Both the validity of the cultural tightness index and the association with creativity and order are spurious -- a comment on Jackson et al

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the methods used in a recent study linking cultural looseness to creativity and order, arguing that their approach is flawed and does not establish valid relationships.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the methods employed to validate the cultural tightness index and its associations are inappropriate and unreliable.

Findings

The methods used by Jackson et al. are unsuitable for validating the index.

The supposed association between cultural looseness and creativity/order is not supported by robust analysis.

The paper questions the validity of the original study's conclusions.

Abstract

It was recently suggested in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour that the historical loosening of American culture was associated with a trade-off between higher creativity and lower order. To this end, Jackson et al. generate a linguistic index of cultural tightness based on the Google Books Ngram corpus and use this index to show that American norms loosened between 1800 and 2000. While we remain agnostic toward a potential loosening of American culture and a statistical association with creativity/order, we show here that the methods used by Jackson et al. are neither suitable for testing the validity of the index nor for establishing possible relationships with creativity/order.