Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans

Nick Obradovich (), Ömer Özak, Ignacio Martín (), Edmond Awad (), Manuel Cebrián (), Rubén Cuevas (), Klaus Desmet, Iyad Rahwan () and Ángel Cuevas ()
Additional contact information
Nick Obradovich: Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Ignacio Martín: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Edmond Awad: University of Exeter
Manuel Cebrián: Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Rubén Cuevas: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Iyad Rahwan: Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Ángel Cuevas: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

No 13735, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich ethnographic methods. Here, we demonstrate that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences. We employ publicly available data across nearly 60,000 topic dimensions drawn from two billion Facebook users across 225 countries and territories. We first validate that cultural distances calculated from this measurement instrument correspond to traditional survey-based and objective measures of cross-national cultural differences. We then demonstrate that this expanded measure enables rich insight into the cultural landscape globally at previously impossible resolution. We analyze the importance of national borders in shaping culture, explore unique cultural markers that identify subnational population groups, and compare subnational divisiveness to gender divisiveness across countries. The global collection of massive data on human behavior provides a high-dimensional complement to traditional cultural metrics. Further, the granularity of the measure presents enormous promise to advance scholars' understanding of additional fundamental questions in the social sciences. The measure enables detailed investigation into the geopolitical stability of countries, social cleavages within both small and large-scale human groups, the integration of migrant populations, and the disaffection of certain population groups from the political process, among myriad other potential future applications.

Keywords: gender differences; regional culture; identity; cultural distance; culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C80 F1 J1 O10 R10 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-evo, nep-geo, nep-gro and nep-isf
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Journal of the Royal Society - Interface , 2022, 190, 1920220085

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Related works:
Working Paper: Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans (2022)
Working Paper: Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans (2020)
Working Paper: Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans (2020)
Working Paper: Expanding the measurement of culture with a sample of two billion humans (2020)
Working Paper: Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans (2020)
Working Paper: Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans (2020)
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