World peace survey results 2023
Today I’m releasing a dataset of responses to a world peace opinion survey. This survey solicited opinions on the feasability of world…
Today I’m releasing a dataset of responses to a world peace opinion survey. This survey solicited opinions on the feasability of world peace.
This data is in the public domain, on Kaggle.
My goal with this survey was to find out whether the abstract concept of world peace was one that people believed possible or practical, and, if so, how people thought it could be done.
Methodology
The survey defined world peace to mean “a cessation of all armed conflict between governments, measurable as zero annual wartime deaths. (Violent crime deaths would not be counted, and could still happen.)”
The survey consisted of five questions, phrased as follows:
What year were you born?
Do you identify as any of these? (If you had to pick just one)
In what country do you currently live?
Would you consider “world peace” desirable and/or attainable as a geopolitical goal in the present?
How might world peace possibly be achieved?
I shared the Google Form with these questions in three discord servers and in one substack open comment thread. I left the survey open to responses for five days, between 27 February and 3 March 2023.
Questions
Question 1 offered a dropdown of years ranging from 1900 to 2022. One person reported being born in 1900 — during data cleaning, this response was changed to a null (it would have made them the oldest person alive if true).
Question 2 offered a dropdown of several world religions. I listed these as:
Secular
Christian
Muslim
Jewish
Buddhist
Hindu
Taoist
Shinto
Sikh
Pagan
Atheist or Agnostic
Other/None of the above
Question 3 offered a freeform text field. During the data cleaning process, I converted these text responses to the corresponding ISO 3166 two-letter country code.
Question 4 was the first question to invoke the topic of world peace. The question was multiple choice, offering five possible responses:
It is desirable, but, in practice, unattainable.
It could be attainable, but should not be desirable as a present goal.
It is not practically attainable, nor would it even be desirable, presently.
It is both desirable as a goal, and it could practically be attained.
Not sure
Question 5 had space for any long answer that the respondent wished to write, on how they thought world peace might be achieved. Some responses were multiple sentences, while others were as short as “It will not be.” Nearly a quarter of respondents (23%) left it blank.
Responses
Overall, this survey received 44 participant responses. I bucketed the age responses by decade for the survey participant age distribution.
The ages of all respondents ranged from 16 to 63. The mean respondent age was 33 and the median respondent age was 30.
Feasability
Most respondents viewed world peace as a desirable outcome, although not as a practically achievable goal.
Only 7% percent of respondents said that world peace, although it could be achieved, should not be desirable as a geopolitical goal in the present.
Most of these minority respondents still responded to the final question, of how world peace might be achieved. It did not seem clear from these correspondences between Question 4 and Question 5 as to why this subset believed world peace should not be pursued. Future research might uncover additional details. Some survey respondents did remark on the possibility that if all life on earth were destroyed through some catastrophe, peace would necessarily result. However, such answers to Question 5 were not seen in the subset who believed world peace was attainable but not desirable.
With 73% of respondents agreeing that world peace is a desirable goal, regardless of its attainability, it seems that world peace as an ideal is not greatly in need of any elaborate sales pitch or public persuasion campaign. Most of the public (based on these limited results) seem to agree that world peace is a desirable outcome.
However, most respondents who agreed with the desirability of world peace (84%) also agreed that it is practicially unattainable.
Judging by these results alone, most people see world peace as desirable, although it’s also generally seen as an impossible-to-achieve goal.
Recomendations
I took the recommendations provided by respondents in answer to Question 5 and organized them into two columns, labelled “Strategies” and “Impediments”.
This required some summarization of the answers to remove extraneous exposition. I combined some of the answers sharing themes or phrases into single entries. That integration process produced the same number of records in the Strategies column (positive recommendations) as in the Impediments column (negative recommendations). This pivot data is included on kaggle as well.
I considered a response a “strategy” and a positive recommendation if it suggested an action that could be undertaken in the pursuit of world peace. Similarly, I considered a response an “impediment” and a negative recommendation if it suggested a roadblock that stands in the way of achieving world peace.
Some responses suggested more than one strategy. If these ideas were different enough, I separated the suggestion into multiple strategies. Each summarized strategy preserves the wording of the original response as closely as possible (but compare the pivot spreadsheet to the response spreadsheet for the precise differences). Below are the positive strategies summarized from the responses to Question 5:
Make everyone too impoverished to fight
Single world government (global constitution, strong enforcement, global governing body with power to reign in superpowers)
Common extraterrestrial enemy
Deeper understanding of how aligned systems work (immunology as an example)
Universal abundance
Proliferation of doomsday weapons
Broader intentions towards world peace
Free, accessible education
Existing global superpowers must sacrifice their ambitions
Make nations wealthier
Make war more ruinous
Make land less important for nation-building
Libertarian communism
Incentivize people to work together instead of against one another
Increased world federalization (think regional unions like the EU, or defensive alliances with an emphasis on cooperation like NATO)
International trade agreements and economics, making war too costly
Advances in physical and societal technology
Substitute tribal fightings for less destructive trivia, like sports competitions
The negative impediments that respondents gave could be just as interesting as the positive strategies. Even respondents who believed world peace impossible provided value to this dataset by explaining what they see standing in the way of world peace.
Once again, some responses provided more than one suggestion. If the ideas were different enough, they were separated into different summaries, preserving as much as possible the original wording. Responses with shared words or themes were combined into single entries. Below are the summaries of responses that were categorized as negative recommendations, or impediments, to world peace:
Life on earth
Low intelligence
Psychopathic traits
Genetic disease
Genetic predisposition for violence
Tribalism
Global poverty
Countries viewing war as more beneficial than costly
Scarce resources
Hierarchical power structures
Being caught up in identity and narrative
Petty differences and small perceptions
Extreme divergences of diverse sets of cultures, ideas, and individual morals around the world
Private property and capital
Any government
Incompetent people, especially in high positions
Deep-seated ethnic and religious hatreds
Desire for hegemony and control
Future research
The responses in this data skewed heavily toward an American perspective, with 70% of respondents identifying as residing in the United States, and 75% residing in North America. Future polling would benefit from a more comopolitan sampling, so that the opinions of more countries’ residents could be analyzed.
Additionally, the percentage of respondents who identified as atheist or agnostic far exceeded the percentage found in a random sampling of the general population. On the other hand, there were zero respondents who identified as Muslim, Hindu, Taoist, Shinto, Sikh, or Pagan. A more representative sampling would have a wider range of religious viewpoints included.
It would be illustrative to find correspondences between religious beliefs and views on world peace. This survey’s sample was not large enough to representation these differences adequately.
Future research would benefit from a larger number of data points that represent more nationalities and religious identites.
Conclusions
World peace is a topic in need of additional study. If there can be any hope for achieving world peace, now or in the far future, it would depend on refining the meaning of world peace for individuals and for international organizations.
I hope that by releasing the dataset of these survey responses into the public domain, more researchers will be inspired to take on further investigations of this crucial topic.