Sources

Where the information comes from

Every tool on this site shows its sources. This page gathers them in one place, with plain notes on how much weight each one can bear.

Culture Map Plotter

This tool is inspired by Erin Meyer's book The Culture Map (PublicAffairs, 2014). It is an independent tool and is not made, endorsed or reviewed by Erin Meyer. Her country scores are not public, so this tool does not contain her data. Starting positions are estimates built from the published studies below.

Hofstede country scores

Power distance, individualism and uncertainty avoidance, from the VSM 2010 table in the public plotly/datasets repository on GitHub. Several Arab countries (Bahrain, Libya, the UAE) use an Arab-countries regional average, not their own scores. Hofstede's organization restricts commercial reuse of these scores, which is one reason this site stays non-commercial.

Schwartz cultural value orientations

Hierarchy, egalitarianism, embeddedness, harmony and intellectual autonomy, 84 samples. Source: Shalom H. Schwartz's research, taken from the wwmetrics R package data on GitHub.

Gelfand and colleagues (2011)

Tightness and looseness across 33 nations. Gelfand, M. J., et al. (2011). Differences between tight and loose cultures: A 33-nation study. Science, 332, 1100-1104. Values were checked against Table 1 of the paper. Germany averages the former East (7.5) and West (6.5) samples.

Levine and Norenzayan (1999)

Pace of life in 31 countries. Levine, R. V., & Norenzayan, A. (1999). The pace of life in 31 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30(2), 178-205.

Hall (1976)

The ordering of cultures from high to low context follows Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (1976), as reproduced in a published critique of Hall's model. These are coarse group ranks applied by country grouping.

Hofstede current country scores

For Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon (and for Kuwait alongside its GLOBE data), power distance, individualism and uncertainty avoidance come from Hofstede's current country scores as published by The Culture Factor (theculturefactor.com, country comparison tool, accessed October 2026), which permits non-commercial use. These scores follow Hofstede's newer model, and individualism in particular differs from the VSM 2010 table for some countries, so the two sets are not perfectly comparable. How the Armenia score was derived is not stated on that page, so it may be an estimate. Georgia also draws on Schwartz and GLOBE data. Azerbaijan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, and Armenia, rest on these three measures alone, so their dots are marked low confidence.

World Values Survey

Trust items from wave 7 (2017 to 2022): the share saying most people can be trusted, and the gap between trusting people you know personally and people you meet for the first time. They are used only as an extra measure for Trusting where a country has few other measures, such as Armenia, Iraq and Lebanon. Haerpfer, C., Inglehart, R., Moreno, A., Welzel, C., Kizilova, K., Diez-Medrano, J., Lagos, M., Norris, P., Ponarin, E., & Puranen, B. (Eds.). (2022). World Values Survey: Round Seven, country-pooled datafile, version 6.0. JD Systems Institute & WVSA Secretariat. doi.org/10.14281/18241.24. Items on respect for authority and support for a strong leader were tried and left out, because the first reads very differently across languages (in Japan and Taiwan most respondents call it a bad thing) and the second measures political, not workplace, attitudes.

GLOBE study

Societal practices for assertiveness, in-group collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and future orientation, plus culturally endorsed leadership styles (face-saver, participative, autocratic, status-conscious), for 59 societies. House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Sage. Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco were averaged to improve the Arab regional estimate. Kuwait and Qatar have their own entries with fewer measures behind them.

Income per person

World Happiness Report data from the same R package, used only as a minor input for the Scheduling scale.

Corrections

Found a better number? The correction form on the tool page prepares an email with the country, scale and your source. Corrections are checked by hand and need a source that can be verified. If you would rather share your own experience of a culture, the improvement survey takes about five minutes.

How reliable are the scales?

Leading and Trusting rest on several well-matched measures (high confidence). Communicating, Deciding and Scheduling are medium. Evaluating and Disagreeing rest on indirect proxies and are low confidence, so the tool pulls them toward the middle. Hover over a dot in the tool to see the range behind it.

Known limits

Erin Meyer's eighth scale, Persuading (principles-first or applications-first), is not included. The measures available to estimate it were too weak to publish responsibly. It may return if better data turns up.
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon have only a few measures behind them, and Armenia's score is of unclear origin. Place them by your own experience where you can. Armenia also has no Scheduling estimate.
Japan appears lower on the high-context scale than most writers on culture would place it. The measures used capture it imperfectly.
These are generalizations about national cultures, not about individuals. Every person is more than their country.

How to cite

pakit2ools. (2026). Culture Map Plotter [Web tool]. pakit2ools.com/tools/culture-map-plotter/. Starting values estimated from Hofstede, Schwartz, GLOBE, World Values Survey, Gelfand et al., Levine & Norenzayan, and Hall.