The Culture of Cities: Measuring Perceived Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Cities like New York and San Francisco have a different feel than cities like Newark and Columbus. But can these differences be captured quantitatively? We argue these places vary along the dimension of cosmopolitanism, that is, the extent to which they offer economic opportunities and emphasize diversity, creativity, and egalitarianism. We present a Cosmopolitan City Scale (CCS) designed to assess perceived cosmopolitanism. The CCS has high internal reliability and correlates with objective indicators of cosmopolitanism such as intergenerational mobility and number of patents generated (Study 1). Consistent with the notion that people with an independent orientation migrate to cosmopolitan places, independence was associated with preference for cosmopolitan cities as measured by our scale (Study 2). High openness to experience, high extraversion, liberalism, high socioeconomic status, and single marital status were also related to greater preference for cosmopolitan cities. We believe the CCS provides a new tool for understanding how cities differ and helps clarify factors that drive migration preferences. We also discuss implications of cosmopolitanism for cultural processes such as acculturation and intergroup relations.

Ongoing Voluntary Settlement and Independent Agency: Evidence from China

“…Initially, we used several indicators to select a counterpart city: population size, economic indicators such as GDP per capita, contact with Western culture, and the cosmopolitan index (Sevincer et al, 2015, 2017). Based on this, we created a list of candidate cities.…”

“…It should be kept in mind that it is impossible to find a perfect counterpart city—a city that is similar on all potential confounding factors but is not a frontier like Shenzhen. Initially, we used several indicators to select a counterpart city: population size, economic indicators such as GDP per capita, contact with Western culture, and the cosmopolitan index ( Sevincer et al, 2015 , 2017 ). Based on this, we created a list of candidate cities.…”

Risky Business: Cosmopolitan Culture and Risk-Taking

“…Fourth, cosmopolitan cities endorse equality. Such cities tend to have policies and norms intended to promote equality and reduce discrimination (Appiah, 2006;Sevincer et al, 2017).…”

“…Perceived cosmopolitanism. We used data from Sevincer et al (2017) on the rated cosmopolitanism of the various cities. Sevincer et al (2017) presented participants from the U.S. with the biggest U.S. cities and asked them rate the perceived cosmopolitanism of each city using the Cosmopolitan City Scale (CCS).…”

“…Study 2a investigated whether people high in trait risk-taking as measured by the General Risk Aversion Scale (GRA; Mandrik & Bao, 2005) prefer moving to cities that are more cosmopolitan. To measure preference for cosmopolitan cities, we used a scenario method by Sevincer et al (2017). Because greater preference for cosmopolitan cities is related to higher socioeconomic status (SES; Sevincer et al, 2017) and because people may prefer moving to cities that are similar to the city where they currently live, following Sevincer et al (2015), we controlled for participants' SES 2 and the cosmopolitanism of their current city.…”