How and When Do Personal Values Guide Our Attitudes and Sociality? Explaining Cross-Cultural Variability in Attitude-Value Linkages

Objectives

The study examines how and when personal values motivate a broad range of social attitudes. The authors propose a new way of understanding links between widely used categories of moral foundations (represented by social attitudes) and personal values, then test their model through a meta-analysis of previously conducted research.

Outcomes

The results showed that:

The context in which individuals live impacts motivations and links between attitudes and values.
Values can be organized into two dimensions: 1) The self-focus vs. other focus dimension includes social attitudes linked to care and fairness which guide relationships between individuals and between people and the environment. 2) The openness to change vs. conservation dimension includes concerns about authority and moral purity, exemplified by political and religious attitudes.
Social attitudes are particularly relevant in social, political, and cultural life as individuals regularly clash with others over social issues. Such disagreements can be understood by their motivational roots.
The national context influences the characteristics of in-group attitudes as much as motivational underpinnings.

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