Page 279 - Cultures and Organizations

252 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Long-Term Orientation Scores Based on
World Values Survey Data

In 2007 Misho Minkov published his analysis of World Values Survey
(WVS) data, introducing three new dimensions. The fi rst, exclusionism ver-
sus universalism, was correlated with our collectivism, and we discussed it
in Chapter 4. The second, indulgence versus restraint, will be the subject of
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Chapter 8. The third was called monumentalism versus fl exhumility, and
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it correlated strongly (and negatively) with LTO-CVS. Monumentalism
predicted 42 percent of the country differences in LTO-CVS, which sug-
gested that the two measures share common underlying values. 37
Misho’s monumentalism versus flexhumility dimension had been

inspired by the work of Canadian psychologist Steve Heine, who saw a
link between self-enhancement (a tendency to seek positive information
about oneself) and self-stability or self-consistency (a tendency to believe
that one should have unchangeable values, beliefs, and behaviors that do
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not depend on shifting circumstances). Although Heine referred to indi-
viduals, Misho guessed that Heine’s theory might also apply at the national
cultural level. WVS data proved him right.
WVS measurements of pride (a self-enhancing feeling) and religious-
ness (which tends to imply unchangeable values and beliefs) did correlate
at the national level. Nations with higher percentages of people who state
that they are very proud to be citizens of their country, or that one of
their main goals in life has been to make their parents proud, also tend to
have higher percentages of very religious people. Pride and religiousness
together formed a strong cultural dimension. The dimension contrasts
societies in which the human self is like a proud and stable monolithic
monument versus societies whose cultures promote humility, fl exibility,

and adaptability to changing circumstances.
In the Chinese Value Survey, saving face can be seen as a form of
self-enhancement, and personal steadiness and stability is the same thing
as self-consistency; both goals appear at the short-term pole of the LTO-
CVS dimension. This explains the negative correlation between LTO and
monumentalism. On monumentalism too, East Asian countries formed a

compact cluster at one pole (flexhumility). African and Islamic countries
were found closer to the opposite pole (monumentalism), and so was the
United States.
This demonstrated that conceptually and statistically similar dimen-
sions could be arrived at starting from very different databases and