The Great Global Divergence of Values

It has long been predicted that the world would converge toward Western democratic values of tolerance, "live and let live" social norms, and diversity. New research shows a more complex picture.

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A new study has helped us answer an old question: as countries become richer and more globalized, do they become more liberal, more tolerant, and more inclusive? Are we heading toward a world where the values of liberal democracy are simply universal human values?

I: The End of History, Modernization Theory, and The Clash of Civilizations

Long ago, as the Berlin Wall crumbled, a fresh, naïve hope dawned on the West: that this was to be the beginning of “the End of History.” In that famous essay by Francis Fukuyama, there was an optimistic notion: that the ideological showdowns between democracy and fascism and later democracy and communism were over. Democracy had won. The march toward universal political freedoms would be uneven, but it would be relentless. Over time, the world’s governments would justify their existence through at least the guise of democracy. There was to be a great convergence.

Since those heady days of the 1990s, much has changed about the world, not just in terms of geopolitics, but in terms of values. Citizens within Western democracies have shifted their views—for the better, in my view—toward being more tolerant and inclusive of others. And for Western liberals, this created a sense of inevitability, that in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

When it came to the rest of the world, then, Western optimism extended across the globe. Many believed that the widespread viewpoints that they saw as “backward,” particularly involving intolerance toward those with different races, religions, sexuality, or longstanding antiquated views about the role of women in society, were ready to be stamped out.

All that was needed, the naïve view suggested, was a bit of economic development and a dash of globalization, exposing those societies to more “enlightened” viewpoints. Intolerance and oppression would be stubborn, but they would steadily decline. (This viewpoint is broadly captured by modernization theory, which suggests that societies evolve in a progressive manner toward liberal values and liberal democracy as their populations become wealthier and better educated).

At Harvard, one scholar was more pessimistic. Samuel Huntington elaborated his Clash of Civilizations thesis, a reductive argument rooted in cultural determinism, in which he painted a bleak picture of inevitable conflict derived from fixed cultural identities. The world, he said, could be relatively neatly divided, intellectually chopped up into a small number of “major civilizations,” including the West, the Orthodox civilization, the Muslim world, the Sinic civilization (China, the Koreas, Singapore, Taiwan, and Vietnam), Hindu civilization (India and Nepal), Sub-Saharan Africa, and so on.

These worlds, Huntington believed, were fundamentally different. There would be no great convergence. There would only be conflict.

Huntington’s thesis spawned an entire literature in social science aimed at debunking it. Many scholars find Clash of Civilizations abhorrent because, in their view, it reduced billions of people to simplistic labels that caricatured them into unchangeable cultural boxes. But many also argued that it was simply empirically incorrect—that it offers little explanatory power to help us understand a complex, multi-faceted world. (For the record, I find the way that Huntington presented his argument as a reductive, cartoonishly simplistic caricature of how the world works).

So, if you want a reductive showdown between rival frameworks, well, we’ve got one: modernization theory and adjacent ideas in the End of History vs. the Clash of Civilizations. Is the rest of the world on the path to becoming Western and all they’re missing is money and education? Or are different groups of people stubbornly different because their values are simply not shared?

The more I’ve studied social change, the more I’ve become convinced that adopting sprawling, singular theories—explanations that pretend to offer a one-size fits all framework for an infinitely complex world—are laughably absurd. Some societies follow the optimistic trajectory of modernization theory, but many others don’t. Some aspects of Huntington’s thesis are paternalistic, culturally essentialist, and clearly wrong, but there is some truth in the notion that different cultural clusters do stubbornly tend to express differing values.

These debates too often conflate the way we wish the world would be with attempts to study how the world actually is—and the latter is an empirical question, not a moral one.

II: The World Values Survey and the Great Value Divergence

Enter a new large-scale analysis that tries to describe what the data can tell us from The World Values Survey, a large-scale study that incorporates more than 400,000 responses from more than 70 countries across four decades. Since they have been asking similar questions across vast time scales, it’s possible to track how values ebb and flow over time. And, crucially, it’s possible to at least partially test these simplistic frameworks for how social change happens: is the rest of the world becoming more like “the West?”

The answer, it turns out, is no—but perhaps not for the reasons we might guess.

