The Social-Psychological Context of Human Values: The Reciprocal Relationship between Personality Traits and Value Orientations

This article investigates and tests the relationship between values (PVQ scale) and personality traits (NEO-FFI) using non-recursive structural modelling while controlling for other potentially significant variables (e.g. age, gender, attractiveness, cognitive skills), an approach that is proposed as an alternative to correlation and regression analyses, which are more common in this type of psychological research. Structural modelling, based on representative data from the Czech follow-up to the PIAAC international research project (2015), reveals the validity of the links between values and personality traits, which is still sometimes overlooked in psychology. The relationship between values and personality traits is more complex than most psychological studies assume, as some personality traits that might be expected to have a strong cognitive component are influenced more by values, while others, vice versa, are weakly associated with values. A new hypothesis then is that the influence of values on traits largely occurs on a conscious level, has a decidedly cognitive basis, and may vary in the long term and change its polarity in response to strong confrontations with the social environment, while the strength and polarity of the influence of personality traits on values remains stable over time.