Altruism based on individual values is changing Western society. People in Western countries have seen a rise in individualism for quite some time, and this in turn helps to create generations of people with altruistic mindsets. Christian Welzel, Chief Research Fellow in the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (HSE and Leuphana University of Lüneburg), teamed up with researchers from the University of Lausanne to conduct a study showing the connection between emancipative values and prosocial behaviour. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.

Societal values have a strong influence on young people’s reproductive habits.

Despite the recent arrival of new domesic brands in the clothing market, many Russians remain loyal to imports. However, using foreign-sounding brand names does not help Russian companies, according to Natalia Antonova, Associate Professor of the Department of Organizational Psychology and Head of the Psychology of Consumer Behavior Research and Study Group, and students of the HSE Department of Organizational Psychology Ajay Kumar, Maria Soloreva and Veronika Morozova, members of the Study Group.

In Central Asia, subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction tend to be higher than objective wellbeing, and people in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan appear to be more content than Russians about their material circumstances and life in general. According to Tatiana Karabchuk, Deputy Head of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), and Daria Salnikova, Research Assistant of the same laboratory, relatively low levels of economic inequality in Central Asian countries may be one of the reasons for this paradox.

In many countries, including but not limited to Russia, frontier regions, populated more recently than the country's core territory, tend to lag behind in terms of socio-economic development. This phenomenon can be explained by legacies such as state formation in remote regions and the autonomy traditionally enjoyed by new settlers, according to Roberto Foa (Harvard University) and Anna Nemirovskaya, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR).

Factors which determine consumer preferences for certain brands are not limited just to income, age and social status; other important considerations are the brand's ‘personality’ and whether it fits with that of the consumer, according to Natalia Antonova, Associate Professor of the Department of Organizational Psychology and Head of the Psychology of Consumer Behavior Research and Study Group, and Veronika Morozova, member of the Group.

While being single or married does not usually make much difference in terms of life satisfaction for younger people, single individuals tend to feel less happy as they age, particularly at certain moments of their lives, and most single people experience a peak of unhappiness once they retire, according to Anna Shirokanova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research in St. Petersburg.

The likelihood of being denied a visa depends on the quality of institutions in the applicant's country – such as public administration, corruption response, rule of law, and prevalent norms and values. The same factors play a role in whether residents of a particular country are likely to be granted visa-free entry, according to the study 'Institutions and Visa Regimes' by HSE researchers Kamila Gracheva, Leonid Polischuk, Alexander Yarkin, and Kong Schoors from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

In the near future, the number of migrants from Central Asia coming to work in Russia will increase – particularly from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, countries where remittances from their citizens working in Russia stand at almost half of their respective GDPs, according to a joint study by the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).

Companies with decentralized management systems are, on average, more effective than firms where the CEO tries to control everything. The risk of centralization is higher if the company is managed by families. These were the main findings of the recent research by Irina Levina, research fellow at the HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies.

The lower a person's resilience, the greater their alienation from themself, other people, and society. In turn, self-alienation and a lack of personal relationships can cause one to approve of military action as a solution to international conflicts, according to Olga Gulevich, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Psychology, and Andrey Nevruyev, postgraduate student of the same department.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, virtually none of the post-communist countries have attained the level of socioeconomic development characteristic of advanced democracies. Likewise, none of the post-communist countries have emerged as successful autocracies with high-quality public institutions, such as those found in Singapore or Oman. Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, and Mikhail Mironyuk, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Political Science, examine possible reasons why it is so.