West vs. East

Values are drifting further and further apart

(Bild: AFP)

According to a study, the values of Western and other societies are becoming increasingly divergent. Although countries have become more similar in many aspects over the past 40 years as a result of globalization, mass media and the spread of technology, cultural values are not necessarily among them, US researchers report in the journal Nature Communications on the results of repeated surveys of around 400,000 people in 76 countries.

According to the study, value orientations, particularly for tolerance and openness, have diverged between countries on different continents over the past four decades. Within continents, they have become more similar. The data also show that the value orientations of high-income Western countries differ particularly from those of other countries.

Increasing value gap could lead to conflict
According to the researchers, one theory is that with increasing modernization and economic prosperity, liberal, individualistic values that emphasize personal rights and freedoms are increasingly being adopted worldwide. However, this correlation is much less pronounced in Asian and African countries in particular than in the West, as the study now shows. The increasing value gap could have consequences for political polarization and international conflicts, warns the research duo Joshua Conrad Jackson and Danila Medvedev.

(Bild: AP)

"If cultural differences in attitudes and values increase, religious intolerance grows and at the same time the willingness to cooperate on economic, social and ecological issues decreases, then conflicts within or between societies can increase sharply, up to and including military conflicts," explained Roland Verwiebe from the University of Potsdam, who was not involved in the study.

Major differences on the subject of religion
The author duo from Chicago analyzed data from the World Values Survey between 1981 and 2022. They recorded cultural differences in 40 values, such as openness, obedience and faith. According to the results, there are major differences in the assessment of how important it is to teach children religious beliefs and raise them to be obedient.

(Bild: stock.adobe.com)

Western and other countries have also diverged significantly in other aspects: while people in Australia and Pakistan, for example, considered divorce equally unacceptable decades ago, their views have developed in opposite directions, as Jackson and Medvedev explain. There has been a similar development in the value of children's obedience.

Prosperity does not mean more openness
According to the researchers, the development of prosperity does not automatically mean a harmonization of values. For example, it increased similarly in Hong Kong and Canada between 2000 and 2020, but the acceptance of homosexuality increased faster in Canada. There is now less emphasis on high motivation among children in Canada, but significantly more in Hong Kong.

Verwiebe, Professor of Social Structure Analysis and Social Inequality, said that he sees limitations in the comparability of the measurement conditions in the individual countries. "At the same time, the use of a very large number of data points means that the results can be assumed to be very robust, and I consider the reported trends in the global divergence of values to be very plausible." New dividing lines have emerged between westernized, very wealthy European countries on the one hand and Asian and African countries on the other.

(Bild: AFP, Krone KREATIV)

Democracies on the defensive
There is also another significant development: "European-style liberal democracies are increasingly on the defensive worldwide; in some cases, their acceptance is also declining significantly in strongly democratic societies, for example in the Netherlands, France, the USA and Germany." Democracy is based on the negotiation of differences of interest, on the acceptance of differences of opinion. "If democracy is in retreat, intolerance increases."