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Research on how socioeconomic status (SES) and gender interact to affect student achievement has produced contradictory findings. Some studies suggest boys are more vulnerable to socioeconomic disadvantage; others find the opposite. This paper argues that these conflicting results stem from a methodological artifact: because boys report their parents’ education less accurately than girls do, the source of parental education data in large-scale assessments fundamentally shapes estimates of the SES–gender interaction. PISA 2006 and 2009 provide data on 151,269 fifteen-year-old students from 20 countries for whom both parent-reported and student-reported parental education were available. This within-subject design allowed a direct comparison of the parental-education–gender interaction in mathematics achievement, isolating the effect of the data source. The direction of the interaction systematically reverses depending on the data source. When using reliable parent-reported data, the parental-education gradient is steeper for boys in the majority of country-waves (18 of 31), consistent with the “vulnerable boys” hypothesis. In 12 of those 18 cases, the results reverse to indicate “vulnerable girls” when using the more commonly available student-reported proxy data. A sign test confirmed that the interaction estimate was more negative with student data in 28 of 31 country-waves (p < 0.001). The choice of data source is not a minor technical detail but a factor that can reverse conclusions about educational equity.

Researchers sometimes use profile correlations to quantify how similar partners' personality profiles are across multiple dimensions, arguing that these correlations capture a holistic 'shape' similarity that cannot be reduced to dimension-level comparisons. In this paper we subject this claim to a critical examination through theoretical analysis and empirical study. We argue that what profile correlations capture is better captured by score products summed across dimensions. As the latter decomposes fully by dimension, there is no holistic quality to be captured. These insights also allow us to explain how profile correlations can increase over time years as an artifact of parallel change, which leaves couples' similarity unchanged but increases their score products. An empirical analysis of 1,632 heterosexual couples from the Australian HILDA survey confirms our theoretical analysis. We conclude that profile correlations do not capture any irreducible holistic property of personality similarity and recommend researchers to conduct dimension-level analysis, which may include polynomial terms such as score products where theoretically motivated.

Behavioural norms vary across cultures, and they vary in distinct ways for different behaviours. We show that this variation is not random but highly predictable. We introduce the Moral Flavours Model, a theory proposing that norms emerge from three factors: how much moral concern a behaviour evokes overall, its 'moral flavour' (the type of concern it evokes), and societies' 'moral tastes' (their sensitivity to different types of concern). We demonstrate that this simple framework predicts 76% of the variance in moral norms across 19 morally contentious behaviours in 42 societies, and 88% of the variance in everyday norms across 150 situated behaviours in 90 societies. Remarkably, the same societal tastes predict both profound moral issues (like euthanasia) and mundane behaviours (e.g. whether it is okay to sing on a bus). These fundamental tastes therefore have the potential to predict a society's entire normative landscape. By establishing a high-performance, quantitative theory of cultural variation, this work provides both a powerful predictive tool and new insights into how culture shapes human judgement.

What determines differences in student achievement? Obvious candidates include individual differences in learning abilities and educational contexts at multiple levels: countries, schools, and classrooms. A fundamental developmental question is whether the relative importance of these factors changes as students mature. We develop and test competing hypotheses: some predict amplification of system-level advantages over time, while others emphasize increasing individual differentiation and institutional sorting. Using a cross-sectional cohort design across three TIMSS cohorts (2011−2023), we compare achievement variance structures in Grade 4 and Grade 8 across dozens of countries. We find a systematic reallocation of achievement variance: the proportion attributable to countries decreases substantially, while the proportion attributable to classes increases consistently—a pattern uniquely predicted by our integrated Individual Differences framework. In a second analysis, we use students' relative standing within their country as a proxy for individual learning characteristics. A formal model predicts that if country-level variance decreases relative to individual-level variance, the slope relating individual characteristics to system quality should be shallower in Grade 8 than Grade 4. We confirm this prediction: students in weaker systems need a smaller compensatory advantage in individual characteristics to reach a given achievement level in Grade 8 than in Grade 4. Both analyses converge on the same conclusion: individual characteristics become increasingly important as students mature. These findings challenge assumptions of straightforward compounding of system-level advantages and illuminate a complex interplay between individual development and educational differentiation.

Introduction: While corruption exists in both democracies and autocracies, its social consequences may differ fundamentally across regime types. Democratic norms of equality and impartiality make trust highly sensitive to institutional failure. We theorize two mechanisms-normative amplification and representative contagion-by which corruption erodes trust more in democracies. In democracies, corruption violates core fairness norms and implicates the citizenry that elected corrupt officials. In autocracies, corruption is expected and elites are seen as separate from ordinary citizens. Methods: To test this theory, we perform multilevel analysis of data from 62 countries combining individual-level survey responses with country-level democratic quality indicators. Results: We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals. We then show this individual-level psychological mechanism is considerably stronger in democracies than in autocracies, even controlling for inequality and country-level corruption. Discussion: These findings reveal an asymmetric vulnerability: the accountability structures that make democracies function also make their social capital fragile. This has important implications for understanding democratic resilience, as corruption threatens the social trust necessary for democratic cooperation differently across regime types.

Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a major global public health problem. Social norms that accept IPVAW are a key correlate of its prevalence, and recent research has documented a widespread, long-term global decline in such acceptability. What societal changes underlie this normative shift and whether it is associated with a reduction in violence are not yet well understood. We analyzed Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from 1999-2024, including responses from 1,920,105 women across 69 countries and 539,470 men across 60 countries. We calculated the annualized rate of change between the first and last available survey waves for each country. We tested the association between these country-level trends and longitudinal changes in the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gender Development Index (GDI) at a 4-year lag. We also examined whether trends in acceptability were correlated with trends in the reported prevalence of physical IPVAW. Acceptability of IPVAW declined in 94% of countries for women and 89% for men, with a mean annual decline of approximately 1.3 percentage points. Countries with faster increases in HDI tended to show faster declines in acceptability at a 4-year lag (women: r = -0.33; men: r = -0.54). Overall societal development (HDI) showed somewhat stronger associations with declining acceptability than gender-specific equity gains (GDI). Finally, countries with faster declines in acceptability tended to show faster reductions in physical IPVAW prevalence (r = 0.35). This study provides the first cross-national evidence that improvements in human development are associated with a global decline in the acceptability of IPVAW, and that this normative shift corresponds with reductions in experienced violence. These findings are consistent with a role for comprehensive development investments in education, health, and economic prosperity, though the design cannot establish that such investments cause reductions in violence against women.

We examine the effects of a year-long national-scale professional development (PD) program on mathematics instructional quality. In contrast to previous studies examining the effects of this program on instruction by comparing before and after participation or participants and non-participants, we examine whether instructional quality changed during the program. More specifically, we conduct an analysis of 174 video-recorded mathematics lessons given by 52 teachers during their year of participation. Contrary to previous studies, the results demonstrate that the instructional quality did not improve over the course of the PD. We suggest that the explanations for the diverging results concern how, when, and to what extent instructional quality changes in PD programs. Specifically, we discuss how the explanations may illuminate the significance of PD duration for PD effects, and how these effects may be mediated by features concerning the PD content and the scale at which the program is implemented.

Every social situation that people encounter in their daily lives comes with a set of unwritten rules about what behavior is considered appropriate or inappropriate. These everyday norms can vary across societies: some societies may have more permissive norms in general or for certain behaviors, or for certain behaviors in specific situations. In a preregistered survey of 25,422 participants across 90 societies, we map societal differences in 150 everyday norms and show that they can be explained by how societies prioritize individualizing moral foundations such as care and liberty versus binding moral foundations such as purity. Specifically, societies with more individualistic morality tend to have more permissive norms in general (greater liberty) and especially for behaviors deemed vulgar (less purity), but they exhibit less permissive norms for behaviors perceived to have negative consequences in specific situations (greater care). By comparing our data with available data collected twenty years ago, we find a global pattern of change toward more permissive norms overall but less permissive norms for the most vulgar and inconsiderate behaviors. This study explains how social norms vary across behaviors, situations, societies, and time.

How and why are moral norms for various issues changing across the globe? Moral argument theory uniquely addresses these questions by positing that moral norm change is driven by 'individualizing' arguments: concerns about harm, fairness and liberty. We test this theory in a preregistered study of the arguments for both sides of 33 moral issues for which the global directions and rates of norm change were estimated in available longitudinal survey data from 94 societies. We also use available cross-national data to estimate the extent to which each society relies more on individualizing arguments than other kinds of arguments. In support of the theory, norms' justifiability by individualizing arguments was found to predict their global change, and the effect of individualizing arguments on norm change is stronger in societies that rely more strongly on such arguments. These findings demonstrate a fundamental pattern in the contemporary cultural evolution of morality and highlights the key role played by individualizing arguments.

Conservative thinkers have long warned that the welfare state may weaken society's moral fiber. But this claim has not been empirically examined. The authors link publicly available data on the sizes of welfare states with behavioral data from a recent study in which thousands of lost wallets were distributed in 40 countries to measure how often they were returned to their owners. A preregistered study (n = 194) confirmed that U.S. Republicans perceive returning lost wallets as a good indicator of moral character and believe that people's moral character is worse in countries where the welfare state is larger. Contrary to this belief, the linked data indicate a strong positive relationship between the size of welfare states and moral character: rates of returned wallets were higher in countries with historically large welfare states, net of economic prosperity and economic inequality. The authors conclude with tentative implications and suggestions for further work.