica, Brazil and Norway are already there, all relying heavily on hydropower for their electricity. And in the us, tech companies are leading the charge for transitioning to renewables to meet the future demands of the artificial intelligence industry.

[NPR News Anchor]

The fundamental idea behind a lot of infrastructural systems is that you invest in these systems because you're investing in the well being of the people who are going to use them. We understand that building out infrastructural systems is widely understood to be something that pays for itself, even in terms of return on investment. A lot of hardheaded economists and financial analysts have shown that the cost of actually building out the infrastructure that mitigates the impacts of climate change is much, much cheaper than dealing with the effects of climate change.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I was actually recently just outside of LA where there are these massive wind turbines that you've mentioned, and, and I, you know, I couldn't help but think about electricity the whole time I was there because they were so in your face. They're huge, you can't avoid them. And I asked someone, I was like, what do you think of them? And they said, oh, you know, you get used to it. They become part of the landscape.

[NPR News Anchor]

Did you ever look at certain parts.

[Jeff Speck]

Of California where they have heavy windmills?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

But the President has said he is not a fan. Like on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2024.

[NPR News Anchor]

It is the ugliest thing. It looks like a graveyard, almost a graveyard of windmills.

[Sarah Lake]

It's pollution.

[Jeff Speck]

It's so bad.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And the federal government will not be supporting these projects. So where will the revamp of our infrastructure stand without federal funding?

[NPR News Anchor]

So I think that places that have the resources and have the kind of political will to start addressing this kind of transformative change and mitigating climate impacts, they will keep doing it, whether or not they have federal resources to do it. So places that have the resources can move farther ahead and make more resilient sustainable communities. Places that don't are not going to be able to do that. There'll be a bigger division between those two. And that's not just in the United States. That's going to be true globally. And a lot of that work will continue regardless of what is happening at any kind of higher sort of higher levels in the hierarchy. And I teach teenage like I teach undergraduate engineering students. And so I really want them to understand that their lives are not about fixing the problems that their grownups left them. No, your job is to build out this world, right? And you will on the way there you can address all the problems that you've been left.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, when you put it that way, wow, what a time to be an engineering student. This is like, there is a chapter here where you can really make a huge change, where a generation from now, if people just think what you've done is normal, you will have succeeded. Right. Almost like when the railroad track relayed in the United States.

[NPR News Anchor]

I think it's very much like that because we remember. I mean, we. I think few of us remember directly, but certainly we understand the role of the New Deal as making that big investment into our lives collectively by building out infrastructure. And I think it's the moment where we have the opportunity to do that again. And this time, you know, we get to go sort of much farther and to do it in a way that is much more responsive to our needs. And it'll be, you know, there might not be another Hoover Dam to point at. Right. But I think the evidence of that work could and will be everywhere, and it'll be just a part of the fabric of our lives. I think that will be true after this transformation. And some of it might be big fields, but a lot of it might be just embedded, you know, into our daily lives or into our communities. So in the 20th century, we built out these kind of massive monolithic systems. And I have to say, like, I am a fan of our charismatic megastructures. So in the US that's the Golden Gate Bridge, it's the Hoover Dam. These were built as monuments, and they were built to endure. But in the 21st century, our infrastructural systems will need to endure, not like monuments, but like forests. So if you think about a forest ecosystem, it's powered by the sun, it's rooted in the earth. There's no waste. Everything is basically used to grow new things. It endures, but it actually evolves and changes with time. And, of course, it provides a place where all who live there can thrive. Our infrastructure systems are how we take care of each other at scale so that we can take care of each other as individuals. They underpin our agency, and they really foster and allow us to develop our social relationships with each other. All of these are about what it means to be human. Right? And that means that a commitment to a shared infrastructural future is a commitment to our shared humanity. So this is the world that we can create together. Thank you.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That's engineering professor Deb Chhatra. She's the author of the book How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems that shape our world. You can see her full [e-mail] on the show today. The hidden forces that shape our habits and choices every day, including the way we behave around other people.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Social norms, culture is this really interesting puzzle because it's omnipresent. It's all around us 24 7, but it's invisible. We don't really think about it. We take it for granted.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

This is Michelle Gelfand. She is a cross cultural psychologist and.

[Michelle Gelfand]

I try to do research to uncover the hidden cultural codes that guide our behavior, really what we call social norms, these unwritten rules for what's expected of us in everyday settings. And you know, we're constantly following rules. We just don't really realize it.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Over the past three decades, Michelle has published over 150 papers in academic journals, including one in particular that became, well, a hit. It was published in the journal Science in 2011. The study examined cultural norms in over 30 countries around the world and it became the basis for Michelle's book, Rulemakers, Rule Breakers How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.

