Culture Compare SOC 1113 · Trend Lab · Midwestern State University

Every number on this page is a published survey measurement of a whole country. Researchers have been putting numbers on culture for decades: how strictly norms are enforced, how much unequal power is accepted, whether the self or the group is the unit. Pick two countries and compare them across nine measures. Then read the last tab before you conclude anything, because a country average is a real measurement of a population and says nothing certain about any single person in it.

United States vs Japan

All 27 countries on two measures of your choosing

Your two countries are highlighted. Countries missing either measure are left off and listed under the chart. This page draws no line through the dots on purpose: two measures moving together across countries is a clue, never a verdict.

Tightness, all 27 countries, ranked

Gelfand and colleagues measured how strongly social norms are enforced in 33 nations by surveying nearly 7,000 people about what behavior is acceptable where. Higher means tighter: stronger norms and less tolerance for deviance. Your two countries are highlighted.

Neither end is better. Tightness buys coordination, order, and self-control, and it costs openness. Looseness buys creativity and tolerance, and it costs coordination when it counts. Every country pays one of the two bills.

Where these numbers come from

Tightness (Gelfand et al., Science, 2011). Surveys of 6,823 people across 33 nations about the strength of norms and tolerance for deviance. Germany's score here is from the West Germany sample.
Six Hofstede dimensions (Geert Hofstede's published 2015 data file). Built from decades of workplace value surveys. Scores are relative positions, roughly 0 to 100, and a few exceed 100. Israel has no published indulgence score.
Social trust (World Values Survey and European Values Study, via Our World in Data). Share agreeing that most people can be trusted, most recent wave, mostly 2017 to 2022. Israel's most recent published value is from 2004.
Religion important in daily life (Gallup, 2009). The oldest measure on this page, and shown anyway because coverage is broad. Six countries here were not in that table and are marked as having no data rather than guessed.

What a country score is not

A country score is an average of thousands of answers. It is real, it replicates, and it predicts things at the level of countries. It is not a description of any individual. Treating a group average as a fact about one person is called the ecological fallacy, and it is the statistical version of the single story: one number standing in for millions of different people. The Adichie talk you are writing about this week makes the same point without the math.

Questions to take with you

  1. Find the biggest gap between your two countries. Name one concrete workplace situation where that gap would show up before lunch.
  2. Power distance is the cockpit dimension. Look up the two countries from the Korean Air story and check whether the scores fit the story. Then ask what else could explain a crash rate.
  3. The United States scores near the top of the world on individualism. What does that setting buy, and what does it cost?
  4. Pick two measures on the map tab that seem to move together across countries. Give one causal story in each direction, and one third variable that could drive both.
  5. These scores describe countries, not people. What would you need to know before predicting anything about one person from their country's scores?
  6. Culture is measured here with surveys. What can a survey of stated values not capture about a culture, and what method from Chapter 2 would you add?