FEW TOPICS appear to rile people in the West as much as political correctness and its impact upon free speech. Although some on the left would like to see more laws governing what is, and is not, acceptable to say in public, most people prefer simply to avoid what they consider hurtful language. Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to complain that this tendency has gone too far and endangers the principle of free speech.
More than half of respondents in America, Australia, Britain and Sweden rated themselves between zero and three , meaning they were the most likely to feel that the general public are too sensitive when it comes to speech. At the other end of the scale, Chinese, Indians and Turks were the least likely to say people were being too sensitive—fewer than one-fifth of the people from these countries responded with a scale of zero to three—instead believing it was necessary to modify their language.
What affects these attitudes across countries? Using an index of press freedom from Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog, we found a strong correlation between the extent of press freedom and individual attitudes towards language. Although people living in places with less press freedom are most receptive to what the Anglosphere would call “political correctness”, it may be that, in countries such as China, cautious use of language is required for self-preservation.
The survey also asked respondents whether or not they agreed that “culture wars” were dividing their countries. Americans and Indians were among the most likely to say that they were, with about three-fifths agreeing. By contrast, fewer than one-tenth of Japanese and one-fifth of Russians and Germans thought that culture wars were divisive. Yet country-level responses to this question bear little relationship to their attitudes about offensive speech.
the authors of the study chose to measure the correlation between political correctness and freedom of the press. But the primary correlation appears to be with liberal democracy and free market economies. Freedom of the press is a feature of liberal democracy.
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