Cultural Evolution: People's Motivations are Changing, and Reshaping the World

by Ronald Inglehart

Cultural Evolution argues that people's values and behavior are shaped by the degree to which survival is secure; it was precarious for most of history, which encouraged heavy emphasis on group solidarity, rejection of outsiders, and obedience to strong leaders. For under extreme scarcity, xenophobia is if there is just enough land to support one tribe and another tribe tries to claim it, survival may literally be a choice between Us and Them. Conversely, high levels of existential security encourage openness to change, diversity, and new ideas. The unprecedented prosperity and security of the postwar era brought cultural change, the environmentalist movement, and the spread of democracy. But in recent decades, diminishing job security and rising inequality have led to an authoritarian reaction. Evidence from more than 100 countries demonstrates that people's motivations and behavior reflect the extent to which they take survival for granted - and that modernization changes them in roughly predictable ways. This book explains the rise of environmentalist parties, gender equality, and same-sex marriage through a new, empirically-tested version of modernization theory.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, History, Cultural, Science, Society

279 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 22, 2018

About the author

Ronald F. Inglehart (born September 5, 1934) was a political scientist at the University of Michigan. He was director of the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists who have carried out representative national surveys of the publics of over 80 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing 90 percent of the world's population. The first wave of surveys for this project was carried out in 1981 and the latest wave was completed in 2014. Since 2010 Inglehart was co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and St Petersburg. This laboratory has carried out surveys in Russia and eight ex-Soviet countries and is training Phd.-level students in quantitative cross-national research methods.

In the seventies Inglehart began developing an influential theory of Generational Replacement causing intergenerational value change from materialist to postmaterialist values that helped shape the Eurobarometer Surveys, the World Values Surveys and other cross-national survey projects. Building on this work, he subsequently developed a revised version of Modernization theory, Evolutionary Modernization Theory, which argues that economic development, welfare state institutions and the long peace between major powers since 1945, are reshaping human motivations in ways that have important implications concerning gender roles, sexual norms, the role of religion, economic behavior and the spread of democracy.

Reviews

[Martin Henson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning! This is not popular political science - it a distillation of Inglehart’s work over many years. The sheer scale of the research, over more than 100 countries, and the extraordinary coherence found between parameters is staggering. It’s hard to pick out examples among so many insights, but maybe characteristic is the untangling of the questions surrounding the rise of populism, and whether this is due to cultural backlash or declining economic security: it turns out the former is the main reason for support, but the overall level is due to the latter. “The fact that birth-cohort effects can coexist with period effects is not intuitively obvious and tends to be overlooked, but it explains the seeming paradox that economic factors do not explain why given individual vote for a populist party but to help explain where the popular vote is much stronger now than in the past.” The last chapter, on the emergence of the knowledge society and its continued development towards AI, is supremely well argued. However, neither of these examples really does justice to “Evolutionary Modernisation Theory”, which explains cultural changes based on truly global evidence.

[Juan Fernando · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendo balance de vida del creador de la Encuesta Mundial de Valores. Actualiza y complementa las hipótesis que marcaron los argumentos del surgimiento e impacto de valores posmaterialistas en sociedades que alcanzan condiciones de bienestar y seguridad.

Es un libro de ciencia política, y aunque el autor conscientemente excluye argumentos técnicos o estadísticos para hacerlo digerible, no deja de ser un documento técnico.

¿Nos les pasa que vemos a los abuelos de nuestros niños y que por el contexto están casi condenados a ser misóginos, clasistas y machistas? Llenos de amor y buenas intenciones, pero totalmente desconectados de los valores que hoy se promueven como aquellos por los que debemos luchas y que queremos perseguir. Este libro lo explica

En esta versión incluye información nueva de más países y períodos de tiempo más largos, ofreciendo explicaciones más robustas al impacto del desarrollo económico y apertura democráticas en los valores ciudadanos.

El capítulo final lo dedica a plantear una posición bien justificada de la importancia de intervenir los modelos capitalistas de "El ganador se lleva todo" y cómo la desigualdad generada en democracias avanzadas está abriendo la puerta a xenofobia y liderazgos autoritarios.

El proceso de cambio cultural acelerado explicado en el capítulo 5 podría insinuar para Colombia que la presión de las cohortes nacidas después del 2002 de manera gradual será cada vez más intensa pidiendo cambios que permitan más espacios de desarrollo individual como los relacionados con género e identidad sexual.

[Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible analysis of materialism and postmaterialism across different societies, supported by explanations using the scarcity and socialisation hypotheses. The research into fertility norms, individual choice, and the shift from survival values to self-expression is particularly intriguing. While the ideas may not be entirely unique, they are well-articulated and backed by solid statistical comparisons across different regions.

[Stefan Schubert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting theses but some of the reasoning is iffy. In part repetitive (restates previous theses instead of giving more evidence).

[Hossein Samani · Rating 4 out of 5]

برای من بسیار بسیار آموزنده بود
کتاب یک تز اصلی دارد و در زمینه های مختلف با نوانس های بسیار تطورات فرهنگی را با آن تز توضیح میدهد
فکر میکنم برای هر کس که به علوم اجتماعی علاقه مند است کتاب چیزی آموزنده و توهم زدا داشته باشد.

