Effects of Introspection About Reasons for Values: Extending Research on Values-as-Truisms

Abstract

In past research, analyzing reasons for values that involve promoting the welfare of others (i.e., self-transcendence values) caused them to change—a finding that occurs only when values lack prior cognitive support (Maio & Olson, 1998). In the present research, we tested whether analyzing reasons for values serving different motivations (e.g., conservation, self-enhancement) at different social levels (personal vs. societal) causes them to change. Experiment 1 replicated the finding that analyzing reasons for self-transcendence values causes these values to change, while extending this finding to three other types of values described by Schwartz (1992): conservation, openness, and self-enhancement values. Experiment 2 revealed the analyzing reasons effect for two types of social values described by Inglehart (1971): materialist and postmaterialist values. These results extend previous research on the malleability of values by showing that introspection has similar effects on many different kinds of values.