Values refer to objectives that are desirable, transcendent, and establish the principles guiding the life of a person. Schwartz’s (1992) theory presents a set of 10 values defining a system in which the relationships between them form a circular structure that represents their conflicts and congruences¹1

The 10-value model was recently expanded to a 19-value model (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2022). Importantly, the new model still comprises the initial ten values with some of them being further partitioned. Since the present studies are the first steps in a research program, I decided not to incorporate the complexity of the 19-value model from the outset.

One important point for our purpose concerns the priorities that people attribute to these values. They have been mainly measured through the Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) with questions asking participants to rate the importance of each value item as a guiding principle in their life. Notwithstanding slight departures (Witte et al., 2020), a striking finding regarding the hierarchy of values is the apparent cross-national consensus on the priority of self-transcendence values and the rejection of self-enhancement values, especially power (Schwartz & Bardi, 2001). Indeed, when averaging the ratings at a national level, benevolence values are consistently among the most important followed by universalism, self-direction, security, conformity, hedonism, achievement, tradition, stimulation, and power. This hierarchy stands for both the national level and the individual level. In fact, while there are significant differences in value priorities from one individual to another, depending on gender, and occupation, among others, these differences are relative rather than absolute. For example, business students favor self-enhancement more than psychology students, however, both placed more importance to self-transcendence than self-enhancement (see Arieli et al., 2020 for a review).

However, there are some exceptions to this consensual pattern. Kasser et al. (2007) presented a large body of evidence suggesting how the institutions and ideologies of corporate capitalism foster a set of values related to self-enhancement (i.e., self-interest, desire for financial success, and competition) while at the same time undermine concern for self-transcendence values (i.e., the welfare of others, and developing and maintaining close relations with family and friends). Following this interpretation, Schwartz (2007) showed that the more competitive and market-driven societies are, the more individuals attach importance to achievement, and power values and less to universalism values.

So, ultimately, we are left with two opposing sets of findings. On the one hand, research showing that people generally place more value on self-transcendence values than on self-enhancement values, and on the other hand, studies showing that capitalist societies encourage and foster self-enhancement values and de-emphasize self-transcendence values. How is it possible to reconcile these two divergent streams of research? I will argue that the type of evaluative focus people can adopt possibly explains these differences.

In social psychology, evaluation and value are often thought of as the act of placing a stimulus on a single affective dimension. For example, Tesser and Martin (1996) wrote: “Evaluation refers to what is captured by people’s responses on dimensions such as good-bad, like-dislike, feel good about-feel bad about, approve-disapprove” (p. 400). However, this one-dimensionality has been challenged by works coming from people’s perception literature. According to Dubois and Beauvois (2011), in their daily life, people develop a knowledge of the social value of objects, events, themselves and other people. This knowledge is not descriptive, that is, it is not an attempt to depict an object from its characteristics. Rather, it is an evaluative knowledge proceeding from people’s attempts to make sense of the function that objects have within a certain social system. This evaluative knowledge allows people to attribute value to social objects, and this value, in this theoretical framework, can take on two forms, social desirability and social utility. Social desirability reflects the knowledge people have of affects that a social object can elicit, or ways in which that object can satisfy the principal motivation of people. In other words, the social desirability of an object refers to its reputational likeability. The second dimension relates more to the positioning of the social object in the social status hierarchy and refers to whether it meets the requirements of the functioning of society (Cambon, 2022; see also Butera et al., 2024). This form of value is potentially independent of people’s preferences, and it should be understood in the quasi-economic sense of market value. In other words, this form of worth results from the knowledge of the value that society assigns to the object (i.e., its reputational “bankability”).

Although the distinction between social desirability and social utility is akin to the distinction between the horizontal and the vertical dimensions of the Big Two recently put forth by an adversarial collaboration between the authors of the five main models of social judgment (Abele et al., 2021), it differs on one crucial point: the epistemic status of the perceiver. In the collaborative framework, the perceiver is conceived of as an isolated individual inferring the value that objects can have from her personal point of view. In the evaluative knowledge framework, the perceiver is conceived of as a social agent knowing the value that objects have in society, from the social desirability and social utility standpoint. Thus, this distinction is particularly relevant for answering the question of personal value priority. Indeed, value priorities are highly disputed between social groups, it is likely that when judging the importance of values people not only act as individuals but also as social agents positioning themselves in relation to other groups in society and keeping in mind the social desirability and utility of each value.

