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Social Construction of the Value-Behavior Relation
Vladimir Ponizovskiy1, Lusine Grigoryan1,2, Ulrich Kühnen1
1Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Bremen, Germany.
Frontiers in Psychology
|May 24, 2019
Summary
Personal values guide behavior, but beliefs about how actions reflect values significantly shape this link. Understanding these value-instantiating beliefs is key to predicting attitudes and behaviors across contexts.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Social Psychology
Background:
- Personal values are established predictors of attitudes and behavior.
- Research on values, particularly Schwartz's theory, initially focused on universal patterns in value-attitude relations.
- However, significant cross-cultural and contextual variations in these links persist, necessitating the study of moderators.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and investigate the concept of value-instantiating beliefs as a proximal moderator of value-attitude and value-behavior relations.
- To examine whether the subjective construal of a behavior's relevance to a value is a prerequisite for the value-behavior link.
- To determine the role of value-instantiating beliefs in directing the relationship between values and behavior.
Main Methods:
- A web-based survey experiment with 1724 participants across three trials.
- Participants were presented with vignettes describing behavioral choices, with behaviors manipulated to be neutral, reinforcing, or inhibiting of a specific value.
- Measurement of value-instantiating beliefs, attitudes toward the behavior, and behavioral intentions.
Main Results:
- Value-instantiating beliefs significantly moderated the relationship between personal values and the measured outcomes (attitudes, intentions) in all trials.
- The direction of the relationship between values and behavior was determined by the nature of the value-instantiating beliefs.
- These findings highlight the plasticity of the value-behavior connection.
Conclusions:
- Value-instantiating beliefs are crucial moderators, influencing both the strength and direction of the link between personal values and behavior.
- Social construction plays a vital role in shaping how values motivate specific actions.
- The study underscores that the connection between values and behavior is not fixed but is dynamically influenced by cognitive interpretations.
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