How do values affect your life

They tend to remain unchanged throughout our lives and are personal, but their prioritizing varies according to what stage of life we are in. That is having a choice to make the right decision for us, as you choose based on what is important to you and what you are prioritizing in life. For example, if you become aware that freedom is your number one value, you would make a different decision than if security was in first place.

Or if you value adventure, this will make you follow a different path than someone who values routine. Knowing your values affects your behavior as you are acting in full integrity with who you are, and you do walk your talk. You take decisions and actions honoring these values. It does take courage to live up to the values. I am not insinuating that just knowing your values, would make a difference in your life.

As that is integrity and authenticity. Being and owning your full self and what you stand for. It is doing the hard things that you stand for rather than what is easy — that means staying true to your values.

When you are not in alignment with your values, you feel off and there is dissonance internally. Our children never fail to imitate us. Young children and adolescents alike learn a great deal about how to act by watching you. So, model the values and traits you wish to cultivate in your child: respect, friendliness, honesty, kindness, tolerance.

Do things for other people without expecting a reward. Express thanks and offer compliments. Above all, treat your children the way you value people should be treated, with kindness, patience and respect. They will in turn reciprocate these same behaviors to you and to others. Values may change throughout a lifetime. So remember, the family is laying an important foundation for their child's values to grow when they:. This means for every one-point increase in the importance attributed to benevolence, we would expect a 0.

Benevolence and self-direction predicted a significant decrease in experienced intellect, while conformity and tradition predicted a significant increase in experienced intellect.

Power, conformity, tradition and stimulation predicted a significant increase in experienced adversity, while benevolence, universalism, security and self-direction predicted a significant decrease in experienced adversity. Achievement and conformity predicted a significant increase in experienced deception, while self-transcendence, security, and self-direction predicted a significant decrease in experienced deception.

Benevolence predicted a significant increase in experienced sociality, while self-direction predicted a significant decrease in experienced sociality.

Controlling for age and gender, we found that gender was a significant predictor of duty, i. Age predicted a significant decrease in adversity and deception. Power and tradition predicted a significant increase in experienced adversity. Self-direction predicted a significant increase in experienced positivity. Tradition predicted a significant increase in experienced deception.

There was no influence of age or gender. The results concerning relation between values and intellect reveal a reversed pattern than hypothesized. The results for adversity and deception are at least partly in line with our assumptions. While the relation between the self-enhancement-self-transcendence dimension was clear and mostly as expected, the relation between the openness-to-change-conservation dimension was more inconclusive.

Namely, not all values belonging to same higher dimension showed the same relation, which is contrary to the assumed compatibilities in the circumplex model. Overall the pattern of results suggests that in both samples individual differences in values are at least to some extent associated with differences in situation experiences in everyday life.

However, unfortunately the results did not replicate and therefore, no clear pattern emerged. Possible reasons and implications for these findings are further discussed in the general discussion section.

The investigation of human values and their relation to behavior has been an on-going topic in psychology Roccas and Sagiv, However, up to date, the link between values and actual behavior, i. There have been several attempts to explain this missing link. For example, some researchers assumed that in order for values to influence behavior they need to be activated Maio, ; Sagiv et al. Others researchers have argued that values are too abstract to actually determine one single behavior or even that behavior cannot actually be assigned to a specific value because there might be different understandings of which behavior actually represents a value depending on social or cultural backgrounds i.

Goal of the present work was to contribute to the value-behavior link discussion by providing a novel approach, i. Even so, we did not investigate any kind of behavior, we will first discuss the present results, the limitation of the studies and then there potential meaning for the value-behavior link. First, we reported the relations between values and subjective situation experiences.

Overall, the pattern of correlations between samples was quite different. We found many relations in Sample 1, unfortunately there were only few relations in Sample 2.

While self-transcendence values were negatively related to all negative situation characteristics i. Power was in both samples related to adversity and deception, but there emerged no clear pattern for achievement.

