Measuring culture worldwide with a sample of two billion humans using data from Facebook

Nick Obradovich, Ömer Özak, Ignacio Martín, et al., Expanding the Measurement of Culture with a Sample of Two Billion Humans, NBER Working Paper No. 27827, Issued in September 2020.

Abstract: Culture has played a pivotal role in human evolution. Yet, the ability of social scientists to study culture is limited by the currently available measurement instruments. Scholars of culture must regularly choose between scalable but sparse survey-based methods or restricted but rich ethnographic methods. Here, we demonstrate that massive online social networks can advance the study of human culture by providing quantitative, scalable, and high-resolution measurement of behaviorally revealed cultural values and preferences. We employ publicly available data across nearly 60,000 topic dimensions drawn from two billion Facebook users across 225 countries and territories. We first validate that cultural distances calculated from this measurement instrument correspond to traditional survey-based and objective measures of cross-national cultural differences. We then demonstrate that this expanded measure enables rich insight into the cultural landscape globally at previously impossible resolution. We analyze the importance of national borders in shaping culture, explore unique cultural markers that identify subnational population groups, and compare subnational divisiveness to gender divisiveness across countries. The global collection of massive data on human behavior provides a high-dimensional complement to traditional cultural metrics. Further, the granularity of the measure presents enormous promise to advance scholars' understanding of additional fundamental questions in the social sciences. The measure enables detailed investigation into the geopolitical stability of countries, social cleavages within both small and large-scale human groups, the integration of migrant populations, and the disaffection of certain population groups from the political process, among myriad other potential future applications.

On the use of data from Facebook:

Facebook places particular importance in classifying the interests of its users. As a result, the company has inadvertently built the largest platform for the measurement of culture in existence (see Figure 1B). For- tunately for scholars, Facebook makes this information accessible to prospective marketers via a marketing Application Programming Interface (API). Using information drawn from users’ self-reported interests, click- ing behaviors on Facebook, likes on Facebook, software downloads, GPS location, behavior on other sites that employ Facebook ads (Figure 1B), this API provides the ability to create and analyze social groups of interest along hundreds of thousands of interest dimensions and down to very fine spatial and temporal resolution (the zip code-by-day level in the US). Table S4 illustrates examples of cultural categories along with corresponding Facebook interests both for traditional and non-traditional cultural elements. By making its platform open to those interested in marketing to its users, Facebook has enabled scholars to interrogate its measures of global human interests and construct freely available measures of culture.

We use data gleaned from scraping the Facebook Marketing API to construct a high-dimensional measure of culture. We gathered nearly 60,000 diverse interests by sequentially interrogating Facebook’s platform and then constructed – for each administrative unit in our analysis – a vector of the share of individuals in that unit that held each interest (see Methods for added detail). Importantly, each interest on the platform is indexed by a unique identifier, allowing for consistency across languages globally. We use these data to investigate culture at the country, subnational, and local levels.

H/t Tyler Cowen.