Worldwide divergence of values.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38594270.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-46581-5 and PMC identifier 11004123.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Social scientists have long debated the nature of cultural change in a modernizing and globalizing world. Some scholars predicted that national cultures would converge by adopting social values typical of Western democracies. Others predicted that cultural differences in values would persist or even increase over time. We test these competing predictions by analyzing survey data from 1981 to 2022 (n = 406,185) from 76 national cultures. We find evidence of global value divergence. Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world. We also find that countries with similar per-capita GDP levels have held similar values over the last 40 years. Over time, however, geographic proximity has emerged as an increasingly strong correlate of value similarity, indicating that values have diverged globally but converged regionally.