More educated people are more WEIRD: Higher education predicts global cultural similarity to WEIRD countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Behavioral scientists increasingly recruit participants from less-WEIRD 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 education 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, including the United States, Anglosphere, and Western Europe. Education did not predict cultural similarities to other large, culturally and politically influential countries, such as China, Russia, and India. Income and self-reported subjective status did not show the same pattern of WEIRD cultural similarity. Our results are consistent with hypotheses linking formal education with Western culture and suggest that cross-cultural samples of university-educated individuals underrepresent the world’s cultural variation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".