Speaker：林靓，斯坦福大学商学院博士后

Time： 2026年6月17日（周三）11:00-12:00

Venue：王克桢楼1206

Host：金淑娴 研究员

Abstract

Why do so many women exit male-dominated fields despite equivalent qualifications and ambitions? This talk proposes that a critical but previously unmeasured mechanism lies in how social norms are lived rather than merely prescribed. The concept of lived tightness is introduced here, referring to the chronic experience of operating under heightened scrutiny and the anticipation of disproportionate social sanctions, and this experience is argued to fall unevenly across gender lines, particularly as male representation in a workplace increases. Across four studies using surveys, experiments, and experience sampling (n = 4,492), findings demonstrate that women consistently report tighter social worlds than their male counterparts, and that this asymmetry helps explain downstream outcomes including self-censorship, risk avoidance, and intentions to leave. Together, these findings suggest that the same workplace can function as two distinct normative environments depending on who is navigating it, with implications for tightness-looseness theory, cross-cultural research on cooperation and social norms, and efforts to build more equitable organizations.

Bio

Jing Lin is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, working in Michele Gelfand's Culture Lab. She completed her Ph.D. at Beijing Normal University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she studied the foundations of human cooperation across cultures. Her research spans cross-cultural psychology and organizational behavior, with a focus on how cultural norms, social tightness, and structural inequality shape trust and cooperation. She examines these questions across diverse contexts, from workplace dynamics to large-scale cross-national studies, using methodologies including surveys, experiments, ESM, and multilevel modeling.

2026-06-09