The World Value Survey (WVS) has recently completed its seventh wave of data collection, covering 58 countries over the period of 2017-2022. This series of posts will highlight some of the findings, using the same subset of countries. In the last post, I focused on what the WVS calls “emancipative” values, as in emancipation from authority. Emancipative values emphasize freedom of choice and "involve priorities for lifestyle liberty, gender equality, personal autonomy and the voice of the people." (World Values Survey).
Emancipative values overlap with the belief in human rights, as articulated in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Endorsed in 1948 by the UN General Assembly, the UDHR was meant to serve as a “common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations”. In its own words, the UDHR “sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected”, which are “inalienable rights of all members of the human family”, including “freedom of speech and belief”. The UDHR has since been translated into over 500 languages.
In this post, I will use the seventh wave of WVS findings to explore the relationship between support for human rights, using emancipative values as a proxy, and trust of outsiders. I will define support as a “medium” or “high” level of endorsement of emancipative values, per the survey’s own labels. Outsiders will include people of other nationalities and of other religions.
First, I compare country-level support for emancipative values with the percentage of respondents who indicated they did not trust people of another nationality at all. This is what I found:
The pattern is quite clear: at the country level, higher support for emancipative values is associated with greater trust of people of other nationalities. And the lack of trust of other nationalities is associated with lower support for emancipative values. I’m not claiming a causal relation, though the pattern does make sense: if you distrust most of humanity, you probably don’t care much about human rights in general.
But what makes people of other nationalities so unworthy of trust? Religion appears to play a role:
Again, the pattern is clear: at the country level, mistrust of foreigners pretty much tracks mistrust of people of other religions.. Mistrust one, mistrust the other. Why this is the case is bound to be a long and complicated story.