Social norms, defined as general unwritten standards of behavior, are vital to both individuals and society (Gelfand et al., 2006; Hawkins et al., 2019). However, there may be national, regional, or social differences in the strength of social norms and the degree of sanctions for violating them. These differences describe cultural tightness–looseness (Gelfand et al., 2006), which is influenced by ecological and historical factors, such as population density and the occurrence of epidemics (Chan, 1996; Gelfand et al., 2011). When facing collective threats, tighter cultures hold an evolutionary advantage–for example, in a study of nation-level cultures, tighter cultures were associated with lower mortality rates by epidemics, even when controlling for collectivism/individualism (Gelfand et al., 2021).

Additionally, research demonstrates that cultural tightness and looseness can affect individuals’ personalities, emotions, and behaviors. For example, individuals in tight cultures tend to be more conscientious and have higher self-monitoring and self-control abilities which help them in adjusting their behavior in real-time to conform to social norms (Gelfand et al., 2011). Cultural tightness is also associated with mental health; for instance, individuals in tighter cultures are more likely to express positive emotions and experience higher life satisfaction (Liu et al., 2018; Chua et al., 2019) in the Chinese context, while tighter culture may lead to lower happiness (Harrington and Gelfand, 2014) in American. In addition, a tight culture is associated with higher interdependent self-concepts (Carpenter, 2000), and may encourage more charitable giving (Siemens et al., 2020). However, tighter culture could reduce innovation (Chua et al., 2019), decrease a sense of individual personal control (Ma et al., 2022), and grow more prejudice based on skin color, sexuality and so on (Jackson et al., 2019). Cultural tightness–looseness also plays important roles in other fields of study, such as management (e.g., Gedik and Ozbek, 2020) and advertising (e.g., Youn et al., 2019).

Previous work has measured cultural tightness and looseness in various ways. Harrington and Gelfand (2014) synthesized objective indicators such as the severity of punishment and degree of religious piety as a measure of the regions’ cultural tightness–looseness, while Jackson et al. (2019) calculated the frequency of words associated with cultural tightness–looseness. Developed by Gelfand et al. (2011), the Cultural Tightness–Looseness Scale (CTLS) measures the perceived cultural tightness at a personal level (Marcus et al., 2022). In addition, predecessors composed a provincial (Chua et al., 2019) and national (Mandel and Realo, 2015) level of cultural tightness–looseness by a large sample using CTLS. The CTLS is a single-factor structure measurement that assesses the degree of clarity and effective implementation of social norms through six items and is widely applied in surveys related to cultural tightness–looseness. Nevertheless, the reliability and validity of the CTLS have been seriously challenged when tested in different cultural contexts (Treviño et al., 2021). Oh (2022) found that the factor loading of a reversed-scoring item in the CTLS was low when used with a Korean population, and that after removing this item, the scale reliability was only 0.67. In another study assessing cultural tightness–looseness amongst Chinese participants, Liu et al. (2022) reported a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.68 for two items of the CTLS. This demonstrates the need to revise CLTS and modify it to be suitable for measuring the cultural tightness–looseness in China.

The Cultural tightness–looseness theory (Gelfand et al., 2011) posits that the strength of social norms, and the tolerance of deviant behavior affect psychological adaptation through the structure of people’s daily life situations and how constraining the situation is. Therefore, individuals may experience situational tightness differently in their daily life because of the difference in cultural tightness. In recent years, the process of urbanization in China has promoted the diversification of people’s lifestyles (He and Qian, 2017). Although within the same macro-cultural context, individual microsystems may be diverse nowadays. Importantly, as ecological systems theory suggests, the microsystem is the immediate environment for children’s development (Bronfenbrenner, 1992). Thus, the degree to which individuals perceive the tightness of their general lives may have a more direct effect on their behaviors. Harrington (2017) developed the General Tightness–Looseness Scale (GTLS) and Childhood Home-Life Tightness–Looseness Scale, among others, to assess perceived tightness–looseness in specific domains. He found that tightness perceived in general life is positively associated with that perceived in other specific domains, and it is also positively related to an individual’s conscientiousness and self-monitoring. Since the inception of the GTLS, it has not been applied to measure Chinese people’s perception of the general tightness–looseness of their life. Given the differences in people’s perception of general life tightness and its more direct effects on individual behavior, this study also aims to adapt the GTLS in the Chinese setting.

In addition, the level at which people perceive cultural tightness varies despite the same macro-cultural context (Harrington and Gelfand, 2014; Chua et al., 2019). Therefore, the revised CTLS and GTLS should be able to effectively distinguish between individuals with different degrees of perceived cultural tightness and looseness. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) is an individual-centered method that can identify different subgroups contained in a population (Howard and Hoffman, 2018). The LPA can also be used to evaluate the construct validity of scales (Davis et al., 2015; Baek et al., 2022). Paschke et al. (2020) applied LPA to analyze the newly compiled Gaming Disorder Scale for Adolescents and found that adolescents with different levels of gaming disorders could be effectively distinguished, indicating that the scale had good discrimination ability. LPA will be used to examine construct validity in this study and explore the pattern of perceived cultural differences in tightness–looseness amongst the Chinese population.

We used SPSS 22.0 for item analysis, EFA, and reliability and validity tests. Confirmatory factor analysis and LPA were conducted using Mplus 7.0.