According to the researchers Joshua Conrad Jackson and Danila Medvedev, over the last several decades, there has been a significant divergence of values across the globe. There is a bigger gap in values between “the West” and “the rest.” However, most of the divergence isn’t because “the rest” are changing their minds; instead, it’s because the rate of change in the West is so rapid and significant that the gap is much bigger than it was before.

Put bluntly, the West became much more tolerant, while everywhere else…didn’t.

As they summarize their core finding in their own words:

“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.”

Now, it’s important to be careful here. This does not mean that countries outside of the rich, industrialized Western nations have become decisively more regressive when it comes to issues related to tolerance. Instead, they’ve largely flat-lined, staying the same across time. However, because Western democracies have undergone profound shifts on cultural values in that same time period, the gap between them is now larger.

Consider Figure 2 from their research paper, published a few months ago in Nature Communications. Part A shows measures of “value divergence” within the data. A larger divergence means that differences in opinion are larger globally than they were in the past. And across these seven social issues, values were more similar in the past—they were universally more intolerant—than they are today. (As you read the bar charts from left to right, what you’re seeing is larger gulfs of opinion growing over time across the globe).

Part B shows a more nuanced picture, as it depicts the average scores of various regions in terms of an index of “emancipative values,” which are tied to a tolerant sort of “live and let live” mentality. As is clear from the data, there are increases on those values in New Zealand and Australia, Europe, and North and South America. However, the scores declined on that index slightly declined or stayed broadly the same in Africa and Asia. This has produced a greater gap, even as most regions saw a shift toward more tolerant values.

The researchers also found something interesting that was a bit unexpected.

As the world has become more globalized, it’s clear that people are getting exposed to a broader range of novel cultural ideas than they were in the past. (For example, I recall sitting down to dinner in a house without running water in 2011—when I lived in the West African nation of Togo for a few months—and we ate the Togolese dish of fufu while watching reruns of the 1990s American sitcom Full House, dubbed in French on Togolese TV). This exposure to more globalized, Western culture could plausibly produce a convergent effect.

Instead, what the researchers found is that culture is converging, but at the regional rather than the global level. In other words, countries in, say, southeast Asia, are getting more similar to each other, but are not converging toward a global uniformity.

As the researchers argue, these findings have implications for a wide array of questions, but don’t convincingly resolve broader debates. Proponents of modernization theory will have some comfort from the data, but there is also plenty here that seems to offer partial confirmation of Huntington’s insistence that there will remain stubborn cultural divides between distinct regional and religious “civilizations.” Many of the societies in Asia and Africa have gotten richer and more educated during the period analyzed, but haven’t shifted their viewpoints on several key social issues.

In their own words:

“Theoretically, our findings suggest that globalization and intergroup contact alone are not sufficient to produce converging social values. Our findings also suggest that the post-materialist hypothesis—that wealth breeds emancipative values and tolerance—may have stronger predictive power in some regions than others…

Only time will tell if our findings represent a general cultural trend or a historically isolated phenomenon…Value divergence could also explain theoretical puzzles in the social sciences. For example, there is a popular theory that rising wealth and technology facilitate religious decline because they decrease existential insecurity and relieve the economic pressure to have children. But this model does not explain why rising wealth has not brought religious declines in Middle Eastern countries and has even correlated with rising religiosity in some of these countries.

Practically, value divergence has implications for political polarization and conflict across world countries. Russia has framed the recent war in Ukraine as a war against Western values. Chinese politicians have spoken against countries that “forcibly promote the concept and system of Western democracy and human rights”. Western non-governmental organizations have faced recent accusations of seeding immorality and propagating Western imperialism, and public opinion polling has found increasingly hostile attitudes towards Western countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.”

They also point to the disturbing phenomenon, which I’ve highlighted previously in Corruptible, of how much psychology research that purports to be about humanity writ large is actually about an extremely unrepresentative slice of it—WEIRD people, and particularly WEIRD people who are between the ages of 18-22 and attend elite universities in the United States. (WEIRD in this context stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic).

These new findings from the World Values Survey show that skewed psychology studies present an even more acute problem than they did in the past because Western values are more different than those found in much of the rest of the world than before. It is now even more absurd than ever to pretend that Western psychology and human psychology are the same thing.

