Human Values Across the Lifespan: Age-Graded Differences at Three Hierarchical Levels and What We Can Learn From Them.

Abstract

Personality-development research is flourishing. Here, we extend these efforts horizontally (new constructs) and vertically (new levels within the same construct) by charting out age-graded differences in Schwarz's human values across 80,814 individuals. Conducting a systematic investigation of cross-sectional age-graded differences in human values-from late teenage years to post-retirement-featuring 36 analytical model choices and 180,000 simulation-based decisions, our analyses replicate some earlier findings (e.g., increasing self- and growth-focus during adolescence and increasing security concerns during adulthood), while also highlighting complex and previously unappreciated dynamics. As such, while it is a common practice to aggregate specific values into parsimonious higher-order concepts to ease interpretation, this may risk overlooking meaningful trends in lower-order value development. Specifically, revealing unique and asynchronous patterns for value nuances, we find that aggregation (a) leads to a loss of critical information, (b) creates conflicting results when nuances diverge, and (c) significantly reduces predictive power.