A new study published in Nature Communications finds that world-wide, people with higher levels of education are more culturally similar to those in Canada, the U.S. U.K. and other Anglo, industrialized countries and countries in Western Europe.
Lead author and York University Faculty of Health Assistant Professor Cindel White says the study shows that solely recruiting from university students and educated people when doing cross-cultural comparisons will not fully capture the cultural variability we see in the world.
"Education doesn't just teach skills or facts, to a certain extent it also shapes how people think about the world, so the findings make sense," says White, in the Department of Psychology. "While Western countries continue to be over-represented in research in general, our study suggests that even where participants are recruited from non-Western countries, cultural bias may continue to persist."
Analyzing data from nearly 270,000 people across 95 countries captured in the World Values Survey, the study shows that higher education is strongly associated with cultural values typical of so-called "WEIRD" societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). For example, Russians with lower education levels were very culturally distant from American values, but Russians with a university degree were much more culturally similar to the U.S.
Contrary to modernization theories, when analyzing income and social status, the researchers did not find the same association.
White paired up with London School of Economics and New York University Professor Michael Muthukrishna for the study. They found that in 70 per cent of the countries they looked at, highly-educated people were significantly closer to the United States than people with low education in those countries. However, the researchers say the pattern reflects a broader alignment with Western cultural norms, including individualism and an emphasis on personal freedom, analytical thinking, lower conformity to social norms, and a greater generalized trust, not just American values specifically.
Muthukrishna explained, "Schooling is one of the most powerful systems of cultural transmission ever invented. Education doesn't just change what you know, but how you think and what you value. What our results reveal is that school systems around the world still carry the fingerprints of their Western origins. That means if you're a researcher recruiting university students in Nairobi or São Paulo and comparing them to university students in New York, Toronto or London, you may be dramatically underestimating how different those cultures actually are."
White emphasizes that the findings in no way suggest that highly-educated people in non-Western countries are culturally the same as those in the West.
"We're not saying that being highly educated makes everyone the same, there's still a lot of diversity within highly educated groups around the world. It's just that the diversity has shifted in the direction of being more Western," says White, who recently also published a paper with a University of California researcher looking at American end-of-the-world beliefs . "We are saying that you do need to look at education, in addition to things like nationality, ethnicity and religion, when considering why someone thinks the way they do."
