Abstract:

To what extent does the speed of cultural change vary across countries? What factors explain this variation? Research on cultural change tends to have a narrower focus on discrete cultural dimensions (for a review, see Varnum & Grossmann, 2017), leaving questions about broad-scale cultural change and methods for measuring cross-national variation in the speed of cultural change unaddressed. To fill this research gap, we repurpose the cultural fixation index—typically used to measure between-country cultural distance—to measure the speed of cultural change within countries by calculating cultural distance between waves of the World Values Survey (WVS). Using a multilevel dataset consisting multiple measures of cultural change across sequential survey waves from 1989–2020, nested within 75 countries (162 observations), we find significant bivariate associations between the speed of cultural change and a set of predictor variables encompassing socioeconomic development, cultural orientations, and ecology. Changes from industrial to post-industrial economies and higher levels of cultural tightness show the strongest independent associations with the speed of cultural change, lending empirical support to theories of cultural change and agent-based models which emphasize the role of these two factors in accelerating cultural change (Inglehart & Baker, 2000; Muthukrishna & Schaller, 2020).

Speaker's social media:

@nick_r_kay