III: Zooming in on the disturbing details

Now that I’ve painted a broad picture, it’s time to zoom in. Like any self-respecting social scientist would, I decided to look at some of the underlying data in the World Values Survey. And what I saw was disturbing.

There’s a bit of an overly rosy—but evidence-free—viewpoint for some naive Western liberals: that the rest of the world, once emancipated from the shackles of oppressive governments, will suddenly liberate oppressed groups within their own societies, too. The World Values Survey data suggest that we shouldn’t hold our breath. Cultural change is possible, of course, but some of these deeply held values viewpoints are going to take a long time to adjust.

Take Question 19 of the WVS, for example, which asks people about a prospective neighbor moving next door. The survey asks the respondents to name characteristics that they would dislike in that imagined person.

In the United States, three percent mentioned being put off by someone of a different race (I expect the real value is much higher and many American racists feared social stigma of mentioning it). However, in China the aversion to a neighbor of a different race was 18 percent; in Greece 24 percent; in Turkey 41 percent; in Vietnam 62 percent; in Myanmar 70 percent. The global average was 16 percent.

In the same question, the responses were similarly bleak when it came to having a neighbor who was gay. There are still big divergences within Western democracies (4 percent of Britons mentioned that they wouldn’t want a gay neighbour compared to 13 percent of Americans). But between “the West and the Rest,” it’s a much bigger gulf. The aversion to a gay neighbor figure rises to 69 percent in Ethiopia, 71 percent in China, 77 percent in Bangladesh, 89 percent in Nigeria, 91 percent in Myanmar, and 94 percent in Jordan. The global average was 43 percent.

Global attitudes toward women in the workforce remain similarly depressing. Question 28 in the World Values Survey asks people how strongly they agree or disagree with this statement: “When a mother works for pay, the children suffer.” In many Western democracies, the respondents who strongly agreed or agreed hovered between 20 and 25 percent. But the global average was closer to 50 percent—and some countries, such as Jordan and Bangladesh, had agreement approaching 90 percent. (From another question, it’s clear that a disturbingly large proportion of the world still believes it is a significant problem if a woman in a household earns more than a man).

I believe strongly in tolerant, inclusive values that unleash human potential across all demographic backgrounds, so this is all bad news: the world has a long way to go before people are treated fairly and equitably based on what they do rather than how they were born or who they love or worship.

However, there is also an important reminder in these data which struck me: we in the rich, industrialized democracies of the world are incredibly lucky, and many of our gripes about life are substantially less tied to material well-being than billions across the globe.

One question in the World Values Survey asked: “On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with the financial situation of your household?”

In Bangladesh, 81 percent placed themselves between 6 and 10—generally satisfied. Astonishingly, 43 percent of the respondents chose an 8, 9, or 10 on the scale, the highest levels of satisfaction. This is a country where the median salary is around $250/month, or about $8/day.

In Pakistan, 73 percent of respondents put themselves in the top half of satisfaction, with roughly one in three Pakistanis opting for the top score—10 out of 10 levels of satisfaction with their financial situation of their household. (GDP per capita in Pakistan is $1,588 per year, or just over $4/day. To put this into sharp relief, in another question in the World Values Survey, 52 percent of Pakistanis indicated that they sometimes struggled to have enough food for their families).

Now, juxtapose these figures with the United States. 63 percent of Americans opted for a generally satisfied score, but only 7 percent chose a 10 out of 10 level of satisfaction—far lower than in Pakistan.

This, then, showcases a final wrinkle worth paying attention to in the underlying data. The West vs. the Rest isn’t just a cultural divide of shifting values, but an enormous economic gulf—and one that is often taken for granted by the luckiest people on the planet.

IV: The return of history?

The data from the World Values Survey present a muddy picture. Huntington was wrong. Fukuyama was wrong. Modernization theory was wrong. The world is far too complex to cram it into a tidy little box, closed neatly with a single universal theory of social change.

But this fresh scholarly analysis does offer an important reminder: that rich, industrialized Western democracies, while plagued with division and inequality, are nonetheless an astonishing outlier: of tolerant values and abundant riches. And that while our societies often feel broken—and it is true that millions of citizens within them live genuinely crushing lives of difficulty and despair—most of us remain incredibly lucky to be living in arguably the most progressive societies in human history.

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