Social axioms in 33 countries: good replicability at the individual but less so at the country level

In this article, we report on an attempt to replicate findings with social axioms. Participants from 33 countries (total N = 7,825) were given a 30-item questionnaire based on the work of Leung et al. Several different methods of factor analysis were used, and individual-level as well as the aggregated (nation-level) data were examined. The five-factor structure of social axioms did replicate at the individual level. At the country and world regions level of analysis, however, our findings differ from what has been reported previously. As before, the most pronounced arithmetic mean differences were obtained on Religiosity, with South East Asian region and Malaysia in particular scoring high and Western Europe, especially Spain, being low. Even though cross-cultural differences in Social Complexity were not pronounced, they are comparable in size with what has been reported for social attitudes. Differences between world regions on Social Cynicism, Fate Control, and Reward for Application were in-between those for Religiosity and Social Complexity. These results indicate that social axioms are useful constructs for cross-cultural comparisons