Cultural Differences

June 21, 2007

It has always been obvious that countries are different; how and why they are different has not been so well understood. Although many attempts have been made to systematically explain cultural differences by Richard Nisbett, Geert Hofstede, Ronald Inglehart, and others, a thorough analysis of these efforts has revealed certain key weaknesses in their dimensions, the largest common problem being the failure to consider race and intelligence. Anyone familiar with Richard Lynn's research will know that differences in national IQ scores contain the lion's share of the explanatory power, and therefore if other dimensions are to be of any use, they must address those aspects of culture which IQ does not explain.

In the interests of building a clearer understanding of national culture, then, I have carefully constructed and validated a measure for two cultural dimensions which can be provisionally named tension (vs. relaxation) and cosmopolitanism (vs. provincialism). The Tension and Cosmopolitan Indices were devised after a thorough review of the existing literature on cultural differences, and an extensive cross-checking of various scales to determine which correlated with which. By using the indices which showed the strongest correlations with each other and the fewest with unrelated indices, it was possible to derive a pair of measures which integrates the values and psychological character of people from all around the world. Although the results have been encouraging enough for me to consider submitting them to academic journals at a future date, I still wanted to release some general findings because they might help shed light on the topics relevant to the regular visitors of this website.

My dataset included over sixty countries from all populated continents, as shown above. South American and East Asian nations (excluding Japan) are Provincial, with European nations being more cosmopolitan; according to this analysis, English and German speaking nations are extremely cosmopolitan. Japan and the Eastern European countries are high in tension, while Southeast Asian Nations and Scandinavian countries are relaxed. As can be seen in the placing of these nations on the graph, and on the basis of the data used to build these scales, "cosmopolitanism" divides societies characterized by internationalist worldviews and individualistic freedoms (shown on the right) from societies in which individuals are more integrated into family and national groups (shown on the left). "Tension" is less easy to describe impressionistically, but on the basis of those scales which measure it, Tension appears to tap into the sense of seriousness or urgency experienced by individuals in their daily life which creates an emotionally expressive and labile populace (shown at the top), or a more accepting and less competitive populace (shown toward the bottom of the graph).

It was possible to find several good correlations between both of these measures and a variety of indices such as maximum speed limits, commitment to foreign aid, and fertility, but three correlations are worth singling out for discussion. The first of these was between the Tension Index and suicides per capita. This relationship which proved to be entirely independent of wealth, intelligence, or any other variable controlled for; the high suicide rates of countries characterized as tense helps to validate and explain what exactly the Tension Index is describing.

The second correlate worth discussing was between the Cosmopolitan Index and the percentage of immigrants that accounted for a country's total population. This correlation was so large that it was by itself able to explain almost half the variance in the percentage of immigrants living in the nation; thus the name "cosmopolitanism" appears to be quite apt! And because immigration is typically from the less intelligent to the more intelligent nations, this suggests that cosmopolitan attitudes are unsustainable over the long term.

The final, and most interesting, correlation was also found using the Cosmopolitan Index, but this time with Nobel prizes per capita: nearly half of the variance in Nobels per capita is explained by the C.I. It has been known for some time that national I.Q. is a positive but modest predictor of Nobel Prizes, explaining only one-ninth of the variation between countries, while the correlation between national wealth and Nobels per capita is somewhat larger, accounting for a little over a quarter of the variation; both of these relationships disappear when controlling for cosmopolitanism, even though neither wealth nor national I.Q. scores were used to develop the Cosmopolitanism Index.

It should be evident that there is a great deal of variation that IQ and race do not account for by themselves, and that culture, as specifically measured by the Cosmopolitan Index and Tension Index, accounts for these differences well. Taking the example of Nobel Prizes, Austria (I.Q. 100, C.I. 91) has produced 2.512 prizes per million, while Poland (I.Q. 99, C.I. 54) has produced 0.420 per million, a more than five-fold difference; Japan (IQ 105, C.I. 47) has produced 0.094 prizes per million people, but China (IQ 105, C.I. 20) has produced 0.004 per million, more than a twenty-fold difference. Clearly, the Cosmopolitan Index is able to explain the gaps which race and IQ cannot.

To conclude, both the wild technological success and the impending destruction of modern Western nations can be explained in terms of the same underlying cultural trait. Cosmopolitan nations encourage free enterprise and free expression, taking men of independence and initiative for their heroes and frowning on adults who remain at home to long or in-laws who move in with their children, and it is easy to imagine how these values of freedom and fairness are transmitted through literature, movies, institutions, and traditions, as well as how they contribute to innovation, enterprise, immigration, and dysgenic degradation. The challenge for eugenists, futurists, racialists, and like-minded individuals appears to lie in not only finding a middle ground between cosmopolitanism and provincialism which can allow for both creative growth and national survival, but in soberly accepting that many of our personal standards, attitudes, and expectations will have to be altered and abandoned in order for our communities to continue into the future.

