Science and Technology as Grounds for National Pride: Empirical Evidence from 32 Countries

This article explores to what extent the cross-national differences in pride reflect objective differences in countries’ performance in these spheres. The empirical study conducted to answer this question is based on the survey data from the International Social Survey Program – National Identity covering 32 countries and quantitative indicators of countries’ achievements in technology from the World Bank Open Data and in academic science from the Scopus indicators dataset. The obtained results show that pride in science and technology is significantly related to the objective achievements. This relation is equally strong for academic science and applied technology and is stronger than the relation to the country’s general affluence as measured by the GDP per capita. The research demonstrates that as where science and technology are concerned people share a kind of distributed knowledge that produces realistic estimates counteracting the nationalist self-serving bias.