ArticleNature communications2023
Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Satisfaction with democracy predicts democratic behaviors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Kava consumption and the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Everyday norms have become more permissive over time and vary across cultures.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The chronospatial revolution in psychology.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- The immorality of too much money.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Sex differences in romantic love: an evolutionary perspective.Biology of sex differences · 2025Article
- Role of national regime ideology for predicting biodiversity outcomes.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Income and Sex Moderate the Association Between Population Density and Reproduction: A Multilevel Analysis of Life History Strategies Across 23 Nations.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Ecological Threats and Cultural Systems : Epidemics and Natural Disasters Do Not Predict Collectivism.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Bridging theory and data: A computational workflow for cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Association between the home-to-healthcare center distance and hearing aid abandonment among older adults.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cross-national analyses test hypotheses about the drivers of variation in national outcomes. However, since nations are connected in various ways, such as via spatial proximity and shared cultural ancestry, cross-national analyses often violate assumptions of non-independence, inflating false positive rates. Here, we show that, despite being recognised as an important statistical pitfall for over 200 years, cross-national research in economics and psychology still does not sufficiently account for non-independence. In a review of the 100 highest-cited cross-national studies of economic development and values, we find that controls for non-independence are rare. When studies do control for non-independence, our simulations suggest that most commonly used methods are insufficient for reducing false positives in non-independent data. In reanalyses of twelve previous cross-national correlations, half of the estimates are compatible with no association after controlling for non-independence using global proximity matrices. We urge social scientists to sufficiently control for non-independence in cross-national research.
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Registered trials
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