In Sample 1, security was strongly negatively related to almost all situation characteristics, while tradition and conformity only showed moderate relations and in the opposite direction.

Interestingly, the conflicting value self-direction also was negatively related to almost all situation characteristics. Due to the circumplex model, we assumed that opposing values would show opposite relations with the same characteristic resulting in a sinusoid curve Schwartz, As a consequence, this similar perception might result in different pattern of emotional and behavioral outcomes.

For example, both valuing security and self-direction was associated with lower experience of situations high in intellect. Experiencing that a situation is low in intellect might active an individual high in self-direction to leave the situation or evoke negative feelings and emotions. Contrary, experiencing that a situation is low in intellect might active an individual high in security to stay in the situation or evoke positive feelings.

However, the conflicting values benevolence and power did show opposing relations with the same situation characteristics. Therefore, the results provide neither strong evidence for the typical sinusoid curve nor for the idea that opposing values might shift perception in a similar way.

Interestingly, duty, positivity and sociality did not show any strong relations with values. The results by Rauthmann et al. In an ambiguous situation individual differences might influence the perception of potential threats more than the perception of having a task to attend to. However, in that case it would be surprising that positivity is not related to values as it also relates to more subjective experience.

Other measurements have been developed and future research should examine if using the other instruments, which capture situation characteristics with only adjective might be better suited overview: Horstmann et al. Overall, the correlations pattern differed immensely and should be treated with caution. Considering the results concerning the ICCs, they show that individual differences especially influence the experience of negatively connoted situation experiences, i.

This could indicate that values do indeed transcend specific situation in daily life and are a lens through which people see and interpret their surroundings. In Sample 1, our results show that benevolence predicts less aversive and deceptive situation experience in daily life, while the opposing pattern emerged for power as a predictor.

Unfortunately, this pattern could not be replicated in Sample 2. From a psychological perspective, the relation between subjective situation experiences and values might be more interesting than the relation to actual activities or contacts. The findings suggest that values are not necessarily used to evaluate a specific action or situation; rather they may refer to a proneness to see situations in certain way. If this is the case our findings could be used to predict how people with different values will experience identical situations, i.

The games do have objective differences e. For example, an individual valuing power might be prone to experience most economic games as deceptive situations compared to people valuing benevolence. The differences in situation experience may also serve as a mediator between values and behavior. Although, considering prior research Sherman et al. While ESM uses momentary assessment to capture brief events, the DRM uses a memory technique to recall all the events on a typical day.

Even so, due to the specific technique recall biases and memory distortions are reduced, they cannot be completely excluded. Some studies show that in general negative events are easier to recall Porter et al.

Moreover, using ESM can lead to overestimated brief events and distortions due to sample bias Kahneman et al. Think about the situation teaching a class, using ESM participants might never report this episode as they will probably not stop teaching in order to fill out a questionnaire. Using DRM participants will probably report this episode as part of the day. These methodical differences provide some explanation for the differences between our findings and previous findings Sherman et al.

Both methods have their strengths and depending on the research question one or the other might be more useful. Another point worth of discussing, is that, values belonging to the same higher dimension did not always relate to situation experience in similar manner.

Although, that might seem surprising, one should keep in mind that even if values are compatible and belong to the same higher dimension, they do represent distinct motivational goals. Power and achievement are both self-enhancement values, but only power is related to experiencing adversity, i. In general, people assume that others have a similar motivation than themselves Ockenfels and Raub, Thus, one explanation could be that people who value power often unconsciously assume that others want to challenge their dominate role, which in turn leads to a perceived threat.

Furthermore, some values which are supposed to be compatible i. The findings contradict the assumption of the circumplex value model. Situation selection in everyday life could be an explanation for the contradictive results.

Especially, security often showed a different pattern than conformity and tradition. Security refers to valuing the status quo and a safe surrounding; therefore, it seems plausible that people valuing security experienced less negative and aversive situations.

