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by Ross Pomeroy
May 02, 2024
from
BigThink Website
Credit: greenbutterfly
Adobe Stock
Key
Takeaways
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According to a new analysis, societies' values are not
converging around notions of personal rights and
freedoms. Instead, they're growing further apart. The
rift is most pronounced between rich and poor countries.
-
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.
-
Why
did the trend towards tolerance and self-expression
stall in poorer nations? 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.
"Values
emphasizing
tolerance and
self-expression
have diverged
most sharply,
especially
between
high-income Western countries
and the rest of
the world."
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."
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