According to a survey of over 15,500 people from 11 cultures, 10 countries, and eight languages, who were asked to describe their cultures in their own words to outsiders, many cultures not only now resemble each other in fundamental areas, but the characteristics they have in common are more pronounced in American culture.
The survey collected responses to a single fill-in-the-blank question from representative samples of the general population at the national level in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, Japan, Canada, and the U.S., which were then machine-translated and analyzed by OdinText, a text analysis software platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify significant patterns in unstructured data (text).
“Those who say that globalization is diluting and blending the cultures of the world into a single global melting pot may not be so wrong,” said Tom H. C. Anderson, managing partner at OdinText.
“When we think of culture, it’s often in terms of food, music, customs, etc., but it turns out that when you ask people from countries around the world to describe their own culture in their own words, an almost universal and unexpected attribute rises to the top: diversity/multiculturalism,” Anderson said.
More than 15,500 comments collected in the survey were aggregated into an international average of culture and separated for comparison at the country level. The data analysis indicated that the greatest similarities between cultures are also key attributes/characteristics they share with American culture, as described by respondents from the U.S.
“The U.S. seems to occupy the center of the cultural universe in our data, which may not be a coincidence, as American culture could be considered, in many ways, the original model of ‘melting pot,’ and culture is a major export of the U.S.,” Anderson said.
The responses were subsequently analyzed for significant patterns of emotional sentiment, which suggested that people’s perceptions of their culture are also strongly influenced by current events.
“The way people talk about their culture largely depends on circumstantial factors that one would not normally associate with culture. For example, OdinText identified high levels of ‘anger’ in the descriptions of American culture made by Americans, which, upon closer examination, seems connected to the outcome of the presidential election,” Anderson said.