Higher education predicts global cultural similarity to WEIRD countries

Abstract

Behavioral scientists increasingly recruit participants from less-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, but continue to oversample highly educated people, such as university students and online workers. Here we test how representative highly educated individuals are of the world’s cultural diversity. We used the cultural fixation index (CFST) to measure cultural distance between people with high and low socioeconomic status in 95 countries (N = 268,992), across beliefs, values, and behaviors assessed by the World Values Survey (2005–2022). We find that more highly educated people are significantly more culturally similar to WEIRD countries, such as the Anglosphere and Western Europe. Education was not statistically significantly associated with cultural similarities to other large, culturally and politically influential countries, such as China, Russia, and 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 over-represent cultural values that are typical of WEIRD countries.