This study revised the CTLS and GTLS in the Chinese context. Firstly, item analysis showed that some items such as CTLS4 could not distinguish between high and low levels of perceived tightness. In contemporary China, freedom has become a core social value and is constrained by collective interests (Gow, 2017), people may perceive both being constrained by social norms and greater freedom. Therefore, CTLS4 is not good at distinguishing the degree of perceived tightness–looseness, as well as items 4, 12 and 13 of the GTLS. In addition, as suggested by Baumgartner et al. (2018), the core concept of the reverse scoring item is contrary to those of other items in the scale, which may reduce the reliability and misleading factor structure of the scale. Therefore, these items were excluded from the revised scales.

The revised Chinese version of the CTLS is structurally consistent with the version by Gelfand et al. (2011). It remains a single-factor structure that assesses how clearly and compliantly people perceive social norms at the country level. In addition, we adapted the GTLS to measure tightness and looseness in general life. This revised GTLS extracted two dimensions named as “compliance with norms” and “social sanctions.” The definition of cultural tightness–looseness includes two pivotal aspects: the intensity of social norms and the degree of sanctions within society (Gelfand et al., 2006). Therefore, although the revised GTLS differs from the one-dimensional structure proposed by Harrington (2017), it is more consistent with the definition of cultural tightness–looseness. Besides, this study found a significantly positive relationship between CTLS and GTLS. Gelfand et al. (2011) found that the national-level strength of societal norms and tolerance of deviant behavior will influence the degree of everyday situational constraint, while this study discovered the individual level of perceived cultural tightness–looseness was associated with those perceived in general life. These findings may enrich the cultural tightness–looseness theory (Gelfand et al., 2011) in that macro-culture affects the constraint of individuals’ daily living situations both at national and personal perceived levels.

Furthermore, the results of LPA demonstrate that participants could be grouped into two heterogeneous sub-groups in terms of perceived nation-level tightness–looseness and general tightness–looseness of life. The scores of the high-tightness perception group were higher than those of the low-tightness perception group for each CTLS and GTLS item, and there was no significant difference in the gender and age compositions of the two groups. This indicates that the CTLS and GTLS have good structural validity and can distinguish individuals with different perceived tightness–looseness preferences. When compared with Western countries, Chinese culture is tighter (Uz, 2015) yet the perception of cultural tightness–looseness remains heterogeneous at a personal level. Consistent with these findings, previous work using the LPA method demonstrates that, although China is a typical collectivist country, it can be divided into two subgroups dominated by individualism and collectivism at the individual level (O'Neill et al., 2016).

In addition, the reliability test showed that the revised CTLS and GTLS had acceptable internal consistency reliability (α > 0.7, Viladrich et al., 2017), suggesting that each item in CTLS and GTLS effectively measures the same construct. Pearson’s correlation and intraclass correlation were used to examine test–retest reliability. Although the Pearson correlation coefficient was less than the 0.8 criteria (Porst et al., 2007), ICC indicated that the revised CTLS and GTLS reached acceptable retest reliability (ICC > 0.4, Fleiss et al., 2013). Therefore, the revised CTLS and GTLS showed acceptable consistency and stability.

The revised Chinese versions of the CTLS and GTLS have good criterion validity. Both CTLS and GTLS scores positively correlated with dutifulness, impulse control, and personal structural needs. Previous studies have found that both CTLS and GTLS are related to dutifulness because people are concerned with compliance with norms and fulfilling prescribed responsibilities and obligations in tightness culture (Gelfand et al., 2011; Harrington, 2017). People in tightness culture need to adjust their behaviors to conform to social norms, so they have high self-control (Gelfand et al., 2011; Mu et al., 2015). In addition, individuals with high simple structure desire prefer a tightly organized life (Neuberg and Newsom, 1993), so there was a positive association between personal structural needs and perceived tightness–looseness as found by predecessors (Gelfand et al., 2011; Harrington, 2017). Similar to previous findings, this study found that perceived cultural tightness was positively associated with life satisfaction and positive emotional experience (Chua et al., 2019). In addition, Liu et al. (2022) found that perceived social norms can reduce negative emotional experiences and enhance confidence in fighting COVID-19 in the Chinese population. Therefore, greater cultural tightness is likely to result in beneficial psychological outcomes in the Chinese context. The findings of this study can enrich the downstream factor of cultural tightness theory, that is, the influence of cultural tightness on psychological well-being.

Cultural tightness and looseness play an important role in responding to a variety of threats (Gelfand et al., 2021). For example, countries with greater cultural tightness have fewer confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths (Gelfand et al., 2021). At the individual level, perceived higher cultural tightness results in more support for policies to help control COVID-19, more public health behaviors (e.g., wearing masks and handwashing) (Gilliam et al., 2022) and lower levels of COVID-19 risk perception (Liu et al., 2022). Conversely, epidemics may change the tightness–looseness degree of a culture (Gelfand et al., 2011). Whether cultural tightness–looseness is affected by COVID-19 is worth comparing in future studies. In addition, tightness culture is associated with greater prejudice against other races, religions, sexual orientations and immigrants, which may lead to intercultural conflict (Jackson et al., 2019). Therefore, we should also pay attention to the inhibition role of cultural tightness in the process of sociocultural change.

In conclusion, cultural tightness and looseness have an important impact on people’s behavior and psychology. The CTLS and GTLS scales adapted in this study can provide reliable and effective measures of individuals’ perceived tightness–looseness in their national culture and general life in the Chinese context.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found at: https://osf.io/zprsy/files/osfstorage.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Ethics Committee of the Department of Psychology, Renmin University of China. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

JL collected and analyzed the data, and wrote and revised the manuscript. HM collected the data and helped revise the manuscript. XL helped analyze the data and revise the manuscript. PH designed the work, provided data analysis advice, and revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This study was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (Major Program) (19ZDA021) and by Fund for building world-class universities (disciplines) of Renmin University of China.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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