Know Thyselfby Silenos Works

Politics & Society

Culture Map

Which national culture matches your values?

  • About 6 minutes
  • 42 questions
  • 6 dimensions
  • 8 illustrated results
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Illustration: Culture Map

Every society settles certain questions in its own way: how much respect rank deserves, whether you are first an individual or part of a group, whether winning or caring matters more, how comfortable you are with the unknown, whether you look to tradition or to the distant future, and how freely you enjoy life. This test measures your own answers on six dimensions from the research of Geert Hofstede, then compares your profile with the published scores of fifty-one countries and three world regions.

Answer for yourself as you really are, not for your country or how you think you should be. A match describes shared values, not where you belong.

What it measures

Power distance

Equal footing ↔ Hierarchy

How far you accept and expect that power and status are distributed unequally, and how much deference you think rank and age deserve.

Equal footing: You want leaders who consult, colleagues on first-name terms and the freedom to challenge people above you.

Hierarchy: You accept that people hold different ranks and expect seniority to be respected and leaders to lead.

Individualism

Collectivism ↔ Individualism

Whether you see yourself first as an independent "I" with personal goals, or as part of a "we" (family, clan, group) whose loyalty and harmony come first.

Collectivism: Your identity is bound up with your family and close groups; loyalty, harmony and mutual obligation come first.

Individualism: You see yourself as an independent person, speak your mind and expect to make your own choices.

Achievement vs care

Care ↔ Achievement

Hofstede's masculinity versus femininity: whether a society rewards ambition, competition and success, or care, modesty, consensus and quality of life.

Care: You value cooperation, modesty and a good life over winning, and you prefer compromise to confrontation.

Achievement: You admire ambition and excellence, enjoy competition and want achievement to be recognised.

Uncertainty avoidance

Flexibility ↔ Structure

How comfortable you are with ambiguity and the unknown, and how much you rely on rules, plans and predictability to manage it.

Flexibility: You are relaxed about the unknown, enjoy surprises and treat rules as guidelines.

Structure: You like clear rules, careful plans and security, and ambiguous situations make you uneasy.

Long-term orientation

Tradition ↔ Pragmatism

Whether you honour tradition, steadiness and timeless truths, or take a pragmatic view that adapts to circumstances, saves and invests for the distant future.

Tradition: You value tradition, a stable sense of self and clear moral truths, and you like to see results in the present.

Pragmatism: You are thrifty and persistent, adapt traditions to new conditions and plan for the long run.

Indulgence

Restraint ↔ Indulgence

How freely you allow yourself to enjoy life and have fun, versus keeping desires in check through duty and social norms.

Restraint: You value self-control and duty, and you are wary of giving in too easily to pleasure.

Indulgence: You feel free to enjoy life, treat leisure as important and do not feel guilty about pleasure.

Possible results

About this test

Between 1967 and 1973 the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede analysed more than a hundred thousand questionnaires completed by IBM employees in dozens of countries. Because the jobs were similar everywhere, differences between countries pointed to differences in national culture. In Culture's Consequences (1980) he described four dimensions: power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity (here called achievement versus care) and uncertainty avoidance. Long-term orientation was added in 1991 from Michael Bond's Chinese Value Survey, and indulgence versus restraint in 2010 from Michael Minkov's analysis of the World Values Survey. Later projects, notably GLOBE, which studied managers in 62 societies, refined and challenged the model, and several scores have since been revised.

This test uses original statements to place you on the same six dimensions, then compares your profile with the country scores published by Hofstede and his colleagues; where a country has no score on a dimension, that dimension is left out. The Arab countries, East Africa and West Africa appear as the regional averages of the original survey, because no research scores exist for their individual countries. Similarity reflects the distance between your scores and the country's, and the eight mindsets are typical combinations of the six dimensions.

Two cautions matter. The dimensions were built to compare national averages, not individuals, and your scores are relative to the answer range rather than calibrated against the original surveys, so a match is an analogy rather than a measurement. And beware the ecological fallacy: a country's average says nothing about any one of its people. Variation within countries is large, often larger than the differences between them, and most nations hold many cultures. Treat your matches as an invitation to curiosity, never as a stereotype.

References

For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.

Culture Map

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About 6 minutes · 42 questions

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