[Michelle Gelfand]

In some contexts, the rules are very strict. They're what we call tight cultures. They have a lot of rules and a lot of reliable punishments when people violate them. On the flip side, we have context where there are looser norms, where there's a wider range of behavior that's perceived as permissible.

[Research Assistant]

What we found was that just like we can classify people in terms of their personalities, we can also classify groups in terms of the strength of their norms.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Here's Michelle Gelfand on the TED stage.

[Research Assistant]

So tight, loose is a continuum. Some groups like Japan and Singapore, Austria and Germany veer tight. Other groups like New Zealand or Brazil, Greece or the Netherlands veer loose. And what we found was that tight and loose confers really important trade offs for groups that we don't recognize. So tight groups have the corner on order. They have a lot more law enforcement and also security, and they have much less crime. Tight cultures with their strong rules have people also regulating their behavior more. They have more self control. Tight cultures have less alcoholism, they have less debt and they're less fat. Loose cultures tend to be more disorganized. They have more crime, they have less synchrony, and they have a host of self regulation failures. But loose cultures corner the market on openness. They're far more open to many different types of people, people from different religions, from races, immigrants, people with disabilities, many stigmatized people. In one experiment I did, I asked my research assistants from all over the world to wear fake facial Warts, tattoos and nose rings. And they were asking for help on city streets or in stores. And there was a very clear pattern. People in loose cultures were much more likely to get helped when they were wearing these stigmas as compared to tight cultures. Loose cultures are also open to more ideas, they're much more creative and they're much more open to change. And tight cultures struggle with openness. So you might be asking by now what causes these differences. Tight and loose cultures don't share any obvious characteristics, geography or language or religion or traditional. But there is a hidden rationale and it has to do with threat.

[Michelle Gelfand]

When cultures have a lot of chronic threat in their histories, you can think about threat from mother nature, like constant natural disasters or famine, or they have a lot of human made threat. Think about how many times your nation's been potentially invaded over the last several hundred years. When you have a lot of threat, you need rules to coordinate to survive. And the idea is that loose cultures might have had less threat and that can afford more permissive norms because if there's less coordination needs, then you don't need to have tighter norms.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You know, I always get worried about being like, oh, you know, Germany, it's a, it's, they're rigid there, you know, nobody crosses the street, even if there's no cars coming, if it's not green. And my question to you is like, is this a case of science proving the stereotypes in some way? You know, Berlin, actually quite a freewheeling city, except I lived there and it was true. No one crosses the street if there's no traffic coming. So I guess I'm curious, like, how do you sort of parse what is a stereotype that people have versus what the science tells you?

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And you know, every culture has tight and loose elements. If we zoom into different domains, we could see.

[NPR News Anchor]

Yeah.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You know, in Germany there's strict rules are on time and on jaywalking, but you know, then you see people going, you know, having more nudity at beaches, which you wouldn't see in the us. The US has strangely, like a domain of sexuality is a little tighter here, even though we have a lot of looseness when it comes to jaywalking. I can attest to that. You know, my home, New York State, New York City, it's, it's really dangerous, you know, and so the point here is that we can place countries on a continuum, but we need to remember that it's dynamic, it can change and that we can zoom in and we can find domains in every culture that are tight and loose and try to understand why they are the way they are.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

In a minute, Michelle Gelfand explains how the tight, loose framework can help explain differences on a personal level, too, within our families, friendships and relationships. On the show today, the hidden forces that shape our lives. I'm Minouche Zamarodi, and you're listening to the TED radio hour from NPR. Stay with us.

[Deb Chhatra]

This message comes from BetterHelp. Therapy can be expensive, but at BetterHelp they believe therapy should feel accessible, not like a luxury, which is why they offer quality care at a price that makes sense and can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it, and now it's within reach. Visit betterhelp.com NPR to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com NPR this message comes from U.S. bank. As a small business owner, you're used to doing it all, but US Bank Business Essentials is here to help. It's a powerful combination of checking and card payment processing that gets you fast access to the money you've earned with no monthly maintenance fee, checking and unlimited digital transactions. They even have small business specialists that work together with you to help your business reach its full potential. That's the power of U.S. deposit products are offered by U.S. bank National association member FDIC. This message comes from NPR sponsor Disney season one of Andor had critics calling it the best Star wars series yet. Season two of the Emmy nominated series is now streaming on Disney. Follow Cassian Andor as he embarks on a path from a rebel to a hero starring Diego Luna. And from creator Tony Gilroy, writer of Michael Clayton and the Bourne Identity. Season two of Andor is now streaming only on Disney.