An Overview of Other Cultural Schema

Readers may find it useful to have a general background on other models researchers have used to model cultural differences. This article will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of three of these: Geert Hofstede's work goals, Inglehart's world values, and Robert McCrae's personality factors.

In the 1980's, Geert Hofstede analyzed a survey carried out by IBM and administered to the employees of its various branches around the world. Factor-analyzing the responses by country returned three factors; one factor which correlated strongly with wealth, one which related to employee trust and rule orientation, and a third relating to employee preferences for earnings and advancement versus work environment and relationship with the manager. Controlling for wealth, the first factor split into two further dimensions, one relating to a preference for free time and autonomy versus the development of skills, and the other relating to the employees' preference for authoritarian employers and a reluctance to disagree with their superiors. Hofstede spent a great deal of time analyzing and validating these four factors, which he described in a 2004 paper he co-authored with Robert McCrtae ("Personality and Culture Revisited: Linking Traits and Dimensions of Culture") as follows:

• Uncertainty avoidance deals with a society's tolerance for ambiguity. Uncertainty-avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of (unstructured) situations by strict laws and rules, by safety and security measures, and, and, on the philosophical and religious level, by a belief in absolute Truth... People in uncertainty-avoiding countries are also more emotional and are motivated by inner nervous energy. The opposite type, uncertainty-accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side. People within these cultures are more phlegmatic and contemplative, and are not expected by their environment to express emotions.
• Masculinity versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of emotional roles between the sexes... Cultural masculinity stands for a focus on ego, money, things, and work; cultural femininity for a focus on relationships, people, and quality of life.
• Individualism versus its opposite, collectivism, refers to the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups... In collectivist societies, people are integrated from birth onward into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts, and grandparents), protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word collectivism in this sense has no political meaning: It refers to the group, not to the state. ...(H)igher individualism scores stand for "I" (rather than "we") consciousness... individualist cultures value autonomy, variety, and pleasure over expertise, duty, and security.
• Power distance ...is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (such as the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally... It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders... A society's power distance level is bred in its families through the extent to which its children are socialized toward obedience or toward initiative.

Although Hofstede's four-dimensional model of intercultural differences is very rich, it also has three main weaknesses. The first of these is that it came from an analysis of a work goal survey for IBM employees; work is an important aspect of life, and many of his findings relate to aspects of culture outside of any sort of business-related context, but work-goal factors are not necessarily going to be general cultural factors.

The second problem is the failure for Hofstede's factors to replicate. Another study on Asian values called the Chinese Value survey turned up four factors; one which correlated with both individualism (positively) and power distance (negatively), another which showed the same correlations, a third which correlated with masculinity, and a fourth which showed no relationship at all to Hofstede's factors but which seemed to tap into the degree to which a society was influenced by Confucian values (especially regarding thrift).

The last problem with Hofstede's paradigm offers a glimpse at what might be a better solution: Hofstede's factors weren't orthogonal - in other words, they clustered into two groups. The things that masculinity tended to predict, uncertainty avoidance also predicted in the same direction, and the things that individualism predicted, power distance predicted negatively. Hofstede's decision to split individualism and power distance by controlling for wealth resulted in two factors which had a strong negative correlation; that is, collectivist societies are also high power distance societies, and individualist societies are also low in power distance. Trying to break what is apparently one factor into two by controlling for one of its apparently fundamental correlates - wealth - is of dubious wisdom, because wealth has an important relationship to culture, as has been argued by Ronald Inglehart (see below).

For reference, here is a graph of various countries in the IBM survey, plotting Hofstede's power distance versus uncertainty avoidance; this two-dimensional graph captures most of the differences described by all four of Hofstede's variables.

Source: Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences, 1984

As you study the above chart, note the positions of these clusters and countries:

• Japan (JAP) and Greece (GRE) can be found at the bottom
• Israel (ISR) and the German speaking countries are to the left
• The scandinavian and English speaking countries are in the upper left
• India (IND) and the Philippines (PHI) show up in the upper right, and
• Venezuela (VEN) and Mexico (MEX) are found in the lower right.

