Scholars interested in cultural diversity have long suggested that similarities and differences across human populations might be understood, at least in part, as stemming from differences in the social and physical ecologies individuals inhabit. Here, we describe the EcoCultural Dataset (ECD), the most comprehensive compilation to date of country-level ecological and cultural variables around the globe. ECD covers 220 countries, 9 ecological variables operationalized by 11 statistical metrics (including measures of variability and predictability), and 72 cultural variables (including values, personality traits, fundamental social motives, subjective well-being, tightness-looseness, indices of corruption, social capital, and gender inequality). This rich dataset can be used to identify novel relationships between ecological and cultural variables, to assess the overall relationship between ecology and culture, to explore the consequences of interactions between different ecological variables, and to construct new indices of cultural distance. Note: The full dataset with 72 cultural variables is available on OSF (https://osf.io/45am7/). This is the abbreviated version (66 cultural variables).

R files are included to describe data processing and analyses conducted within Wormley, A. S., Kwon, J. Y., Barlev, M., & Varnum, M. E. W. How much cultural variation is explained by ecology?Funding provided by: National Science FoundationCrossref Funder Registry ID: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001Award Number: Graduate Research Fellowship

For full details on the data processing, please see Wormley, A. S., Kwon, J. Y., Barlev, M., & Varnum, M. E. W. (2022). The Ecology-Culture Dataset: A new resource for investigating cultural variation. Scientific Data, 9(1), 615. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01738-z