The Expression of Values: An Exploration of the Structure

Personal values are desirable life goals that reflect what is important to people in their lives. As such, people differ in their value priorities. However, they share a common value structure. That is, the relations between values across, and more recently, within people are described by a circular motivational continuum, where adjacent values express compatible motivations and opposing values express conflicting motivations. Bardi and Schwartz (2003) found that both values and value-expressive behaviours can also share a common structure, where each value and the behaviours expressive of that value are co-located in the same order around the circle. Many studies have demonstrated that specific traits, attitudes, and behaviours relate to the whole system of values, with relations approximating a sinusoid curve. However, is this necessarily the case? Can traits, attitudes and behaviours be value-expressive without showing systematic relations with the values circle? Under what conditions? We explore these questions with data from 9 countries.