How Values Can Make People More Hopeful for the Future

In Attitude Check, we consider research broadly related to attitudes. Attitudes encompass tendencies to like or dislike other “things,” which can include just about anything. We can like or dislike different activities (e.g., recycling, shopping), people (e.g., individuals or groups), situations (crowded places), policies (e.g., national health care, sales tax), and even abstract ideals (e.g., forgiveness, wealth). From time to time, we invite others to mention findings relevant to one of these “things.” Below, Dr. Paul Hanel (University of Essex, United Kingdom) shares important research on values—abstract ideals we tend to evaluate positively and consider to be important guiding principles in our lives (including the examples mentioned above and many more).

We often believe that people who vote for another party, have another gender, or are older or younger than us are also different from us in other aspects. We often assume that those "other people" have different values. For example, we might think that, compared to young people, older people attach substantially more importance to conservative values such as security or tradition.

Is this assumption correct? Do groups in fact have fundamentally different values? We can answer this question by asking people to report their values and then calculating the degree to which groups of people are similar in terms of their values. When we did this for the first time, we were surprised to see how much groups of people have in common. For example, the majority of voters of the Democratic and Republican parties reported that helpfulness is important or very important to them. But also younger and older people agree that helpfulness is important. So do women and men. Not only from the United Kingdom and the United States but also from many countries.

Shared Values Between Groups

Similarly, most people say that wealth or materialistic possessions are less important to them. This is again true for voters of both the Democratic and Republican parties, women and men, or younger and older people. In fact, the vast majority of people agree that helpfulness is more important than wealth or materialistic possessions.

Why does this matter? In a number of studies, we found that it is possible to change people’s misperceptions of other groups by showing these value similarities. This also increases people’s confidence that members of two groups can get along better or even become friends.

For example, in the recent Summer Science Festival of The Royal Society in London, we had created a short game in which visitors could test how well they know the values of other people. Specifically, they were asked to rate the extent to which values are similar versus different between various groups, including women and men, British Conservative and Labour voters, and people with more and less formal education, among other groups. After each guess, visitors immediately received feedback on how accurate their guess was by comparing the visitors’ responses to data from a representative sample of more than 2,200 people living in the United Kingdom.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Hanel

It turned out that the majority of the 777 visitors who consented to us analysing their data initially substantially underestimated the similarities between groups. For example, while the actual similarity between women and men across all values is 93.1 percent, people only assumed that the amount of similarities is 67.7 percent. This discrepancy between perceived and actual value similarity was larger for most other pairs of groups (e.g., Conservatives and Labour voters).

After receiving feedback, visitors became increasingly more accurate in guessing the actual similarities between groups. In other words, their stereotypes reduced. Visitors also reported being more hopeful and optimistic that we as a society could together solve major crises, such as climate change and the current economic situation.

Personal Motivation

However, across a range of studies, we have not found evidence that this similarity information changes people’s personal motivation to engage with someone from another group. This would be important because a lot of research has shown that personal contact with someone from another group reduces prejudice. In future studies, we are therefore planning to test whether repeated exposure to value similarities helps to also change people’s personal motivation.

Together, this research provides an intriguing and easy-to-implement method for reducing misperceptions while increasing optimism and positivity in attitudes toward other people.

This research is also illustrated in this video, commissioned by The Royal Society (United Kingdom):

Dr Paul Hanel, University of Essex

Source: Courtesy of Paul Hanel