What is striking about it is that after conducting interviews with representatives of 80 societies from 1981 to 2007, each national sample consisting of 1,000 participants, covering 85 percent of the world's population, the results remain stable over this time (i.e. movements have been slow).
You can conclude that the results confirm the importance of two things:
Institutions. The new institutional economics (NIE) school tells us that individuals and groups in society structure and organize their dealings in a manner that reduces costs to them (the so called transaction cost approach). Social norms and expectations (a.k.a instituions) are a way of enforcing stability and regularity. Because these arrangements suit the interests of both parties transacting, they are expected to endure much longer than any formal legal or political dispensation.
Inertia or status quo bias. Behavioral science tells us that much as we would like to think of ourselves as rational agents, our behavior is affected by what we perceive others think and expect of us. Thus, we might persist in customary practices even when the original incentive for it has gone. This makes the case for institutional change even more difficult to make.
Difficult perhaps, but not impossible nor uncommon. One key finding of the WVS is that
since 1981, economic development, democratization, and rising social tolerance have increased the extent to which people perceive that they have free choice, which in turn has led to higher levels of happiness around the world, as the "human development" model suggests.
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