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[Minouche Zamorodi]

It's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Minouche Zumarodi. Today on the show, the hidden forces that shape shape our lives. We were just talking to cross cultural psychologist Michelle Gelfand. Michelle says that some cultures veer tight, meaning they have stricter rules and norms, while others veer loose. And she believes this framework can help us understand our differences.

[Research Assistant]

Rather than red or blue, we can also differentiate our United States 50 states in terms of A continuum of tight and loose. In our research, we could see the south and some parts of the Midwest veer tight and the coasts tend to veer loose. Tight states, just like tight nations, tend to have more threat. There's a remarkable similarity between scores on tightness in our data and Mother Nature's fury in terms of natural disasters. Once you grasp the tight, loose lens, you can also use it to analyze other differences that have eluded us. Let's take social class. In our research, the working class is far tighter than the upper class. And it makes sense. They experience a lot of threat. It's the upper class that has more of a safety net. They have less threat, and so they can afford to be more rule breakers.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And is that partly because, like, if you don't have to worry about having health care and, you know, all those other things, like a whole, a huge load is lifted off your shoulders and you can think about the world differently, you can move more freely.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Bingo. One of our studies that we did that, it was the youngest people in our sample. They were 3 year olds, kids between 3 and 5 years old. We brought them into the lab and we, we can't exactly ask them how tight or loose is your household this week? You know, but we have these kids playing a game, a new game with a puppet, Max the puppet. In the middle of the experiment, Max the puppet does something a little strange. She starts violating the rules of the game. And, you know, we simply actually look at what do the kids do. Like, do they laugh at Max? Do they tell him to stop? But we wanted to see, does this vary by class? Like, are the working class kids more likely to tell Max to stop as compared to the upper class kids? And in fact, we have some evidence that that seems to be the case, that this starts early. So this is just another way to think about tight, loose, this invisible pattern in a different level of analysis.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

You're reminding me. I had a conversation with my brother the other day about my niece who is like maybe not the most athletic kid on the playground. And he was saying she really wants kids to follow the rules because then things are predictable, right? She's not hanging around on the monkey bars like some of those other kids who are crazy. So I guess I wonder about that too. In every situation, depending on your limitations, you veer towards tightness or looseness.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah, that's right. And actually very interesting. I mean, parents, teachers, prime socializers of cultures. So you can even analyze school systems for how tight or loose they are. How do you design schools that Have a healthy amount of accountability, but also empowerment from looseness. So parents are socializing what they think is the right balance in their households with their kids. Then schools are reinforcing this. So we all have our own story. I think what's exciting is to figure out where do our own mindsets come from? Whether it's from our socialization, whether it's from our occupation, our gender, or culture, how has it changed over time? And then we can think about, is it optimal? Do we have the optimal balance?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yeah, I mean, I would love to know, like, how do you teach openness to somebody who veers more closed? Like, do you do it with rules? Like, you must be open and not punish anyone?

[Michelle Gelfand]

Well, you know, might call that legislative looseness. Right. There's places and times where you're allowed to be loose. This is a very personal question because I have a quiz that assesses our tight and loose mindset and ask people to think about themselves in general, in your life. Do you like rules? Do you try to manage your impulses? Do you like structure? Do you like predictability? On the flip side, do you take risks? Are you someone that's tolerant of a lot of uncertainty? Are you someone who is a little more impulsive? These are kind of things that we ask people to think about. And by the way, you could think about in general or you can ask yourself at work. You can ask those questions in your work life. How do you think about rules and impulse control and structure in your social life? Do you have a different mindset? So you can think about this in various different contexts, too. The quiz itself asks people to think about it generally. And then you get a score which is combining these variables. And, you know, you can think about someone who gets a score of very loose, moderately loose, moderately tight, or very tight.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I took it.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You took it. What was your score?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I'm moderately loose.

