Cold and Warm Cultures

Maybe a term for this dichotamy already exists elsewhere, but I haven’t heard it yet and have found my own term for it super useful, so here we go:

Cold Culture examples

• Highly efficient in small things

• Knows how much time is worth, e.g. might consciously spend no more than 1 minute selecting a grocery product with a price difference lower than a dollar

• Libertarian-esque; pays attention to system efficiency, not what ‘feels good’

• Willing to use money to incentivize things in their personal life, e.g. “if you figure out my emotional issue I’ll pay you 1k” or “paying a roommate to do chores for you”

• More risk-tolerant; likely to view downsides or problems as sometimes being worthwhile tradeoffs

• More likely to place responsibility inside the self; views others as ultimately not responsible for your well being

• Less likely to parse things as exploitation or manipulation; views additional choices as non-coercive (e.g., a new employer offering well below minimum wage is not viewed as exploitative)

• Donates to efficient charities; utilitarian

• Ask culture: a frame where people should ask directly for what they want with the expectation that the askee will say no if they don’t want to

• High decoupling

• Destination over the journey

Warm Culture examples

• More attention to the subjective, emotive, connective world

• More disgust sensitive (more likely to resist things that trigger moral disgust, such as homosexuality or sex work. this is highly relative to culture)

• Persuaded by sense of fairness

• Distrusts conscious signaling as manipulative; e.g., really hates pickup artistry because it’s making deliberate something that is otherwise organic and intuitive

• Wary of manipulation in general; more likely to perceive manipulation as genuinely subverting individual agency

• Perceives responsibility as resting more outside the self or diversified; others can be responsible for your well being

• Views some voluntary options as coercive or exploitative; e.g. less likely to allow a rich private individual to pay voluntary minority groups to get sterilized

• Naturalistic and community oriented

• Dislikes advertising and capitalism

• Guess culture: a frame where there can be harm in asking for things because of implicit pressure for the askee to agree even if they don’t want to

• Low decoupling

• Journey over the destination

I know this list covers many clear dichotomies already (ask vs guess culture, or right vs left brain), but I have kept wanting a more general term that covers a lot of these feelings. I keep saying “that sounds like a cold culture thing” in conversation and then feeling awkward I don’t have a longer post to refer to, so here it is finally.