War on terror

A surprising reason for the rise of ISIS

It's a stubborn cultural fact: People crave social order. In the absence of social norms -- the rules, routines and controls that keep a community cohesive and civilized -- people hunger for security. Extremists and autocrats all around the world are often all too ready to sate this universal need.

"Do you know how it was in Mosul before ISIS came?" civilian Abu Sadr said. "We had bombings and assassinations almost every day. Now we have security."

All cultures need social norms to guide behavior, and our research shows that we can classify societies on the degree to which they have a strong normative order. Tight cultures have strong norms that spawn social order and conformity. Loose cultures have weaker norms and comparatively less order but they foster more creativity and openness. Neither is inherently superior; each is generally adaptive to its ecological and historical challenges.

But problems arise when either tightness or looseness gets extreme: Studying over 30 countries, we found that both very tight cultures, to the point of being oppressive -- such as Pakistan, Turkey and China -- and very loose cultures, those made chaotic by too much freedom -- such as the Ukraine, Brazil and Venezuela -- have lower happiness, more depression, higher suicide rates and more political unrest.