During later years, Ronald Inglehart was examining data from a different source: the World Values Survey, which grew out of the older European Values Survey of 1981 but was later expanded to include extra-European nations and carried out in five year waves. Inglehart selected ten items from the large battery of survey questions and, after factor analyzing these, found two factors which explained some 70% of the variance in those ten questions. These are described in the World Values Survey website:

• Modernism: The Traditional/Secular-rational values dimension reflects the contrast between societies in which religion is very important and those in which it is not. A wide range of other orientations are closely linked with this dimension. Societies near the traditional pole emphasize the importance of parent-child ties and deference to authority, along with absolute standards and traditional family values, and reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride, and a nationalistic outlook. Societies with secular-rational values have the opposite preferences on all of these topics.
• Postmaterialism The second major dimension of cross-cultural variation is linked with the transition from industrial society to post-industrial societies - which brings a polarization between Survival and Self-expression values. The unprecedented wealth that has accumulated in advanced societies during the past generation means that an increasing share of the population has grown up taking survival for granted. Thus, priorities have shifted from an overwhelming emphasis on economic and physical security toward an increasing emphasis on subjective well-being, self-expression and quality of life.

Source: www.worldvaluessurvey.org/statistics/some_findings.html

Where Hofstede saw cultural dimensions as enduring expressions of a nation's historical inheritance, Inglehart was more focussed on cultural change. He argued that cultures become more secular as wealth accululates, but then after industrialization become gradually more self-expressive. But like Hofstede's model, Inglehart's also had shortcomings.

Firstly, Inglehart only carried out a factor analysis on ten questions which he had selected himself. It should be a simple matter to select any ten questions from the WVS for factor analysis and come up with completely different factors. So how accurately Inglehart's map truly reflects the structure of cultural differences, instead of merely the differences he himself expects to see, is an open question.

But secondly, his Modern values index, which ranges from traditional to secular-rational, is extremely close to Richard Lynn's national IQ scores - IQ explains over 60% of the variance in modernism in my own sample of countries - for reasons which are theoretically obvious. That intelligence plays a crucial role in national behaviors and beliefs is not in dispute, but whether there is any the need for a modern values index which exists separately from intelligence is questionable. Intelligence as measured by IQ is known to be biological, with massive heritability (over .70 by adulthood, at least in developed countries). And since the environmental component to IQ is known to be saturated with "noise" (the Flynn Effect was found by Rushton to be unrelated to actual intelligence or "g") we should not expect that changing conditions has an important influence on IQ. So it is fairly clear that IQ is a much more fundamental attribute of society than any suite of values, rendering Inglehart's modernism a redundant scale, useful only for what it will tell us about the difference between brighter and duller societies.

Postmaterialism still remains useful for explaining national differences beyond IQ, as it shares less than 20% of its variance with national IQ. But it also correlates with all four of Hofstede's factors, as well as with cosmopolitanism (positively) and tension (negatively), while modernism remains essentially uncorrelated with all of these factors. It appears that Inglehart's analysis has brought out intelligence differences fairly well with modernism, but found only one large cultural factor to describe the variance Hofstede uncovered.

While Ronald Inglehart and Geert Hofstede were writing books about their own models explaining international cultural differences, psychologists have been examining national personality differences. There are at least two studies to have examined relationships between personality and Hofstede's dimensions; one of these was jointly written by Robert McCrae and Geert Hofstede, and another being jointly written by Robert McCrae with Juri Allik. The results were striking: Extraversion correlated strongly with individualism and power distance, and Neuroticism correlated strongly with uncertainty avoidance and masculinity, with no cross correlations. Using cluster analysis, Allik & McCrae created a scatter-plot of the personality profiles for 36 cultures; notice the parallels between this graph and that of the CI and TI:

Source: Allik & McCrae, (2004) "Toward a Geography of Personality Traits: Patterns of Profiles across 36 Cultures." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology; Volume 35, Number 1, Pages: 13-28. Feb. 2, 2004.

Although Allik and McCrae didn't investigate the relationship between these two personality factors and Inglehart's dimensions, I was able to check the correlations, finding these to be positive for E and postmaterialism (explaining 25% of the variance), negative for N and postmaterialism (13% of the variance), and insignificant with modernism. So again postmaterialism shows muddled relationships with multiple factors, while modernism still seems purely a measure of national IQ differences.

It is much harder to point out limitations in the personality research, except to say that by itself it cannot answer the question of whether or not people in different cultures are genuinely different in personality, or whether they simply see their personalities differently. But this is a moot point for those who are interested in uncovering the structure of national cultural differences. Whether or not the Japanese are in fact a Neurotic people, they believe that they are; there is a cultural norm for the Japanese to think of themselves as anxious and emotionally labile, and to claim that they value strict rules, work, and the glorification of the ego. This is a leitmotif the Japanese share with many other ethnic groups such as the Greeks, the Italians, and the Russians.

So we are left with what appears to be three primary variables of international culture: rationalism, independence, and anxiety. The remaining questions are how these three variables should be measured, and what they should be called; I have chosen to refer to them as "intelligence," "cosmopolitanism," and "tension."