Personal Values Across Cultures

Values play an outsized role in the visions, critiques, and discussions of politics, religion, education, and family life. Despite all the attention values receive in everyday discourse, their systematic study took hold in mainstream psychology only in the 1990s. This review discusses the nature of values and presents the main contemporary value theories, focusing on the theory of basic personal values. We review evidence for the content and the structure of conflict and compatibility among values found across cultures. We discuss the assumptions underlying the many instruments developed to measure values. We then consider the origins of value priorities and their stability or change over time. The remainder of the review presents the evidence for the ways personal values relate to personality traits, subjective well-being, and the implications of value differences for religiosity, prejudice, pro- and antisocial behavior, political and environmental behavior, and creativity, concluding with a discussion of mechanisms that link values to behavior. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Utilizing personal values to explain people’s attitudes towards legal norms

The aim of this study is to clarify whether personal values explain delinquents’ and non-delinquents’ general attitudes towards legal norms. We expect that 10 basic personal values form a circular scale common to all individuals, both delinquents and non-delinquents, that people’s ratings of the importance of these 10 values predict their norm acceptance in a sinusoidal way, with higher predictability for delinquents, and that the correlations of personal values with norm acceptance are highest for those delinquents with a broad spectrum of offences. Finally, we expect that gender does not have an impact on these profiles, whereas controlling for age does. Our analyses are based on four studies on community crime prevention. The results are in line with the above expectations.

Schwartz Value Clusters in Modern University Students

People differ in their value hierarchies, i.e., in the importance they attach to basic personal values. A large number of studies were performed to establish similarities and differences between national, ethnic, or professional groups in terms of Schwartz’s values structure. In addition to this sample-level approach, we found it useful to disclose a number of subgroups within those larger social groups, which are more homogeneous in themselves and reflect the individual-level types of personal values systems. The study was performed on university students (n = 1237) who were asked to fill in the SVS и PVQ Schwartz’s questionnaires. The sample was then treated with the K-means cluster analysis, which resulted in the division of the initial sample into three subgroups or clusters according to their values hierarchy being measured separately at the (1) Normative Ideals scale and (2) the scale of Behavioral Priorities. These clusters were equally common among male and female students, but they were unequally found in young people coming from different ethnic groups and regions, demonstrating the role of socio-cultural environment in building up personal values. The results may extend our capabilities for the prediction of the social, economic, and political behavior of the younger generation.

The Contribution of Religiosity to Ideology: Empirical Evidences From Five Continents

The current study examines the extent to which religiosity account for ideological orientations in 16 countries from five continents (Australia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Greece, Finland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Results showed that religiosity was consistently related to right and conservative ideologies in all countries, except Australia. This relation held across different religions, and did not vary across participant’s demographic conditions (i.e., gender, age, income, and education). After controlling for basic personal values, the contribution of religiosity on ideology was still significant. However, the effect was substantial only in countries where religion has played a prominent role in the public sphere, such as Spain, Poland, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, and Turkey. In the other countries, the unique contribution of religiosity was marginal or small.

The Agreeableness Type of Personality and the Basic Personal Values

The goal of this study is to discover the relationship between the agreeableness type of personality and the basic personal values, analyzed through non-experimental methodology and quantitative approach. The sample of this study is the Albanian high school seniors in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia which consists of 479 subjects, randomly selected from the total sample specified. The subjects’ willingness to participate in the survey and their anonymity was respected by following all ethical norms. The results of correlative statistics show that there is association between the agreeableness type and all basic personal values, while the comparative statistics indicate statistically significant differences between the basic personal values related to the agreeableness type of personality and the highest mean score was reached by the value universalism. The Eta square agreeableness type of personality results showed a relatively low effect on the values stimulation as well as hedonism.

HEXACO Personality and Schwartz's Personal Values: A Facet-Level Analysis

This study systematically examined the correlates of Schwartz’s basic values with the broad and narrow traits of the HEXACO model of personality. A sample of 1244 adults (53% male; M age=44, SD=12) completed the 200-item HEXACO-PI-R and the Portrait Values Questionnaire measuring Schwartz’s 10 basic personal values. Regression models predicting each of the ten basic values from personality revealed mean-adjusted multiple correlations of .39 for HEXACO factors without honesty-humility, .45 for all HEXACO factors, and .53 for HEXACO facets. The facet-level multiple correlations were particularly large (greater than .60) for power, universalism, and cooperation. Results suggest that individual differences in personality and values overlap to a greater extent than implied by past literature. OSF project materials includes data, analysis scripts, and materials used in the publication of the same name. For details and licensing information, see the Wiki page below.