It was so different from what Alina experienced at school, where it seemed like her classmates all shared one point of view, and dissent was discouraged. Alina and her parents used to get in arguments almost every week. Alina would tell her mom that she didn’t want to wear makeup, and Alina says her mom would say, “What, you think women should dress like men?” At the worst moments, her mother would weep and ask her daughter, “Who are you turning into?” (Now, she says, they get along better.)

Alina felt disappointed that so many good people around her had views she disagreed with so profoundly. It just seemed to be the way of things. “Russia is very infamous for having a consensus that people come to,” she told me, “and no one can challenge it.”

Russia might be illiberal, as Lipman put it, but it is also more “culturally tight” than neighboring countries like Finland or Sweden,59 or even than the U.S. Tight cultures are those in which social norms are strict and formal, and the punishments for breaking them are severe. In tight cultures, people are more in step with one another, but loose cultures permit a wider range of behaviors. Tight cultures are the military, the Amish, or Singapore, where a nineteen-year-old American named Michael Fay was caned in 1994 for vandalism. Meanwhile, tech startups are loose, as is the Netherlands,60 where parents and teachers allow little kids to play “doctor” with one another in the spirit of positive bodily exploration.61 It’s easier to be weird in a loose culture than in a tight one.

The idea of tight and loose nations had been circulating in the cultural-psychology world for decades, but it was scientifically firmed up by the psychologist Michele Gelfand in a major 2011 study.62 Gelfand and her colleagues asked people from thirty-three countries how much they agree with statements like, “In this country, if someone acts in an inappropriate way, others will strongly disapprove.” She also asked them how acceptable it would be to, say, kiss in a public park. (In tight societies, it’s inappropriate.)

Gelfand found a number of interesting associations between different elements of day-to-day life in these societies, all of which point to their willingness (or not) to break social norms. Tight countries were more likely to be autocratic and to have a less free media. People in tight countries are more religious, less likely to protest, and less likely to commit crimes. They’re also less fat—they literally keep it tight. Loose countries have more crime, but they’re also more tolerant of change or of people with facial scars. Essentially, cultures trade orderliness for creativity as they go from tighter to looser.