[NPR News Anchor]

You are. Okay.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I said that to my producer, and she was like, of course you are. You always want to break the rules.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Wow, that's really interesting. So it helps us to a understand ourselves and also be able to communicate with people around us with greater empathy. So I score moderately loose on my own quiz. My husband's a lawyer. That dude is very tight. Right? He actually. We've been married for 30 years, and, you know, we made it work. But, like, he gets deeply disturbed by how I load the dishwasher. And so, you know, he is in a context, an occupation where there's a lot of accountability. He has to have his time, like, you know, accounted for every Six minutes.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Well, you're making me think of my kids where I know one I think would score quite loose, the other would score quite tight. And I shift, you know, I code switch between the two of them, encouraging one of them to go a little looser and the other to go tighter, just to balance them out a little.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Yeah, that's totally right. And in fact, that's kind of an ambidexterity. And you know, my daughters will say, look, in our household, the norms that are tight have to do with basically respect. Like we need to work hard, we need to take care of our health. But the looser domains that they also know are like, you know, their rooms, how, how messy they are. We just close the door. You know, they're curfew. They've always had very lax curfew because we say, look, you need to be accountable to yourself. So we're not going to legislate that. As we zoom into any level, like whether it's organizations or households or relationships, we can start being intentional about where we want tight and loose norms and we can negotiate it. That's how we help people to pivot and have more ambidexterity.

[Research Assistant]

This is what I call the Goldilocks principle of tightness and looseness, that we need a balance of the strength of norms in our everyday lives for the maximal happiness. I want to leave you with a few different ideas of how you can use the tight, loose code in your everyday life. The first is that we should understand our own mindsets. We each have a certain default on the tight, loose spectrum based on our own personal experiences. The second is that we need to cultivate empathy for others mindsets. Often people that we have a lot of conflict with are people that we have. The biggest differences in our tight, loose mindsets and understanding where they come from can be great to understand and empathize and build better relationships. And finally, we can harness the power of social norms to better our world. Culture isn't destiny. We can tighten up norms when they're getting too loose or loosen up norms when they're getting too tight. Luckily for us, humans developed and invented social norms and we can use them to better our planet. Thank you.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was Michelle Gelfand. She is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You can see her full [e-mail]. so we've talked about all kinds of different hidden forces in our lives and that needs to include how we get around. In 2023, the U.S. census estimated that around 70% of U.S. workers commuted by car in places like Phoenix, Arizona.

[NPR News Anchor]

You know, 25 miles each way, hour and a half in traffic.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Ignacio Delgadillo used to spend a lot of time in his car. Because Phoenix is one of the least walkable cities in the United States. Its sprawling suburbs and wide streets are great for cars, not so much for pedestrians.

[Michelle Gelfand]

We really didn't talk to our neighbors.

[NPR News Anchor]

We don't really know, like, we say.

[Michelle Gelfand]

Hi and bye as we're driving by, right?

[NPR News Anchor]

And then we just all go in.

[Sarah Lake]

Straight into our garage.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

But about a year ago, Ignacio and his family moved to a community designed to be car free. Cul de sac in Tempe, Arizona. Here, the streets are built for foot traffic. Buildings are close together. Trees line narrow walkways. A plaza with shops and restaurants serves as a town square.

[Michelle Gelfand]

You naturally see people all day doing.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

What they're doing, right?

[NPR News Anchor]

They're going to work, they're going to school, or they're just out enjoying their walk.

[Jeff Speck]

However much of a driving or car dependent city you may happen to be in, there's a certain number of people who, when presented with the opportunity, will live car free and that that market is completely unmet.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

This is urban planner Jeff Speck. We talked to Jeff last year about his lifelong goal to make American cities more walkable. He says that cul de sac Tempe is a great example of how neighborhoods can be transformed and that the benefits go well beyond just meeting your neighbors.

[Jeff Speck]

Traffic safety, community identity, tourism, stormwater management, transit effectiveness, urban competitiveness. It reduces obesity, other chronic diseases, healthcare costs, crime, traffic congestion, maintenance costs, fossil fuel dependence.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

But he also says making cities more walkable takes very careful planning with seemingly invisible design choices that prioritize the needs of people over the needs of cars.

[Jeff Speck]

What that means at a deeper level is to create an environment in which people will make the choice to walk or to bike or to use some other form of micro mobility rather than driving. And to do that, according to my general theory of walkability, the walk has to satisfy four basic criteria. It needs to be useful, it needs to be safe, it needs to be comfortable, and it needs to be interesting. And each one of those criteria then places upon us a series of mandates that surround urban design and city planning, my profession, to create that environment for the potential pedestrian or cyclist.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, so to be walkable, a city needs to do those four things. They need these attributes for every walk a person takes. Let's start with the first. The walk needs to be useful. What do you mean by that?

[Jeff Speck]

So useful has to do with the proper Mix of uses, so places to live, workshop, recreate, all within walking distance. It typically means more housing in your downtown, which would balance the uses in your downtown and have it be active around the clock. When a neighborhood which is principally a business district becomes a truly mixed use district, with the proper balance of jobs and housing, it comes to life.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, so we've made our city, we've made our walk useful. Now we need to make walking safe. How so?

