Conferences

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 dataset and we analyze its determinants in a cross-country model taking into account both individual characteristics and country effects.

Our models show that misanthropy could be explained by some socio-demographic and economic individuals´ characteristics. For instance, being a woman, education and being married are characteristics that lessen misanthropy while being young; having a low income, being divorced or being self-employed have the opposite effect.

Moreover, in order to capture fix effects, we include dummies per country of residence and most of them result significant in determining misanthropy. This last result indicates that not only individual characteristics matter but also some factors regarding context also play a significant role. Hence, we estimate two additional models including Gross Domestic Product per capita and GINI index. We find that better economic performance reduces misanthropy while inequality hikes it. Finally, we show that there is a strong relationship among our misanthropy ranking (trust in other people) and two corruption perception rankings (trust in public institutions).