Higher education linked to Western cultural values worldwide

People with higher levels of education across the world tend to hold cultural values more closely aligned with those found in Western societies, according to new research co-authored by LSE.

A new study, published in Nature Communications and co-authored by LSE and New York University Professor Michael Muthukrishna, finds that higher levels of education globally are associated with cultural values similar to those commonly found in the United States, the United Kingdom, other Anglo‑industrialised countries, and Western Europe.

Professor Muthukrishna and the study’s lead author, York University Assistant Professor Cindel White, analysed data from nearly 270,000 people across 95 countries using the World Values Survey. Their analysis shows that education level is a strong predictor of alignment with values often described as WEIRD, meaning Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.

For example, the researchers found that Russians with lower levels of education were culturally very distant from Americans, while Russians with a university degree were much closer in terms of values. By contrast, higher education was not associated with increased cultural similarity to other major global powers such as China, Russia or India.

Across 70 per cent of the countries studied, people with higher levels of education were significantly closer to the United States than those with lower levels of education. However, the researchers emphasise that this pattern reflects a broader alignment with Western cultural norms rather than the adoption of specifically American values. These norms include greater individualism, stronger emphasis on personal freedom, more analytical thinking, lower conformity to social norms, and higher levels of generalised trust.

The study also challenges some modernisation theories. When the researchers examined income and social status, they did not find the same association with Western cultural values.

White stressed that the findings do not suggest that highly educated people around the world are culturally identical.

“We're not saying that being highly educated makes everyone the same—there's still a lot of diversity within highly educated groups around the world. It's just that the diversity has shifted in the direction of being more Western,” she said. “We are saying that you do need to look at education, in addition to things like nationality, ethnicity, and religion, when considering why someone thinks the way they do.”

The findings have important implications for psychological and behavioural science research, where university students and highly educated participants are frequently used to compare attitudes and behaviours across cultures.

Muthukrishna explained: “Schooling is one of the most powerful systems of cultural transmission ever invented. Education doesn’t just change what you know, but how you think and what you value. What our results reveal is that school systems around the world still carry the fingerprints of their Western origins. That means if you’re a researcher recruiting university students in Nairobi or São Paulo and comparing them to university students in New York, Toronto or London, you may be dramatically underestimating how different those cultures actually are.”

White, C.J.M., & Muthukrishna, M. (2026). Higher education predicts global cultural similarity to WEIRD countries. Nature Communications 17, 2498. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70404-4