An Unfolding Analysis Approach Reveals the Internal Structure of Perceptions of Nonhuman Entities’ Values

Using unfolding analysis in values studies enables examining the structure of values both within persons and across persons. In particular, it can reveal whether people’s personal values and their perceptions of other people’s values follow a theoretically consistent manner. However, to date no study was found to test whether the circular structure of values exists in individual’s judgments of the values of nonhuman entities. Using Schwartz’s Refined Value Best Worst Survey (Lee et al., 2017), we asked individuals to think about their most important charity as if it were a person who holds certain life goals as important, and to judge the most and least important values for this charity. We examined Australian general population (N=788, M_age=47.44, SD=15.47, 36.5% Male), who responded to the perceived values of the selected charity. Results were assessed with unfolding analysis and within-person correlations. Findings demonstrate that people associate personal values with charities and the known structure of relations among charity values exist for each individual. Benevolence and universalism were the most important values individuals attributed to charities and power and achievement were the least important values to most respondents. We found that within-person correlations, between the attributed values and the theoretical structure increase with the age of the respondent. Future research could consider examining whether current findings replicate across cultures or if similar charities may be perceived as holding different values in different cultures. The potential uses of unfolding methods for predicting perceptions of values will be discussed.