Dimension indulgence versus restraint is the sixth and most recent dimension. The terms were coined by Dr. Michael Minkoff for covering certain differences he had found in the World Value Survey that so far had not yet been found in the other five dimensions. and it is mainly related to feelings of subjective happiness or unhappiness and the control of the people's own life or the opposite.
And it is based on data collected by the World Values Survey in the period 1995 till 2004 and we have again data for 93 countries. Indulgent societies allow relatively free gratification of basic and natural human desires, leading to enjoying life and having fun. Restrained societies suppress gratification of needs and regulate it by strict social norms. If I oppose a number of characteristics of indulgent societies to restraint societies, taking into account that most societies are somewhere in between those extremes, then I see that on the indulgent side people tend to feel healthier and happier, and on the restraint side they feel less happy and less healthy, although objectively they may be equally healthy. In the indulgent societies, people have a perception of personal life control.
They are masters about their own life. In the restrained societies, people tend to feel that what happens to them is not their own doing. It depends on other factors.
Indulgent societies have a leisure ethic, you could say, and restrained societies have a work ethic. Indulgent societies have a more optimist, positive attitude, and restrained societies a more pessimist, cynical attitude. Indulgent societies have more extroverted personalities and restrained societies have more introverted personalities. In indulgent societies having friends is very important.
In restrained societies having friends is less important. This is evident in something like Facebook. In the older societies, the people participate actively in sports.
In restrained societies, there is less sports participation. Sports are things you watch, you see others do. But you don't do it yourself.
Indulgent societies have less moral discipline. Restrained societies have stricter moral disciplines. And this also applies to sexual morals, which are looser on the indulgent side and more strict on the restrained side. How do we measure a society's level of indulgence versus restraint?
There is no absolute standard, again, so we can only compare one society to another. It's the difference between societies. And this difference is expressed in an index, the Indulgence versus Restraint Index, and the abbreviation is IVR.
And again, IVR values have been plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. Zero stands for restrained societies and 100 stands for an indulgent society. I have chosen from the 93 countries for which we have data, and on the indulgent side you find Mexico, very indulgent, Nigeria and also some other African countries, but also Sweden, for example, and Australia. And Britain and the Netherlands and the United States and somewhat lower but still indulgent Brazil. And then on the restrained side we find France and Japan and Germany and Italy and India and China and quite restrained Russia and extremely restrained Egypt and other Islamic countries.
Now what can we do with this index? What does it correlate with? Well, first of all, there is a very interesting opposition.
If you ask what is important to people, you find that in indulgent societies that freedom of speech for all is very important. And this is not so in the restrained societies. And the opposite of freedom of speech seems to be maintaining order in the nation.
So in the restrained societies the feeling is that maintaining order in the nation is more important than having freedom of speech. Indulgent societies tend to have higher crime rates. Nevertheless, they tend to have smaller police forces. And restrained societies have lower crime rates and larger police forces.
In countries with educated population, The indulgent societies tend to have higher birth rates. In countries with educated population, restrained societies tend to have lower birth rates. In wealthy countries, indulgent societies tend to have more obese people, more fat people.
In restrained societies, there is less obesity in wealthy countries. And finally, in indulgent societies, there is higher approval of foreign music and films, and a restrained society is there's lower approval of foreignness in music and in films. The combination of the two dimensions which we derive from the World Value Survey, long versus short term orientation and indulgence versus restraint, leads to an interesting division of areas in the world. We find that on the indulgent plus short-term side, we have some African countries, not all.
Nigeria and South Africa are there, and all the countries of South America and of North America and Australia. On the restrained and short-term side, we find a few countries like Poland and Portugal. some African countries like Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso, and finally all Islamic countries.
On the restrained and long-term side, we find the East Asian countries Japan, India and China, we find the countries of Eastern Europe, and also Italy and Germany. And on the indulgent and long-term side, we find the other German-speaking countries, Austria and Switzerland. We find the Netherlands and Belgium, but we also find Sweden and Britain.
They reflect values clearly that were transferred from parents to children, values that changed difficultly in later life. Now there was a research project by Professor Burgelsdijk from Groningen who compared answers of two successive age groups. cohorts 30 years apart.
And in this research, there is a clear effect on indulgence. It means that over the 30 years, the level of indulgence in the world has grown. So societies have become more indulgent and number of restrained societies has diminished.
But the position of countries relative to each other has remained the same. If they have shifted, they shifted together, and this is what the scores are based on. So the scores again of this dimension can be assumed to be stable over time.