Abstract
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 and 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.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 517-546 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| Journal | Annual Review of Psychology |
| Volume | 73 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This article was funded by a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (847/14) and by grants from the Abe Gray Chair and the Recanati Fund of the Jerusalem Business School and from the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Centre, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to L.S. We thank Sharon Arieli, Ariel Knafo-Noam, Diana Jayyar, Adva Liberman, Sari Mentser, Anna Schwartz, and Lena Spindler-Shafir for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this review.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Annual Reviews Inc.. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Schwartz value theory
- personal values
- value implications
- value measurement
- values and behavior
- values and personality