Worldwide divergence of values

Summary

Evidence that the world’s values are drifting apart. Looking across the last 40 years, Joshua Conrad Jackson and Danila Medvedev find that values around tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and everyone else. Wealth still predicts similarity, but geography increasingly does too: values have diverged globally while converging within regions.

Rationale

Proximity is becoming a stronger guide to shared values, which fits our view that orientations form through the contexts people share. Surveyed values, though, sit nearer the surface than dispositions.