Individual Attitudes Towards Others, Misanthropy Analysis in a Cross-Country Perspective

In general, misanthropy has been analyzed taking into account residents of one country and just comparing results. Instead of doing that, we employ 2004 International Social Survey Program and analyze its determinants in a cross-country model taking into account both individual characteristics and country effects. Our model shows, as expected, that misanthropy could be explained by some sociodemographic and economic individual characteristics. For instance, being a woman, having a university degree, being married lowers misanthropy while being young; having a low income, having no political preferences, being self-employed makes people more misanthropic. Moreover, in order to capture fix effects, we included (dummies) variables per country of residence and almost all of them result significant in determining misanthropy. This last result indicates that not only individual characteristics matters but also some factors regarding context also play a significant role. Finally, we show that there is a strong relationship among our misanthropy ranking of countries and two corruption perception rankings.