How and when do personal values guide our attitudes and sociality? Explaining cross-cultural variability in attitude–value linkages.

TLDR

The study investigates how personal values shape social attitudes and how ecological, economic, and cultural contexts moderate these relationships. Using a taxonomy grounded in Moral Foundations Theory and Schwartz’s value theory, the authors conduct a multi‑level meta‑analysis of 30,357 respondents from 31 countries to predict attitude‑value linkages and their contextual moderators. Results show that self‑transcendence values predict fairness/pro‑environmental and care/prosocial attitudes, conservation values predict purity/religious and authority/political attitudes, while ingroup attitudes are inconsistently linked, and that disease stress, collectivism, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance differentially strengthen or weaken these associations, challenging universalistic claims.

Abstract

This article examines how and when personal values relate to social attitudes. Considering values as motivational orientations, we propose an attitude-value taxonomy based on Moral Foundation Theory (Haidt & Joseph, 2007) and Schwartz's (1992) basic human values theory allowing predictions of (a) how social attitudes are related to personal values, and (b) when macro-contextual factors have an impact on attitude-value links. In a meta-analysis based on the Schwartz Value Survey (Schwartz, 1992) and the Portrait Value Questionnaire (Schwartz et al., 2001; k = 91, N = 30,357 from 31 countries), we found that self-transcendence (vs. self-enhancement) values relate positively to fairness/proenvironmental and care/prosocial attitudes, and conservation (vs. openness-to-change) values relate to purity/religious and authority/political attitudes, whereas ingroup/identity attitudes are not consistently associated with value dimensions. Additionally, we hypothesize that the ecological, economic, and cultural context moderates the extent to which values guide social attitudes. Results of the multi-level meta-analysis show that ecological and cultural factors inhibit or foster attitude-value associations: Disease stress is associated with lower attitude-value associations for conservation (vs. openness-to-change) values; collectivism is associated with stronger attitude-value links for conservation values; individualism is associated with stronger attitude-value links for self-transcendence (vs. self-enhancement) values; and uncertainty avoidance is associated with stronger attitude-values links, particularly for conservation values. These findings challenge universalistic claims about context-independent attitude-value relations and contribute to refined future value and social attitude theories.