[Allan Aksiim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oft repetitive but with fascinating content. For me the book quite satisfactorily explains the "why?" of current cultural and political strife that affects the wealthy societies of the West. Inglehart is famous for heading the World Value Survey and and most of the contents of the book are based on work with that. It is a book about the reasons why people's values are formed (mostly by childhood upbringing and how secure people feel) and how by generational change Western societies after WWII changed from materialist to post-materialist values as the old died and the young replaced them. The new generations living in much more secure surroundings compared with those that came before who witnessed WWI, the Great Depression, WWII and whose lives were oft tainted by fear of what great horrors the near future will bring. The new generations on the other hand saw unparallelled rise in life-quality that continued for decades. For the French it was the Les Trente Glorieuses but others had their equal trends with the Rise and Fall of American Growth being another book that comes to mind. New feeling of security brought new post-materialist values (out-groups like migrants are okay, gays and lesbians can live their lives, social change is good, caring of the environment etc) that dominate the advanced economies of the world. The problem as I understood from the book is not a new one - many even in the wealthy societies did not partake in the unparallelled growth and after the 70s the growth of the economies in the West is a shadow of what it was before with an ever increasing proportions of the wealth created since the 70s going to the higher echelons of society.

Even if we could reverse that economic insecurity we would still be left with cultural insecurity because there have already been so many changes to western societies in the past decades that has lead to the reactionary forces gaining traction. Another problem is that we would be unlikely to change the values of those who already have formed them meaning we are stuck in this political situation for quite some time.

This book is a must read for the inquisitive mind and every chapter brings new nuggets of insight and graphs to ponder about. What the book would have need to receive a higher rating would have been a strong editor who could have cleaned the book of repetitiveness.

[Vibhor Atreya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply insightful book. It discusses how a longing for existence security and urge for self-expression guide our political choices and policy preferences. These two factors are so deeply entrenched in our psyche that we may not be aware when we are heeding to them. This book is one of the several culminations from the world values surveys run across the world for several decades by Ronald Inglehart. He uses data in the form of very creative charts to find not so evident patterns. A must read for people who are interested in how soceity works and makes choices.

[Viktor Sidorov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose this id one of the best book in political science. Extraordinary cultural explanation of politics ever made. Strong theoretical and empirical foundations. Highly recommended for all who wants to understand politics.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides an assessment of data from the World Values Survey, conducted in a representative sample of countries around the world. The author has written on the emergence of post-materialist values (a concept that he has developed from the survey) for decades, and although the book is interesting, it is mostly more of the same. Essentially, people in rich countries who grew up in a materially secure environment are less concerned about material well-being, and more concerned with values related to self-expression. The only new thing in this book is that the author tries to grapple with the rise of authoritarian populism. However, his argument doesn't really make sense, since most of the support for authoritarian populist parties is coming from relatively old people (who were part of the baby boom generation that grew up in security and abundance and developed post-materialist values in the first place). Today's young people, growing up in a less secure environment, do not seem to be embracing populism in as large numbers. He does present some new data, as the World Values Survey has expanded to many additional countries, so he can do more sophisticated statistical and cultural analysis. It is a worthwhile book to read, but probably won't offer much new to those who are already familiar with Inglehart's work.

[Akbar Madan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cultural changes in societies are phenomena similar to physical ripples in the universe, fixed within the limits of our temporal knowledge of them and variable with the movement of time and the movement of societies and individuals in proportion to their needs related to population changes and the size of natural and non-natural resources, post-material values ​​as a result of this cultural change that elevates man to produce species There are many forms of cooperation that will create a global cultural pattern, and the speed of cultural change depends on the breadth and diversity of human communication forms that always produce new concepts commensurate with the quality of these technologies. Social justice and human well-being, these new standards are also without it, as if the process is cycles in a circle that establishes new social and behavioral concepts and thus new challenges.

[Erfan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read for anyone that wishes to make sense of modern politics. A very comprehensive and evidence based take on evolution of cultural and political trends. The thesis that Inglehart brings forth, "Evolutionary modernization theory", is the more complete, scientific and data based form of "historical materialism" of Karl Marx. Where Marx talks in hypotheticals and philosophy, Inglehart talks in numbers and data. Inglehart also takes inspiration from psychology and genetics to improve his thesis, which makes his argument more robust. Oftentimes people that study human sciences forget to incorporate behavioral biology and biology in their consideration, which bugs me as a biologist. To me Inglehart did not make the same mistake.

6/5

[Rhys Lindmark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great exploration of the World Values Survey and the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingleha....

The book was quite repetitive but was full of juicy graphs looking at how society's values are changing.

[Whissteria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic work - so if you are looking for pablum you won't like it. Massive amount of research and fascinating results. Should be required reading. Crystallizes current trends to give a fresh viewpoint.

[Fred Pratt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. A bit thick on forecasting a future that is probably not visible, but the guts are sound.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

A staggering, big-picture look at how and why societies transition from values based on survival to values based on individual autonomy. Data-driven, optimistic, and deeply profound.

[John Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book basically says: "People used to care about survival. Now they care about self-expression. Also, politics is weird because of it." And honestly? Fair. Inglehart pulls together decades of data to show how value systems have shifted globally—and how that shift explains a lot of modern chaos (and progress, depending on your mood).

It’s dense, a bit stats-heavy in places, and reads like the product of someone who’s been on first-name terms with survey datasets since the Cold War. But the insights are huge, and the implications for democracy, culture, and generational change are mind-blowing... or at least mildly panic-inducing.

Read this if you want to understand why your grandma is baffled by TikTok and why Gen Z would rather have a purpose than a paycheck.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book on why people (and countries) exhibit different values and behaviors. I think the book could have benefited from a better editor- some of the paragraphs were redundant, but I walked away from reading it with a better idea of why the world is changing in the ways that it is, and what we might do to improve subjective well-being the world over.

I read this book while working on my dissertation but I think it's accessible enough to appeal to the layperson as well. Tons of interesting graphs and insights!

[Yanick Punter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good and interesting book. But the prospects of the future are horryfing.