World 😌

Previous research found that the within-country variability of human values (e.g., equality and helpfulness) clearly outweighs between-country variability. Across three countries (Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom), the present research tested in student samples whether between-nation differences reside more in the behaviors used to concretely instantiate (i.e., exemplify or understand) values than in their importance as abstract ideals. In Study 1 (N = 630), we found several meaningful between-country differences in the behaviors that were used to concretely instantiate values, alongside high within-country variability. In Study 2 (N = 677), we found that participants were able to match instantiations back to the values from which they were derived, even if the behavior instantiations were spontaneously produced only by participants from another country or were created by us. Together, these results support the hypothesis that people in different nations can differ in the behaviors that are seen as typical as instantiations of values, while holding similar ideas about the abstract meaning of the values and their importance.

Introduction

In recent years, many Western countries have accepted once again tens or even hundreds of thousands of immigrants into their country. This has sparked widespread discussions of how well immigrants are able to acculturate (e.g., The Economist, 2016). For example, a recent Canadian survey found that three quarters of Ontarians feel that Muslim immigrants have fundamentally different values than themselves (Keung, 2016). This feeling is in contrast to large international surveys of human values in which it was found that people from more than 55 nations are consistent in valuing some values more and others less (Schwartz and Bardi, 2001). How then is it the case that people from different countries appear to be so different? The present research follows up this train of thought by testing whether people in different nations differ in the behaviors that are seen as typical instantiations (i.e., examples) of values, while holding similar ideas about the abstract meaning of the values and their importance.

Conceptualizing Values and Value Differences

Values, abstract guiding principles, have gained a lot of attention, not just within psychology, but also in neighboring fields such as sociology, economics, philosophy, and political science (Schwartz, 1992; Gouveia, 2013; Maio, 2016). In the last three decades, researchers have asked people to rate diverse values in terms of their importance as guiding principles in their lives. Analyses of these ratings have taught us that the structure of human values is very similar across more than 80 countries (Schwartz, 1992; Bilsky et al., 2011; Schwartz et al., 2012). That is, the same values have been grouped together in most countries, resulting in the view that values within a cluster are motivationally compatible. More specifically, in the predominant value model (Schwartz, 1992) 10 value types are distinguished: power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, tradition, conformity, and security. The 10 value types can be combined into four higher order value types, which form the endpoints of two orthogonal dimensions: openness values vs. conservation values, and self-transcendence values vs. self-enhancement values (see Figure 1).

Adjacent value types are motivationally compatible and hence positively correlated, whereas opposing value types are expected to be motivationally incompatible and negatively related.

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 1. Schwartz’ (1992) circumplex model of human values displaying 10 value types (bold font) and examples of values in each type (normal font) along two dimensions.

In addition, there is similarity in value hierarchies (Schwartz and Bardi, 2001). Benevolence, universalism, and self-direction values are regarded as the most important across more than 50 countries, whereas tradition and power are valued least. Country of origin explains on average only 2–12% of inter-individual variance (Fischer and Schwartz, 2011). Thus, there is high consensus on value priorities across countries.

Given these findings, how is it that people often persist in believing that people from different countries hold different values? Some factors are likely to be motivational: abundant evidence points to the roles of realistic group conflict (Bobo, 1983), social identification (Tajfel and Turner, 1986), symbolic racism (Kinder and Sears, 1981), and various biases (e.g., symbolic self-completion, Gollwitzer et al., 1982, or system justification, Jost and Banaji, 1994) that can lead us to feel that our own group is superior to other groups in numerous characteristics, including values. Other factors are cognitive: social learning (Bandura et al., 1961) and stereotyping processes (e.g., illusory correlation, Hamilton and Rose, 1980) may lead us to encode other groups’ characteristics in ways that magnify the differences between groups. More relevant to the present research, however, is the nature of the values concept itself. Specifically, as abstract ideals, values subsume a wide range of behaviors as exemplars of the concepts. People may perceive differences between social groups because of the differences between groups in the specific behaviors that are seen as exemplars of different values, even if other behaviors that are exemplars of the values do not differ. Thus, by thinking about groups in terms of concrete instances, differences may be stronger than similarities.

