Back in 2007, I travelled to a remote corner of southwest China to hike to a picturesque village in the mountains. Along the way, I ran into two travellers from France, and we decided to finish the hike together. After we were done, we stopped for a meal before catching a bus back to civilisation.
In the small restaurant, we remarked on how tipping the wait staff isn’t a thing in China like it is in the West. Without missing a beat, one of my travel companions said: ‘But they’ll get that soon.’
That thought has stuck with me for years. The intuition was that China was developing, and that development would make China more Western. Since tipping is common in Western cultures, China would adopt tipping.
The tipping example seems laughable. That’s probably why the offhand comment stuck with me for so long. Tipping does not seem like an inevitable consequence of economic development. But the logic – that spreading modernity will lead to cultural homogenisation – is a lot more compelling for people when it comes to things like individualism. It’s easy to see why. In some ways, it’s obviously happening already. By one account, one language is going extinct every 10 days. People in 80 countries can order a Starbucks latte, and people in more than 190 countries can watch Netflix. It sure seems logical to conclude that modernisation is making us more similar.
But when researchers have actually tried to document the size of cultural differences over time, the picture is far more complicated – and more interesting. For example, when they analysed cultural differences in the World Values Survey from the first year of the survey in 1981 up to 2022 – based on issues such as how to raise children and the importance of self-expression – researchers found that countries have grown increasingly different in their values, not more similar.
This feels wrong. Over the same period, the world has become more interconnected, more educated, more urbanised, and more similar in GDP per capita, but cultures have somehow become more different in their values.
To dig into this question, my colleagues and I began tracking what happens to people who move to more modernised environments. We couldn’t force people to move to modern cities just to suit our scientific curiosity, but we hit upon the idea to track one group of millions of people who are already doing that.
Every year, about 10 million students across China start college. Many of those students move. Some move to a nearby town, and some move thousands of miles away, from a tropical to a sub-arctic region, or from a tiny village to a mega-city like Shanghai. If you think about it, all that movement is like a giant field study in the power of the environment. What happens when you send a malleable 18-year-old to a new environment?
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