It is opposed to their underlying motivational goal to put themselves in situations which might entail threats. On the other hand, valuing conformity and tradition implies being obedient to socially imposed expectations. Thus, people may find themselves in situations which are unpleasant, however, due to social expectations they stay in the situation.

Past studies have already shown that individual differences i. Therefore, it seems to be more likely that individual differences might also represent a proneness to experience certain situations characteristics but not determining them.

Contrary to our hypothesis, no value was correlated or predicted the experience of duty. Moreover, additional analyses revealed that in Sample 1 gender, but not age, predicted experienced duty, that is women reported more situations high in duty than men. Considering the sample, it could be that with certain life events e. Another explanation could be that all of our participants reported a week day, which might be determined by situations or tasks which cannot be actively chosen.

Maybe value relations to duty, but also to the other situation characteristics may be enhanced or even be opposed to our findings during the weekend, i. Opposed to our assumptions, we further found that self-direction was negatively and tradition positively related to experienced intellect. Again, we believe that the pattern might change during the weekend.

People valuing self-direction may not experience intellect during daily routine, while people valuing tradition may even experience daily routine as stimulating and intellectual challenging. Our assumptions were mainly based on the theoretical idea that people are consciously or unconsciously seeking out situations which fit their values. Research in the work context supports this idea, showing that values influence amongst others career choices Sagiv and Schwartz, However, we did not find that for example people valuing stimulation also experience more stimulating situations.

It seems worthwhile to investigate the relation between values and situation selection over a couple of days in future research. As mentioned above, participants may consciously or unconsciously seek out different situations, e. Situation selection Rauthmann et al. Unfortunately, our data does not allow drawing any conclusions about active situation selection.

Participants only reported which situations they encounter, but we do not know if they actually put themselves into the situation. Furthermore, our data does not allow drawing any conclusion about how people actually perceive the identical situation, i. One major limitation is that we cannot draw any conclusions about situation selection and situation construal in daily life.

Furthermore, we have no behavioral data in daily life. However, we believe that our data provides some initial evidence and can inspire future research. For example, one could easily extend the DRM to capture self-reported behavior but also it would be possible to add some items to ask about active situation selection. In addition, comparing in situ and ex situ ratings of the situation descriptions given in the DRM could provide some clue about the relation between values and situation construal.

However, considering the recent problems concerning the replicability of psychological findings the major limitation is that we could not replicate our findings in the second sample.

We chose our samples for theoretical and practical reasons i. On a theoretical level to investigate how values relate to situation experiences in daily life, it seemed useful to have samples which differed in several aspects e.

One reason could be that not only did the samples differ in their demographics, but also we used different instruments to measure values and situation characteristics in both samples. Maybe, the results would have been more similar if the studies had not differed on all three aspects.

Even so, if a real effect exists and the instruments are valid, the differences in results between the samples should not have been so pronounced.

Furthermore, both samples are quite small, which probably entails a low power, and thus in order to find an effect it would need to be large effect. Given the very broad conceptualization of both values and situation characteristics, it seems more realistic to assume a small effect. Additionally, we conducted multiple testing which — without corrections — might lead to an inflation of the alpha error.

Thus, the present results should be taken with caution and be seen as some initial evidence that points in the direction of values being related to subjective situation experience. A lot of further research is needed to make any strong or reliable statements. Previous research has shown that individual differences in situation perception also transfer to differences in behavior Rauthmann et al.

However, as we have no real behavioral data in our study, we cannot affirm this assumption for our data. In the future to better understand and maybe to bridge the value-behavior gap, it might be worth to examine the relation between value consistent behavior and situation selection. Situation selection could have similar effects as value activation on value consistent behavior. People who consciously or unconsciously put themselves in competitive situations might activate self-enhancement values.

Individual values reflect how you show up in your life and your specific needs-the principles you live by and what you consider important for your self-interest. Individual values include enthusiasm , creativity , humility, and personal fulfillment. Relationship values reflect how you relate to other people in your life, be they friends, family, or colleagues in your organization.

Relationship values include openness , trust , generosity, and caring.