In other words, people in different social groups may endorse the same values but associate different behaviors with them (Maio, 2010). For example, the value of equality may be linked to comparisons between men and women in countries where gender equality is promoted, but not in countries where gender equality is not part of the political agenda. Indeed, Turkish people value equality as much as people in other European countries, but endorse gender equality less strongly (Hanel et al., 2017). Furthermore, equality on an abstract level and gender equality were slightly negatively associated in Turkey, but positively in most other European countries.

These differences are not as evident if “meaning” is understood only as abstract conceptualizations of values, which tend to be vague in nature. The concrete actions that people link to values are value instantiations (Hanel et al., 2017). The concept of instantiations originates from cognitive psychology. Instantiating a rule or concept involves applying it to a concrete exemplar (Anderson et al., 1976). ‘Instantiation’ thus refers to a particular realization or instance of an abstraction or to the process of producing such an instance. Instantiation is therefore based on the relationship between general and specific, as in different levels of a conceptual hierarchy. For instance, football is an instantiation of the category sport, fork is an instantiation of cutlery, and pear is an instantiation of fruits (see Hanel et al., 2017, for a more extensive overview).

Maio (2010) suggested that values can be modeled as mental representations on three levels. The first level is the system level, on which values are connected to each other, as in Schwartz’s (1992) model. The second level is the level of specific abstract values (e.g., equality and wealth), which comprise the importance that people attach to the abstract concepts. Finally, the third level is the instantiation level, which includes specific situations, issues, and behaviors relevant to the values.

Similar to instantiations of animals and other categories, research has found that value instantiations can vary in typicality, with important ramifications. For example, Maio et al. (2009) found that contemplation of typical, concrete examples of a value increased subsequent value-related behavior more than did contemplation of atypical examples. That is, the act of thinking about a typical, concrete example of a value led people to be more likely to spontaneously apply the value in a subsequent situation. This finding illustrates the importance of finding typical instantiations over a range of values (perhaps due to their greater familiarity or fit with the ideal or central tendency), which is another aim of Study 1. Based on this finding, Maio (2010) indicated that value instantiations could operate in different ways. More specifically, concrete value instantiations “could (1) affect a strength-related property of the abstract value itself (e.g., value certainty), (2) act as metaphors that we apply to subsequent situations through analogical reasoning, or (3) affect our perceptual readiness to detect the value in subsequent situations” (Maio, 2010, p. 27).

The Present Studies

In Study 1 we used a qualitative approach to measure (behavior) instantiations of 23 values from Schwartz’s (1992) value model, while comparing them in a systematic way across three countries. To help us examine the value instantiations, participants were asked to report situations in which they considered a value to be relevant, including the people in this situation and their actions. This method was an extension of previous concept-mapping approaches used in the study of attitudes (e.g., Lord et al., 1994), creativity research (Sternberg, 1985), and values (Maio et al., 2009).

