Although most knowledge is communicated and stored in writing today, the oral tradition takes precedent with it’s longer history and wider reach. Storytelling is a fundamental mode of communication: they’re easy to remember and understand. Parents teach values to kids through storytelling. The classic tale of the knight saving a princess from the dragon exemplifies bravery as a desireable trait. The stories we tell our kids can reflect what we value.
On a larger scale, stories passed down generationally reflect the values of a society. Here, I explore the relationship between a culture’s stories and its values. For data on stories, I use folktale data scraped by Andrzej Panczenko (avaliable here, accessed October 2022), which contains 2,838 folktales from 57 nations. The drawbacks of using a dataset for folktales should be noted: English translations are used for other languages; stories are told and retold, but are only recorded once here; the popularity/importance of each story is not considered; and the stories that are included might be of different types (are English folktales about Jack and Jill comparable to Chinese epics retold for children, like the Monkey King?) For data on cultural values, I use Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions: power distance index, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance index, and long-term orientation. I downloaded the data here. A future study might consider using laws to analyze cultural values. However, because of colonization and Western influence, current laws might not be an accurate representation of cultural values.