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Competing ecological explanations of collectivism in Russia
Recent theoretical developments in ecological approaches to culture challenge the prevailing East–West framing of cultural variation by emphasizing a north–south axis linked to local habitat stability and climatic demands. Building on Van de Vliert et al.’s (2025) ecological analysis, we replicate their preliminary tests across 83 Russian regions and add focused analyses to clarify the main results using a newly developed regional index aligned with the Global Collectivism Index. Habitat stability—operationalized as smaller within-year contrasts in day length, thermal extremes, and precipitation—emerges as a robust predictor of regional collectivism. Pathogen prevalence, a competing ecological predictor, shows no comparable association with collectivism. Agricultural subsistence may serve as one plausible proximate channel linking habitat stability to collectivist practices. We also replicate climato-economic moderation: the associations of cold and heat stress with collectivism change sign across the regional wealth distribution. Because both are indexed as departures from the same 22 °C livability optimum, their associations are theoretically symmetric and opposite in sign. In Russia, climato-economic associations are plausibly interpreted through wealth-indexed thermal buffering capacity—the extent to which infrastructure and institutions attenuate experienced thermal demands. Taken together, these results are consistent with a systems-theoretical interpretation in which habitat stability functions as a slow-moving ecological baseline linked to higher collectivism, whereas thermal-stress associations with collectivism are conditional on regional wealth and reverse along the wealth gradient. Russia’s case illustrates that despite radical institutional change, long-run ecological structures remain spatially aligned with region-level orientations toward interdependence as expressed in collectivist practices.