News
Are Values Universal?
Do we all fundamentally value the same things?
As the team behind a recent paper in Frontiers in Psychology led by Paul Hanel (Cardiff University) note, immigration is triggering some conflicts over perceptions of value. For example, a 2016 poll reported that three quarters of people living in Ontario, Canada, felt that Muslim immigrants have fundamentally different values to their own.
However, other surveys have found that people around the world agree on values. In one study by Shalom Schwartz and Anat Bardi, people from 50 different countries tended to agree that benevolence, universalism and self-direction are highly important; tradition and power were valued least.
Hanel and his colleagues recently studied people living in three different cultures: Brazil, India and the UK. They concluded that people in different nations can differ in the behaviours associated with certain values, while still holding similar ideas about the meaning and importance of those values.
In 2020, a separate team led by Roosevelt Vilar looked at age and gender differences in values among more than 20,000 people living across 20 countries with “substantial” cultural variability. They found slight differences between men and women through most life stages. In general, women were more focused on social and ‘central’ goals (helping others, for example) whereas men were more focused on personal goals (excitement and promotion). Older people, too, valued social and central goals more than younger people, who were more enamoured of personal goals. However, the team reports, culture had virtually no impact on the results. This, they argue, “supports the lifespan developmental psychological idea that values reflect a universal pattern of human agency in facing challenges over the life span”.
Broadly, we are all driven to have fundamentally the same values — and the same slightly diverging values, according to age and gender — no matter where we live in the world.
As the team behind a recent paper in Frontiers in Psychology led by Paul Hanel (Cardiff University) note, immigration is triggering some conflicts over perceptions of value. For example, a 2016 poll reported that three quarters of people living in Ontario, Canada, felt that Muslim immigrants have fundamentally different values to their own.
However, other surveys have found that people around the world agree on values. In one study by Shalom Schwartz and Anat Bardi, people from 50 different countries tended to agree that benevolence, universalism and self-direction are highly important; tradition and power were valued least.
Hanel and his colleagues recently studied people living in three different cultures: Brazil, India and the UK. They concluded that people in different nations can differ in the behaviours associated with certain values, while still holding similar ideas about the meaning and importance of those values.
In 2020, a separate team led by Roosevelt Vilar looked at age and gender differences in values among more than 20,000 people living across 20 countries with “substantial” cultural variability. They found slight differences between men and women through most life stages. In general, women were more focused on social and ‘central’ goals (helping others, for example) whereas men were more focused on personal goals (excitement and promotion). Older people, too, valued social and central goals more than younger people, who were more enamoured of personal goals. However, the team reports, culture had virtually no impact on the results. This, they argue, “supports the lifespan developmental psychological idea that values reflect a universal pattern of human agency in facing challenges over the life span”.
Broadly, we are all driven to have fundamentally the same values — and the same slightly diverging values, according to age and gender — no matter where we live in the world.