Values and Behavior

What are values? How are they different from attitudes, traits, and specific goals? How do our values influence our behavior, and vice versa? How does our culture and environment impact the relationship between values and behavior? These questions and more are rigorously examined by prominent and emerging scholars in this significant volume Values and Behavior: Taking A Cross Cultural Perspective.

Personal values are cognitive representations of abstract, desirable motivational goals that guide the way individuals select actions, evaluate people and events, and explain their actions and evaluations. The unique features of values have implications for their impact on behavior. People are highly satisfied with their values and perceive them as close to their ideal selves. At the same time, however, daily interpersonal interaction reveals that individuals hold different, sometimes opposing, value profiles. These individual differences are even more apparent when individuals from different cultures interact.

The collected chapters address the links between values and behavior from a cultural perspective. They review studies conducted in various cultures and discuss culture as a moderator of the relationships between values and behavior. Structurally, part I of the volume discusses what values are and how they should be measure; part II then examines the contents of the relationships between values and behavior in different life-domains, including prosocial behavior, aggression, behavior in organizations and relationships formation. Part III explores some of the moderating mechanisms that relate values to behavior. Taken together, these chapters review and synthesize over twenty years of research on values and behavior, and propose new insights that have important implications for both research and for practice.

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