HSS: How and When Do Personal Values Guide Our Attitudes and Sociality?

How and when do our personal values relate to social attitudes? In this talk, I will propose an new attitude-value taxonomy (Boer & Fischer, 2013) based on Moral Foundation Theory and Schwartz' Basic Human Values Theory that allows predictions of (a) how social attitudes are related to personal values, and (b) when macro-contextual factors impact on attitude-value links. In a meta-analysis based on the Schwartz Value Survey and the Portrait Value Questionnaire (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 were not consistently associated with value dimensions. We also hypothesize that the ecological, economic and cultural context moderates the extent to which values guide social attitudes. Results of the multi-level meta-analysis showed 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 value and social attitude theories.