At the end of the Cold War, many thinkers optimistically predicted that globalization would cause global societies’ social values to converge around liberal notions of personal rights and freedoms. Since then, technology has made the Earth “smaller” than ever. Global trade delivers goods from one corner of the globe to the other. Airlines allow us to travel across oceans in hours rather than days or weeks. The internet lets us keep tabs on events thousands of miles away, engross ourselves in different cultures, and connect with others almost instantaneously. And yet, according to a new analysis conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, societies’ values are not converging. Instead, they’re growing further apart. The rift is most pronounced between rich and poor countries. Diverging values Joshua Conrad Jackson, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the Booth School of Business, and Dan Medvedev, a final-year PhD student in behavioral science at the Booth School of Business, teamed up for the study, published on April 9 in the journal Nature Communications. Together, they scoured through …