Why relying on university students skews global psychological research

An analysis of the World Values Survey (2005-2022) data found that individuals with more education tend to be culturally similar to people from the Anglosphere and Western Europe. Interestingly, education level was not associated with cultural similarities to other large and influential countries such as China, Russia, or India. The paper was published in Nature Communications.

Psychological research has traditionally relied heavily on participants from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. This is so common that the acronym WEIRD has been coined to refer to such groups. However, this has raised concerns about how well findings on such groups generalize to the wider world. Although cross-national research has expanded substantially, many international studies still depend disproportionately on highly educated participants such as university students.

But are university students, even from non-WEIRD countries, really representative of the wider cultures of the countries they belong to? Education itself is an important source of cultural norms. Formal schooling transmits not only knowledge and skills but also particular values, cognitive styles, and patterns of behavior. Studies have found that higher levels of education tend to be associated with traits typically considered characteristic of WEIRD societies, such as individualism, analytic thinking, nonconformity, and generalized trust.

Socioeconomic status may also contribute to the adoption of WEIRD cultural norms through the endorsement of personal freedom, specific styles of thinking, and the availability of resources needed to experience different cultures. However, education may play a particularly important role in determining what kinds of cultural norms a person will actually adopt.

Study authors Cindel J. M. White and Michael Muthukrishna conducted a study in which they explored whether socioeconomic status is associated with a variety of different cultural traits across 95 countries around the world. They note that processes of colonization, globalization, and the adoption of Western-style institutions have led to the diffusion of WEIRD cultural norms around the world. As a result, highly educated individuals could be expected to be more similar to one another across the world, but to also show patterns of attitudes, traits, and behaviors characteristic of cultures of WEIRD countries, including Anglosphere countries like the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Western Europe more generally.

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These researchers analyzed data from the World Values Survey (2005-2022), waves 5-7. The World Values Survey is a long-running international research program that measures people’s values, beliefs, attitudes, and social and political views across countries and cultures. These analyses were based on data from 268,992 participants from 95 different countries.

Study authors report that they excluded from analyses any country or group with fewer than 100 respondents. As a result, the number of countries for which data were available differed between analyses and did not always include all 95 countries.

Participants within each country were grouped into high, middle, and low clusters according to three indicators of socioeconomic status: educational attainment, income, and subjective social status. Next, they used a statistic called the cultural fixation index, which quantifies the overall magnitude of cultural differences between groups across a wide range of traits, to measure cultural distance between people with high and low socioeconomic status in 95 countries. Most importantly, they compared all these groups to the U.S., as a prototypical WEIRD country.

Results showed that, across the whole world, highly educated groups and those with only secondary education were more culturally similar to the U.S. than low-education groups. For example, people with high education in Singapore were as similar to the U.S. culturally as highly educated Australians were. However, people with low levels of education from Singapore were culturally quite distant from the U.S. Highly educated Russians were as similar to Americans as highly educated people from New Zealand. However, this was not the case with Russians with low levels of education. This pattern was found in 70 percent of the analyzed countries.

These results seemed to be specific to education. Cultural similarity to the U.S. did not differ between high- and low-income groups, or between groups differing in subjective social status. Additional analyses showed that this observed association between education and cultural similarity becomes even more pronounced when Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Andorra, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland were used as the reference category. This indicates that the finding might not be about educated people adopting U.S. culture specifically, but about them adopting cultural traits of WEIRD countries in general. Interestingly, education was not associated with cultural similarities to other large, culturally and politically influential countries such as China, Russia, or India.

“Contrary to modernization theories, income and self-reported subjective status did not show the same pattern of WEIRD cultural similarity. Our results suggest that cross-cultural samples of students or university-educated individuals overrepresent cultural values that are typical of WEIRD countries,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of cultural differences across the world. However, it should be noted that the study was based on data about self-reported beliefs and behaviors, which may not be identical to beliefs and behaviors people practice in everyday life.

The paper, “Higher education predicts global cultural similarity to WEIRD countries,” was authored by Cindel J. M. White and Michael Muthukrishna.