At the end of the Cold War, many thinkers optimistically predicted that globalization would cause global societies’ social values to converge around liberal notions of personal rights and freedoms. Since then, technology has made the Earth “smaller” than ever. Global trade delivers goods from one corner of the globe to the other. Airlines allow us to travel across oceans in hours rather than days or weeks. The internet lets us keep tabs on events thousands of miles away, engross ourselves in different cultures, and connect with others almost instantaneously.
And yet, according to a new analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, societies’ values are not converging. Instead, they’re growing further apart. The rift is most pronounced between rich and poor countries.
Diverging values
Joshua Conrad Jackson, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the Booth School of Business, and Dan Medvedev, a final-year PhD student in behavioral science at the Booth School of Business, teamed up for the study, published on April 9 in the journal Nature Communications. Together, they scoured through data in the World Values Survey.
Every five years since 1981, social scientists around the world interview tens of thousands of people spread across at least 76 countries. Using a common questionnaire, they ask respondents about their beliefs, values, and motivations. The responses provide a glimpse into the minds of people from all sorts of diverse cultures.
Jackson and Medvedev found that of the 40 values measured in the survey, 27 had diverged between 1981 and 2021. The world’s peoples were particularly less likely to agree on the ethics of homosexuality, euthanasia, divorce, prostitution, and abortion. Residents of wealthy countries grew more comfortable with all those topics, while residents of poorer countries were less so. This rich-poor value divide also widened on parenting over the past four decades. People from poorer countries valued obedience and religious faith in their kids, while people from wealthier countries placed much less importance on those two qualities.
To showcase the diverging values between rich and poor countries, Jackson and Medvedev cited Pakistan and Australia. In 1981, 39% of Australians said childhood obedience was important and 45% said divorce was justifiable. That same year, 32% and 10% of Pakistanis respectively agreed with those statements. In 2021, only 18% of Australians compared to 49% of Pakistanis said childhood obedience was important, while 74% of Australians and 15% of Pakistanis viewed divorce as justifiable.
In an additional analysis, the authors found that GDP per capita was the greatest predictor of aligning social values. Frequent trade, geographic proximity, and religious similarity also contributed, albeit to a much lesser extent.
Over the study period, pretty much every country grew wealthier. In 1981 over 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. That proportion is less than 8% today. Over that time, most countries’ social values tended to grow more tolerant, secular, and individualistic — in short, more Westernized. So in that sense, the globalist predictions from decades ago were correct. It’s just that citizens of wealthier countries tended to follow that trend to a far greater extent than citizens of the poorest nations.
Accounting for the divide
Why did the trend stall in less-well-off countries? It’s possible that, even though these societies grew richer, their wealth gains remain insecure. Political instability, conflict, and the threat of environmental disasters might cause people to remain more conservative, nationalistic, and distrustful of others.
Authoritarian governments also may be putting up roadblocks. These regimes, particularly in Iran, Russia, and China, speak out forcefully against Western values.
“Russia has framed the recent war in Ukraine as a war against Western values,” the authors noted. “Chinese politicians have spoken against countries that ‘forcibly promote the concept and system of Western democracy and human rights.’”
The researchers cautioned that their study might actually be too short to inform us of any grand changes in human values. After all, human civilization has been around for roughly 10,000 years. This study only covered 0.4% of it.
“It may be that our findings are specific to a particular period of time following decolonization and the end of the Cold War and that we would have found different results at different periods of time,” Jackson and Medvedev wrote. “Only time will tell if our findings represent a general cultural trend or a historically isolated phenomenon.”
