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.