We expected that people in different countries would differ in their concrete (behavior) instantiations of values, because we assumed that personal experiences and the socio-cultural environment exert a strong influence at the concrete level (Morris, 2014; Hanel et al., 2017). To test this hypothesis, we collected data from regions of three countries: north-east Brazil, south-west India, and south Wales. These countries differ on various dimensions. In terms of years of schooling, GNP, and life expectancy (United Nations Developmental Programme, 2014), India is the least developed of the three countries, and the United Kingdom is the most developed. Brazil and India are perceived to be much more corrupt than the United Kingdom (Transparency International, 2014), and the homicide rate in Brazil is 25 times higher than in the United Kingdom and almost eight times higher than in India (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2014). Thus, corruption may be more spontaneously associated with equality as a value and protections against physical violence may be more strongly associated with family security in Brazil than in the United Kingdom. There are also marked differences in climate and natural resources. These differences may well be reflected in differences in value instantiation between the nations. For example, water conservation may be more spontaneously associated with the value of protecting the environment in places where water is scarce (e.g., north-eastern Brazil) than where it is abundant (e.g., most of the United Kingdom). Similarly, waste recycling may be more spontaneously associated with protecting the environment in places where recycling is possible and promoted than where it is not possible and/or not promoted. This difference could emerge even if the absolute or relative importance of the value protecting the environment – a key value relevant to these behaviors – is the same in both types of location. Furthermore, such differences may emerge even if people in both regions recognize the behaviors as potential ways to promote the environment (see Study 2). That is, people in both types of location may recognize that water conservation and recycling protect the environment, but they may simply differ in how strongly they spontaneously associate these behaviors with the value in day-to-day life.

With the results of this study in hand, the next substantive issue was whether the (behavior) instantiations that were most frequent in each nation would fit the value as it is conceived in the other nations. That is, even if we focus on the instantiations that appeared only in one nation but not in another, could the instantiations be matched to values (i.e., ‘back-translated’). Study 2 examined the degree to which instantiations could be recognized as belonging to the values from which they originated. For example, would participants recognize recycling as an example of protecting the environment and keeping secrets as an example of loyalty to an equal extent across countries? This step was important because it would reveal the conceptual relevance of the instantiations to the values. In other words, people should be able to recognize the value that a behavioral instantiation promotes, even if the instantiation is atypical for the participant’s own region. This matching would show that the instantiations vary merely in their spontaneous natural activation by values, but not in their conceptual relevance to values. Both studies were approved by the ethics committee of the School of Psychology, Cardiff University.

That means that informed consent was obtained by the participants, which included that their participation was voluntarily, they could withdraw at any time without providing a reason, and that the information participants provided would be held anonymously. At the end of each study, participants were fully debriefed. The English versions of the questionnaires used in both studies, along with the two datasets, can be found on https://osf.io/s5vwa/?view_only=6803c67e69af48278640fbcbb2a7b3ea.

Study 1: Exploring Value Instantiations

This study aimed to find typical value instantiations in Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom and estimate the degree of similarity between them. This aim was achieved using a paradigm that has been used to examine exemplars of natural categories (e.g., Collins and Quillian, 1969), as well as in later research on typicality effects (Fehr and Russell, 1984; Lord et al., 1994; Maio et al., 2009) and on the strength of associations between categories and their members (Fazio et al., 2000). For example, Maio et al. (2009, p. 601) asked participants “to list situations in which they considered equality to be important”. A different approach was chosen by Lord et al. (1994), who asked their participants to complete attitude concept maps on capital punishment and social welfare in order to identify how participants refer to people who are affected by each of those social policies. Specifically, participants were asked to construct a concept map by adding nodes to a central node that stated “capital punishment” or “social welfare,” and the added nodes were generated in response to questions asking “what,” “where,” “when,” “who,” “why,” and “how”.

Following those examples, in Study 1 participants were asked to list situations in which they considered a value to be important and to include people and their actions. These responses were then used to create a conceptual map representing values and value instantiations for each country. These maps were similar to those created by Lord et al. (1994, p. 661), except that our method maps values, rather than natural concepts (see the 23 figures in the Supplementary Materials for such ‘value maps,’ one for each of the 23 value investigated in this study).

Method

Participants in Brazil

Participants were 189 mostly postgraduate students from João Pessoa, a coastal city from north-east in Brazil. Participants were not compensated. The average socioeconomic status (SES; Sharma et al., 2012) of 18.50 indicates that the average participant was part of the Brazilian upper-middle class (see Table 3 for details).

Participants in India

Participants were 214 undergraduate and graduate students from Dharwad, south-west India. Participants were not compensated. The mean SES was 20.78, indicating that the average participant was part of the Indian upper-middle class (see Table 3 for details).