Are Your Values a Part of Your Personality?

What could be more important than your values? The values you hold are nothing less than what you care about the most, what really matters to you, and what you think is good or bad. Your values motivate you to pursue the things you believe are worthwhile. You are personally invested in your values—if someone attacked your values, it would feel like an attack on you. And whether you can get along with another person often depends on the similarity between your values. Value similarity is one of the strongest predictors of relationship satisfaction, intimacy, and longevity.

Given the importance of values to our sense of self and relationships with others, you might think that personality psychologists would say that values are a central, core feature of personality. But most do not. In fact, many personality psychologists deny that values are a part of personality at all, but, rather, are just a different part of a person's psychological makeup. The most influential research on values was conducted by Milton Rokeach, a social psychologist. Shalom Schwartz, also a social psychologist, developed Rokeach's ideas with cross-cultural research into the dominant model of values today. Jonathan Haidt, also a social psychologist, proposed that differences in commitment to five basic moral values explain why liberals and conservatives do not get along.

Why are social psychologists and not personality psychologists studying values? I think the answer to this question lies in a historical accident.

Historians usually trace the origin of today's most widely followed model of personality, the Big-Five or Five-Factor Model, to the work of one of the founders of personality psychology, Gordon Allport. Allport's research team scanned the 1925 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary for terms that might be used to describe personality and located 17,953 such terms. The researchers published a monograph in 1936 that grouped the terms into four categories:

1. Neutral terms designating possible personality traits (4,504 terms)
2. Terms primarily descriptive of temporary moods or activities (4,541 terms)
3. Weighted terms conveying social or characterological judgments of personal conduct, or designating influence on others (5,226 terms)
4. Miscellaneous: designations of physique, capacities, and developmental conditions; metaphorical and doubtful terms (3,682 terms)

Allport declared that only words in the first category were appropriate for objective personality description. Here is what he wrote about value-related terms in Category Three in the preface to his 1936 monograph: "Since Column III contains evaluative (characterial) terms it should be avoided by psychologists unless they are prepared to deal with the subject of social judgment... This column, of course, may be directly serviceable to the educator or moralist whose interest is primarily in ethical codes or normative judgments" (Allport & Odbert, 1936, p. vii). Interestingly, Allport himself never designed a questionnaire to measure Category One traits, but he did collaborate with Philip Vernon to publish in 1931 the Study of Values, which measures personal preferences for six types of values: theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious.

As for the development of personality trait rating scales and questionnaires, Raymond Cattell and others drew primarily from Allport's first category, ignoring the value-laden terms in Category Three. Their motivation for doing this was probably to make the study of personality as objective and scientific as possible. Psychology already had a reputation for being somewhat soft and subjective because it postulated unobservable mental structures. Personality psychologists hoped that focusing on the neutral terms in Category One and avoiding the value-laden terms in Category Three would make their research more scientifically respectable. Eventually, rating studies using terms from Category One led to the currently popular Big Five model of personality.

But that is not the end of the story. Allport and his followers may have tried to remove value from the study of personality, but some personality psychologists began to think that values might legitimately be seen as a part of personality or at least related to personality. A superb article by Parks-Leduc, Feldman, and Bardi (2015) summarizes studies that compare scores on the five major personality dimensions with scores on measures of the 10 values identified by Shalom Schwartz. Here is a simplified version of their findings.

Extraverts tend to value power, achievement, hedonism, and stimulation. Agreeable persons tend to value universalism, benevolence, conformity, and tradition, and devalue power. Conscientious persons tend to value achievement, conformity, and security. People with high levels of Openness to Experience tend to value stimulation, self-direction, and universalism and devalue conformity, tradition, and security. Only the domain of Neuroticism vs. Emotional Stability is completely unrelated to values as measured by Schwartz.

The following brief definitions of the Schwartz values might make their relationship to the Big 5 clearer.

• Power—social status, prestige, wealth, control over other people
• Achievement—successful demonstration of an ability to accomplish activities valued by society
• Hedonism—physical pleasure, fun
• Stimulation—excitement from variety, novelty, and challenge
• Self-Direction—freedom to choose, create, and explore without interference from others
• Universalism—promoting the well-being of all people, equally, and protecting the environment
• Benevolence—promoting the well-being of one's local group
• Conformity—following expectations of people one is close to so as not to upset them
• Tradition—respecting longstanding customs, beliefs, and norms of society
• Security—safety of one's self and harmony and stability in relationships and society

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You might have noticed that some values seem to align more naturally with other values, while some values seem incompatible with other values. Schwartz's research confirms this fact, and he represents the compatibility of the 10 values by diagramming them in a circle. Values that are adjacent to each other are compatible, while those on opposite sides of the circle are more difficult to pursue at the same time.

Schwartz model of relations among values.

Source: Shalom Schwartz, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0

As you can see, the four dimensions of the Big 5 that are related to Schwartz values tend to align with four themes that Schwartz labels around the perimeter of the circle. Extraverts are concerned with self-enhancement values, agreeable people focus more on self-transcendence values (putting others first), conscientious people hold conservation values, and people who are open to experience unsurprisingly value openness to change.

There are more questions to answer about personality and values, such as how moral values differ from other values and how values guide our choice of careers. Future posts will answer those questions. In the meantime, if you want to see how you score on the Schwartz measure of values (and other value measures as well), you can do that at Jonathan Haidt's site, YourMorals.org. You do have to register with the site to complete the measures there, but there is no fee, and your privacy is protected.