Tara L. Teel Benjamin Ghasemi Thao Tran Ugo Arbieu Richard Eugene Waggaman Berl Duan Biggs Luigi Boitani Paolo Ciucci Miguel Delibes-Mateos Enrico Di Minin Sabrina Dressel Christian Gamborg Jenny Anne Glikman Catherine Hill Maarten Jacobs Frank Søndergaard Jensen Irena Kavčič Rose Keller Silvio Marchini Sofia Nanni Agnieszka Olszańska Jonathan Salerno Camilla Sandström Kenneth Shockley Dean Smith Eick von Ruschkowski Michael J. Manfredo 2026 <p><span>Social values shape biodiversity conservation success. Yet information is lacking on how values form, change and adapt people to their environment. Our 33-nation survey in 2021–2023 (</span><i>n</i><span> = 18,477) explored the effect of the institutions of European colonization on present-day values towards wildlife in the Americas. Here we found mutualism values (seeing wildlife as part of one’s social community) prevail in Iberian-origin Latin American countries, whereas domination values (seeing wildlife as a resource for human use) are more prevalent in British-origin North American countries. Multilevel analysis showed significant country-level effects of colonial institution (for example, colonial origin, Protestant versus Catholic religious cultures) and endowment (for example, pre-colonial population density, Indigenous ancestry, settler mortality) factors on wildlife values in the Americas. The strong mutualism emphasis in Latin America appears to be consistent with acculturation between the compatible ideologies of Indigenous peoples and the Iberian colonizers. The effectiveness of wildlife institutions and policies will depend on their congruence with the social values of publics being served.</span></p> application/pdf 10.1038/s41893-026-01825-8 en Nature Enduring cultural legacies affect Euro-American wildlife values article