Institutional particularism reverses the sign of frequency-dependent selection on beliefs about effort in 66 societies

In the vast landscape of human behavior, few questions are as persistent as why some people believe hard work is the surest path to success, while others are convinced that luck and connections matter far more. This belief is not just a matter of opinion; it shapes how people live, how they vote, and how they treat one another. For decades, economists and social scientists have tried to explain why these beliefs vary so wildly from country to country. A popular theory suggested that these beliefs are self-reinforcing: if enough people believe in hard work, the system rewards it, making the belief true for everyone. This creates a "trap" where a society gets stuck in one of two states—either everyone believes in merit, or no one does—and changing that state requires a massive, sudden push.

However, a new study challenges this simple picture. The research asks a fundamental question: does the value of believing in hard work actually go up when more people believe it, or does it go down? To answer this, the researchers treated these beliefs not as abstract ideas, but as practical strategies people use to get ahead. In some places, people invest their energy in building skills and following rules. In others, they invest their energy in building relationships and navigating personal connections. The study investigates how the success of these two strategies changes depending on how many people are using them, and how the rules of the society itself—specifically, whether the system is run by fair rules or by personal favors—alter the outcome.

The study, analyzing data from nearly 92,000 people across 66 different societies, reveals that the answer depends entirely on the type of institution a country has. In societies where rules are applied fairly and equally to everyone, the old theory holds true. Here, believing in hard work is a "strategic complement." This means that the more people who play by the rules and build skills, the more valuable that strategy becomes for everyone else. It creates a system where success reinforces success. But in societies where access to jobs and services depends heavily on personal connections, the dynamic flips completely. In these places, believing in hard work becomes a "strategic substitute." The more people who try to work hard and follow the rules, the less successful they become, because the system is designed to extract value from them by those with connections.

The researchers found that this shift is not random; it is determined by a specific measure of how much a society relies on personal favors over impersonal rules. When this reliance is low, the system behaves like a coordination game with two possible stable outcomes: a society where everyone believes in merit, or a society where no one does. But when the reliance on personal favors is high, the system behaves differently. Instead of getting stuck in one extreme, the population naturally settles into a stable mix where both strategies coexist. In these environments, the belief that "connections matter" is not a trap that needs to be broken; it is a stable equilibrium that the system constantly returns to, no matter how many people try to push for a different outcome.

To reach these conclusions, the researchers used a clever method to look at cause and effect without needing a long-term experiment. They treated the belief in hard work as a choice, similar to a biological trait that spreads through imitation. If people see others succeeding with a certain approach, they copy it. The researchers measured the "fitness" of each approach by looking at the income levels of people who held those beliefs. They found that in countries with low levels of favoritism, people who believed in hard work were indeed richer, and this advantage grew as more people shared that belief. In countries with high levels of favoritism, however, the advantage flipped: those who believed in hard work were often poorer, and their relative success actually declined as more people tried to follow that path.

The study analyzed data from the World Values Survey, a massive global project that asks people about their values and life circumstances. By breaking down the data country by country, the researchers could see that the relationship between belief and success was not the same everywhere. In places like New Zealand, Germany, and Singapore, the data showed a clear positive link: the more people believed in hard work, the more it paid off. In countries like India, Pakistan, and Lebanon, the link was negative or non-existent. When the researchers combined these findings with a measure of how much corruption and favoritism existed in each country, a clear pattern emerged. The more a society relied on personal connections, the more the reward for believing in hard work turned negative.

This discovery changes how we understand the persistence of these beliefs. In rule-based societies, a society can get stuck in a "bad" equilibrium where no one believes in hard work, and it takes a huge, disruptive change to shift everyone to the "good" equilibrium where they do. But in connection-based societies, the system is not stuck in a trap; it is simply balanced in a different way. Trying to force a shift in belief in these places is often futile because the structure of the society pushes people back to the middle ground. The only way to change the outcome in these societies is to change the rules of the game itself—reducing the power of personal connections so that hard work becomes a viable strategy again.

The researchers were careful to rule out other explanations. They tested whether the results were just a fluke of the data or caused by how the survey was asked. They split the data in different ways, removed various controls, and even used different measures of success, such as life satisfaction versus income. The core finding remained robust: the relationship between belief and success reverses sign depending on the level of institutional favoritism. They also examined whether the patterns could be explained by statistical noise in how different age groups were sampled. They found that while raw data from age cohorts appeared to show a specific type of evolutionary change, this was actually an illusion created by sampling error. Once corrected, the data showed no evidence of that specific evolutionary mechanism, confirming that the main findings about belief and success were real and not an artifact of the data collection method.

Ultimately, the study suggests that there is no single recipe for changing how a society thinks about success. In some places, the problem is a lack of trust in the system, and the solution is a massive push to rebuild that trust. In others, the problem is the system itself, and the solution is to dismantle the networks of favoritism that make hard work a losing strategy. The belief that effort brings success is not a universal truth or a universal lie; it is a reflection of the environment in which people live. When the environment rewards the rules, the belief thrives. When the environment rewards the connections, the belief fades. Understanding which environment a society is in is the first step toward knowing how to change it.