How have cultural values changed worldwide over the past decades? This is now shown by a study based on data from surveys from 76 countries around the world between 1981 and 2022. According to this, people in wealthy Western countries have become increasingly more open, emancipated and secularized as prosperity increases. In other regions of the world, however, an opposite trend is emerging. Overall, it can be seen that the values within the world regions have become more similar, but are increasingly different between the regions.
What attitudes do people around the world have on issues such as homosexuality, abortions, religiosity and child-rearing? The World Values Survey (WVS) has been doing this since 1981 using global surveys. From the answers of people from different parts of the world, researchers draw conclusions about the development of cultural values. One of the initiators of the WVS, Ronald Inglehart (1934-2021), assumed that as individuals become more prosperous, they place a greater focus on self-development and tend toward progressive rather than traditional and religious values.
A team led by Joshua Conrad Jackson from the University of Chicago has now evaluated the WVS data and linked it to the development of the gross domestic product of the respective countries. The researchers used survey data from over 400,000 people from 76 countries. For 40 ideal and cultural values, many of which have to do with tolerance, obedience and faith, the researchers measured how the differences within and between different regions of the world developed between 1981 and 2022.
Opposite tendencies
They found that values have become more regionally uniform over the past few decades, but that they differ more between different regions of the world than before – even though the world is more interconnected today thanks to globalization than it was 40 years ago. “Values that emphasize tolerance and self-realization have diverged the most, particularly between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world,” the team reports.
In rich Western countries, tolerance, emancipation and secularization have increased significantly on average. In other parts of the world, however, development was either much slower or even in the opposite direction, depending on the region. In African and Asian countries in particular, there were clear trends towards more rigid traditional values. A comparison of Australia and Pakistan provides an example. In the first survey in 1981, 39 percent of Australians and 32 percent of Pakistanis said it was important for children to be obedient. “At that time, there was little difference in views in this regard,” write Jackson and his team. “Over time, however, these views have diverged. In the last survey, only 18 percent of Australians compared to 49 percent of Pakistanis cited obedience as an important quality in children.”
Influence of wealth?
However, according to the study, material wealth does not inherently promote progressive values. For example, Hong Kong and Canada have a similar gross domestic product per capita, which also developed similarly between 2000 and 2020. But while in Canada the view that children’s sense of responsibility is important fell slightly over this period, from 53 to 47 percent, it increased rapidly in Hong Kong, from 19 to 52 percent. At the same time, acceptance of homosexuality in Canada increased from 49 to 74 percent, while in Hong Kong it also increased, but to a much lesser extent, from 29 to 44 percent.
“These results suggest a provocative possibility: the rise in global wealth could be responsible for the global divergence in values,” the researchers write. “In Western countries, increasing prosperity brought more emancipatory values, but this was not true in most non-Western countries. These trends have led to a growing gap between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world.” Reasons could be, for example, that emancipatory values are deeply anchored in Western self-image through historical events such as the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution therefore become more and more widespread with increasing prosperity – but not in other cultural areas. However, based on the current study, it cannot be said with certainty whether there is actually a causal connection between wealth and changes in values.
Relevant for Germany
Social psychologist Eldad Davidov from the University of Cologne, who was not involved in the study, notes that many of the questions used in the study ask about attitudes and behavior rather than general values. “Attitudes vary more than fundamental values,” he explains. “But even if attitudes or behavior were actually measured, this does not reduce the relevance of the work.”
Social psychologist Constanze Beierlein from Hamm-Lippstadt University, who was also not involved in the study, emphasizes that, in her view, the results are also relevant for German politics. “If you think, for example, of the maxim of feminist foreign policy pursued by the federal government, for example the protection of women and marginalized groups, the pursuit of these values will be correspondingly more difficult to implement,” she says. The same applies to European countries such as Hungary, which are becoming increasingly authoritarian. “If values such as national security and dominance over other countries are at the center of political action, this also has a direct impact on Germany and on the goals that can be achieved together with these countries, for example peacekeeping, environmental protection, human rights,” said Beierlein.
Source: Joshua Conrad Jackson (University of Chicago, USA) et al., Nature Communications, doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-46581-5