Cultural values are diverging around the world

Values. They form the centre of how our societies function. They dictate laws, how we distribute resources, who we go to war with, and - on a more micro level, how we go about our daily lives. 

Many psychologists assumed that rapid technological developments would make the world an increasingly homogenous place, and that cultural values across the globe would begin to converge. But new research published in Nature Communications has found exactly the opposite. To find out more, I went to meet Dan Medvedev who was one of the lead authors on the study…

Dan - The values that actually we show the biggest effect for, the biggest divergence for, are values that are related to how people perceive and treat groups and cultural practices that somehow deviate from the norms. We're talking about things like acceptance of homosexuality, acceptance of divorce, euthanasia. These things that maybe before, in Western societies at least, we would think of as in some way deviant.

James - One of the hypotheses around this topic is that, with globalisation, with economic development across the world, with better means of communications between cultures, people thought we might start to see our values assimilate and become one.

Dan - Yeah, that's right. I guess a pretty famous example is Francis Fukuyama's book where he predicted the ‘end of history.’ The idea, or the reason for the end of history was that, after the spirit of the Second World War and Cold War after, now that countries are beginning to gain prosperity - which is true, the poorest countries, the majority of them, have gained in wealth - they thought it was just a matter of time before more and more cultures would adopt more of these 'western' or 'European' values.

James - Some really big ideas, some very grand theories, there. So how do you do your job? How does one go about objectively analysing whether cultures are diverging or converging? What's the process?

Dan - There have already been studies that looked at just some values, only looking at a few countries. I think what we did is different in that we analysed 76 countries, almost half a million people, and we did it for 40 different values. Not all of them are related to these values of acceptance or tolerance that some researchers call 'emancipative' values. What we do is we take data from this survey called the 'World Value Survey,' which is probably one of the biggest and most influential and important instruments, sources of data, for looking at values over time in many countries. What they do is they survey a lot of people in a lot of different countries in the world around every seven years. They are all representative samples, which means that they try to emulate the actual demographic composition of a country, and that goes back at least to 1980 to the last wave of the survey, the last time they collected data, which I think ended around maybe two years ago.

James - So when you looked at the survey results across the 40 year time period, have values been converging or diverging since that time?

Dan - We find pretty strong evidence for overall divergence in values. Not all values have been diverging. For example, people around the world tend to agree more and more that there will be more emphasis on technology in the future. Values that have been diverging the most, which is the majority of values that we've surveyed, they have to do with the dimension that we previously talked about that refers to importance of tolerance and self-expression. The value that has diverged the most is acceptance of homosexuality. A lot of them also have to do with somewhat similar practices such as divorce, abortion, euthanasia. Some of them have to do with the importance or relative rejection of qualities such as, for example, obedience in children. Like, is it important to instil obedience of authority in children? Now, countries disagree on that much more than 40 years ago.

James - In terms of these diverging values, I've got a hunch that they would be diverging more in countries in different parts of the world and perhaps the divergence would be less strongly felt in countries that neighbour each other. That's just an intuitive guess. Would that be a correct one?

Dan - Yeah, also a couple of things, there. So we actually see that around 1980, for example, Europe and Asia are pretty close to one another on the acceptance of these sort of more liberal western values. Now they are worlds apart, you can say. But for example, South America was also pretty close to Asia and Africa: pretty low on these emancipative values, but it has become significantly more liberal, emancipated, western, whatever you want to call it, but Asia and Africa have not. So there's also this pretty big difference if you just look at continent level. I think that the second most important finding in our paper is that if you take a really wealthy country and a low income country, the likelihood of them sharing similar values is much lower than if you take two countries that have similar levels of wealth, that has always been the case, but in these past four decades we've been observing a trend where geographical proximity, how close the country is geographically to another country, has been becoming a more and more important predictor of sharing values. So we do see overall global worldwide divergence of values, but regionally we see the opposite pattern where, regionally, the values are converging and becoming more similar.

James - We've talked about how economic development is a big determinant in these emancipative values and how much they're taken up by the population of a country. Is that a consistent finding around the world?

Dan - So we do see that in some countries in the west, particularly in Europe, it is true that as they grow wealthier, they do develop more emancipative values, values that focus more on self-expression and tolerance and acceptance. But this does not seem to be the case in a lot of other world regions, notably in Hong Kong and in Singapore, that have increased their GDP per capita a lot in the past four decades. We do not find the same pattern of moving towards emancipated values.

James - And my final question, because I know it's not one you particularly set out to answer over the course of this study, it's the question that I've been refraining from asking, which is why is this happening? Why is it that the modernisation theory that you outlined at the start has not come to fruition? And why is it that as economic development has touched all the corners of the world, it's gone down this route of the traditional values of that country becoming more entrenched?

Dan - Yeah, I mean this is such a broad question. I don't have one definite answer. I think we just assumed that consumption of western media and western values would lead to people adopting them, but that might not be the case. Hollywood, right? Hollywood movies are being watched all over the world. A lot of people are listening to Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift. But people can go and watch RuPaul's Drag Race and either reject it or completely not change the way they think, for example, about self-expression or LGBTQ rights. There’s a theory by this scientist named Tomlinson, he was thinking about how globalisation, which is commonly seen as supposed to be a force that was supposed to unite different cultures, he thought the globalisation might actually do the opposite. It might create this incentive, this type of psychological and sometimes political drive to create a particular cultural national identity for itself. You have to establish or reestablish yourself as a country that also has a separate national cultural identity, and to me it's also interesting that it seems like this divergence at least is co-evolving, right? Co-occurring with also a general rise in anti-western sentiment in a lot of parts of the world right now.