Local housing market dynamics predict rapid shifts in cultural openness: A 9-year study across 199 cities.

Abstract

Accumulating evidence suggests that culture changes in response to shifting socioecological conditions; economic development is a particularly potent driver of such change. Previous research has shown that economic development can induce slow but steady cultural changes within large cultural entities (e.g., countries). Here we propose that economically driven culture change can occur rapidly, particularly in smaller cultural entities (e.g., cites). Drawing on work in cultural dynamics, urban economics, and geographical psychology, we hypothesize that changes in local housing prices-reflecting changing availability of local amenities-can induce rapid shifts in local cultures of Openness. We propose two mechanisms that might underlie such cultural shifts: selective migration (i.e., people selectively moving to cities that offer certain amenities) and social acculturation (i.e., people adapting to changing amenities in their city). Based on trait Openness scores of 1,946,752 U.S. residents, we track annual changes in local Openness across 199 cities for 9 years (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014). We link these data to annual information on local housing markets, an established proxy for local amenities. To test interdependencies between the time series of local housing markets and Openness, we use Panel Vector Autoregression modeling. In line with our hypothesis, we find robust evidence that rising housing costs predict positive shifts in local Openness but not vice versa. Additional analyses leveraging participants' duration of residence in their city suggest that both selective migration and social acculturation contribute to shifts in local Openness. Our study offers a new window onto the rapid changes of cultures at local levels. Public Significance StatementEconomic developments in countries prompt cultural changes that typically unfold over decades and centuries. Here, we investigate the possibility of more rapid cultural shifts in smaller entities, finding that housing market dynamics predict significant changes in city cultures within a few years. Our results highlight rising local amenities as a key driver of local cultures of Openness, which in turn affect a wide variety of political, economic, social, and health-related outcomes.

Regional intergroup bias

“…Maps of explicit (left) and implicit (right) regional intergroup biases, as reflected in the responses of Project Implicit visitors Note. Maps generated using distance-based weighting (Brenner, 2017;Ebert et al, 2021). Specifically, we used the most fine-grained geographical information available in the data (i.e., visitor's county of residence) and calculated a score for each geographical unit that is based on all observations in the data.…”

“…(Plant & Devine, 1998), based on the responses of N = 100,262 Project Implicit visitors. Maps were generated using the same distancebased weighting approach as in Figure 1 (Brenner, 2017;Ebert et al, 2021).…”

Cultural evolution of genetic heritability

“…For example, regional variation in the legalization of same sex marriage in the United States led to swift and substantial state-wide differences in implicit and explicit antigay bias (Ofosu, Chambers, Chen, & Hehman, 2019). Likewise, Götz et al (2021) showed that changing amenities in cities (measured by housing prices) lead to swift and substantial changes in city-level openness.…”

The psychology of cultural change: Introduction to the special issue.

“…Some of the articles in this special issue focus on the "What" of cultural change-documenting shifts in specific phenomena such as prejudice (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021), mental health (Infurna et al, 2021), individualism (Hamamura et al, 2021), social mobility (Chan et al, 2021), and religious beliefs and practices (Jackson et al, 2021). Other articles focus on the "Why"-testing theories regarding the causes of specific cultural changes, such as shifts over time in levels of individualism (Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021), or openness (Götz et al, 2021), or fertility (Rotella et al, 2021). Finally, the special issue includes articles that tackle the "How"-attempts to model and capture the broad processes involved in cultural change writ large.…”

“…These pieces capture a range of theoretical perspectives that have been brought to bear on how and why cultures change over time, including insights from evolutionary psychology (Jackson et al, 2021; Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021; Pan et al, 2021), behavioral ecology (Rotella et al, 2021), cultural evolution (Schaller & Muthukrishna, 2021), and socioecological psychology (Buttrick & Oishi, 2021). The special issue also highlights the diversity of methodological approaches in this emerging field ranging from computational modeling (Jung et al, 2021; Schaller & Muthukrishna, 2021; Pan et al, 2021), to machine learning (Sheetal & Savani, 2021; Stavrova et al, 2021), to time series analyses (Charlesworth & Banaji, 2021; Chan et al, 2021; Götz et al, 2021; Kusano & Kemmelmeier, 2021; Rotella et al, 2021).…”