This article presents evidence for a rising emancipatory spirit, across generations and around the world, in a life domain in which traditional family, fertility and sex (FFS) norms have been most resistant to emancipatory gains since the ages: reproductive freedoms. We propose an explanation of...

This paper discusses correlations between certain genetic characterestics of the human populations and their aggregate levels of tolerance and happiness. We argue that a major cause of the systematic clustering of genetic characteristics may be climatic conditions linked with relatively high or...

This article presents a new theory of development that unifies disparate insights into a single framework, focusing on human empowerment — a process that emancipates people from domination. Human empowerment sets in when mass-scale technological progress widens ordinary people’s ‘action...

This article demonstrates that inter-state peace is underpinned by an increasingly solid mass basis: representative survey data from around the world evidence a massive decline in people’s willingness to sacrifice their lives in war. To explain this finding, we test and confirm Welzel’s...

This article analyzes the decline of subjective well-being and a sense of national self-esteem among the Russian people that was linked with the collapse of the communist economic, political and social systems in the 1990s — and a subsequent recovery of subjective well-being that began more...

This study provides new evidence on the impact of historic household formation patterns on present day levels of social capital (SC). We distinguish effects on bonding and bridging social capital, of which only the latter is beneficial for a society as a whole. Our results challenge the view...