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. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Highlights
Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution
Our goal is to reduce the dimensionality of interests and questions and to assess how many unique principal components are able to explain a large share (80%) of the variance in our Facebook measure of culture and in the World Values Survey (WVS) questions across countries
Our method enables us to answer an additional fundamental question regarding human culture: Which cultural attributes make a nation, region, or locality unique? Table 1 presents the cultural outliers in our data for the 50 U.S states, where a cultural outlier is defined as an interest that presents a penetration in that state that is at least twice higher than that interest’s share in any other U.S state
Summary
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. 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. The global collection of massive data on human behavior provides a high-dimensional complement to traditional cultural metrics. The traditional quantitative approach to the study of culture has been shaped by the historical availability of data[29]. Whereas a scholar of culture historically would often need to directly observe individuals in the field to produce a rich description of their cultural attributes[37], the information age has enabled measuring certain aspects of human life at high resolution globally and unobtrusively[30,38]. The data produced from this process are massive in size, extensive in coverage, and high in resolution This changing information environment enables supplementing and expanding the scientific approach to the measurement of culture. High-resolution granular data are essential for our understanding of many cultural phenomena, ranging from wars and the formation of identity to the integration of immigrants and the fragmentation of societies
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