[Jeff Speck]

The typical American street is designed for speeds well over the posted limit. And that's the exact opposite of what they do in the Netherlands, for example, where you make the streets as tight as they need to be to cause the drivers to go. The speed that is safe for the community, the resistance that you find to accomplishing this typically lies in public works departments and engineering departments, which are led by engineers who still embrace the older concept of traffic safety, which in America grew out of highway safety. So if you think about yourself when you're driving on a highway where your speed is a constant, anything you can do to reduce the speed, opportunities for conflict to increase elbow room, is going to make that street safer. So wider lanes, one way traffic, no parallel parking, no trees, that's the clear zone, big swooping curves, all those things make a highway safer. But it's precisely the opposite that makes a downtown safe. You want to have narrow lanes, you want to have parallel parking, you want to have two way traffic, you want to have lots of intersections and lots of other things going on. And so the biggest impediment often in cities to making them safe and comfortable to walk around is a traffic engineer who is trained on highway design and has brought it into city design.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Okay, our walk is useful, our walk is safe. How do we make it, number three, comfortable for walking?

[Jeff Speck]

Comfortable is the most designy aspect of the discussion because. And it's a little counterintuitive, we like to be in places that have spatial definition. If you can picture lower Manhattan or, you know, the cranky parts of our oldest cities, those have the smallest blocks of all. And that gets us into the comfortable walk and that delightful feeling of being embraced by buildings on both sides.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

Yeah.

[Jeff Speck]

So that idea of spatial definition is central to making walkable places. And we, you know, our favorite streets tend to be quite narrow, and then the buildings aren't that tall, but they're considerably taller than the streets are wide.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

And that brings us to the fourth and final principle of making a city walkable, which is that the walk needs to be interesting.

[Jeff Speck]

Yeah. So the final category of interesting is basically not having blank walls, not having parking structures, having lots of eyes on the street in the form of doors and windows and signs of human activity. You know, we humans are among the social primates. Nothing interests us more than other humans, and that's what causes us to walk.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

So when you arrive at a. At a city to work with them, do you find that you need to first sort of change their cultural outlook on how to provide the best thing for their citizens? Is there a mind shift that you have to get them to do before you actually start talking about the details?

[Jeff Speck]

Well, I think what's different now, as opposed to 10 years ago or even certainly 30 years ago, when I started doing this work, is that there's now an openness within public works departments and engineering departments to this information. And the thing that has evolved the fastest is bicycle infrastructure. And when we're building new projects now, we're mandated by the city to not have the bike lane in the street. The new standard is to put it up on the sidewalk edge.

[Minouche Zamorodi]

I mean, you're speaking to number two, a safe walk or a safe ride, in this case, on a bicycle. But we've been hearing so many headlines about the rise in pedestrian and, I believe, biker deaths. So if more cities are becoming more welcoming to walking and riding bikes, why is this happening?

[Jeff Speck]

So more. More cities are getting more serious about improving pedestrian safety, but that's really just starting to kick in at volume now. And it used to be that, you know, the poor people lived in the inner city and the wealthy people were suburbanizing. Now many more of America's poor are living further and further from the city center in order to afford a mortgage. That's where a lot of people are stuck now. And sadly, they're stuck there without cars, many of them. So you have kind of the double whammy of people living without cars in an environment that was designed without ever imagining people living there, using it, without cars. And I should say, when I joined this movement in the 80s, I really thought we could stop sprawl. I've pretty much given up on that goal after what, after 40 years? But I've replaced it with a new goal, which is essentially to offer the walkable quality of life, you know, the walking lifestyle to as many more Americans as possible. And that's why, you know, I'm going where the people are and doing much more downtown work. And most of my work is for cities who call me in and say, you know, we realize that we could be so much better if we made our downtown more walkable. And what are the steps to getting there?

[Minouche Zamorodi]

That was urban planner Jeff Speck. He's the author of Walkable City How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. You can watch his ted [e-mail] and hear more from Jeff in our episode A More Walkable World. Thank you so much for listening to our show. This episode was produced by Hersha Nahada, Rachel Faulkner White, Katie monteleone, and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour, Katie Monteleone, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahusy, Fiona Guerin, and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Gilly Moon, Becky Brown, Jimmy Keeley, and Simon Jensen. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Minouche Zamorodi and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr.

[Deb Chhatra]

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[Discover Sponsor]

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