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...

The paper examines the structures and dimensions of four value concepts included in the most recent German World Values Survey (WVS 2006). These value concepts are Inglehart's postmaterialism concept, a reduced version of the Schwartz Value Inventory (SVI), the concept of value synthesis by...

"Large-N cross-national surveys can provide insight into human behavior that is otherwise unobtainable. They make it possible to perform empirical analyses of cross-level linkages, testing such questions as: "Are specific individual-level beliefs conducive to the emergence and flourishing of...

Over the 1990-2000 decade happiness in China plummeted despite massive improvement in material living standards. This finding contradicts the notion that income growth at low living standards leads to gains, not losses, in happiness. We explain this puzzle by drawing on a specific version of...

A revised version of modernization theory implies that certain cultural variables (deeply-instilled attitudes among the public of a society) play an important role in democratization — and considerable empirical evidence supports this claim. Nevertheless, these variables are rarely used in...

Trust in other people is general when it includes remote and dissimilar others (i.e., out-groups). But whether trust in outgroups can be created independently of trust in in-groups is controversial, and conclusive evidence has been unavailable so far. This article fills this gap, analyzing under...

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...