Given the definition of social desirability, socially desirable personal values are values that, when expressed by people, are perceived by others as consistent with a human’s main motivations and affects, and tend to elicit positive rather than negative affect in social interactions. In this sense, self-transcendence values should be considered the most desirable values. Indeed, benevolence and universalism generally support behaviors that favor egalitarian, honest, harmonious relations between people (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2022). And these relations have obvious implication for the welfare of people and are usually considered unconditionally positive (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010). On the contrary, self-enhancement values could be considered as having implications opposed to the welfare of people as the excessive pursuit of self-interest and materialism is likely to harm others. For example, Kasser et al. (2007) reviewed literature showing how self-enhancement values conflict with socially desirable features, such as caring about the broader world, and having close relationships with others. Finally, although not as central to the perception of social desirability as characteristics conveyed by self-transcendence, openness to change and conservation values contain features that present a certain level of social desirability (i.e., the search for independence, excitement, pleasure, for openness-to-change; an emphasis on harmony, restraint of actions likely to harm others, for conservation). Thus, I expect self-transcendence to be considered the most socially desirable personal value, self-enhancement the least desirable, and openness-to-change and conservation to lie in the middle.

According to Dubois and Beauvois (2011), it is important to note that social utility should not be equated with its functional meaning ("the state of being useful"), but rather refers to the knowledge people have of an object's "market value" in society. In this sense, socially useful personal values are values that, when expressed by people, are perceived by others as consistent with the main requirements of society, and as endorsed by people having the most highly ranked positions in society²2

Therefore, claiming that self-enhancement values have social utility does not imply that they promote the efficient functioning of society. In fact, self-enhancement values, such as greed and self-interest, often hinder the smooth operation of social systems. Rather, it suggests that these values hold a privileged position in society (a high “market value”), even if it is functionally maladaptive.

To summarize, I expect that self-enhancement values will be considered the most socially useful and least socially desirable personal values whereas self-transcendence will be considered the most socially desirable and least socially useful personal values, with openness-to change and conservation lying in the middle. These hypotheses are consistent with works from Trapnell and Paulhus (2012) showing that self-transcendence (self-enhancement) was highly positively (negatively) correlated with communion (a meta-concept related to the maintenance of positive relationships) whereas openness-to-change and conservation showed only modest positive correlations with this meta-concept. On the contrary, self-enhancement (self-transcendence) was highly positively (negatively) correlated with agency (a meta-concept related to self-advancement in the social hierarchies) whereas openness-to-change and conservation, again, showed only modest positive correlations with this concept.

I conducted two studies to investigate the evaluative basis of judgments about personal values. Study 1 asked participants to judge the 10 personal values of Schwarz’s model using instructions focused on the social desirability and the social utility of personal values, but also using the standard instruction used in most studies on values. Study 2 was a conceptual replication testing the same hypotheses with less oriented instructions and using a more diverse sample to investigate potential differences in value priorities. I expected that a social desirability focus should lead participants to evaluate self-transcendence values more positively than self-enhancement ones, whereas a social utility focus should lead them to evaluate self-enhancement values more positively than self-transcendence ones. For each focus, I expected openness-to-change and conservation values to fall in between these two extremes. For exploratory purposes, I tested whether the standard instruction used in values studies was closer to a social desirability or a social utility focus. I suspected that the standard instruction would be closer to a social desirability focus than to a social utility focus. Indeed, Dentale et al. (2018, Study 2) showed that scores obtained on a values questionnaire with the special instruction to “appear as good as possible with other people” correlated (r = .49) with responses given under the standard instruction. For the sake of brevity, these last analyses are reported in the exploratory analyses section of Study 1 in the supplementary materials.

All material and data set can be found (see Cambon, 2025).

The main goal of this study was to increase the external validity of our results. It differed from Study 1 in several ways. First, rather than using a projective technique, more direct instructions for social desirability and utility were used. So, for social desirability, participants were simply asked to indicate the importance they attached to the different values. This new instruction⁶6

The equivalence between importance and social desirability judgments could be questioned on the basis that the former refers to a personal evaluation whereas the latter to a social evaluation. Although theoretically distinct, these two levels are often highly correlated empirically. For example, Le Barbenchon et al. (2005) found very strong correlations between judgments of social desirability and likeability (r = .96).

Research on the importance of personal values revealed an apparent inconsistency between studies indicating that self-transcendence values were the most endorsed and those suggesting that self-enhancement values were prioritized in capitalist economies. The aim of the present studies was to demonstrate how people's evaluative focus when judging personal values can help explain this discrepancy. Globally, the results showed that, as expected, when people’s focus was on social desirability they prioritized self-transcendence values and rejected self-enhancement values, whereas the opposite occurred when the focus was on social utility, with openness-to-change and conservation values in the middle. To my knowledge, this is the first time that such a hiatus is shown in the literature on personal values.

To increase the external validity of our test, Study 2 used a more direct and ecological method than Study 1. Despite this difference, the results of both studies were quite similar. In addition, I used a population that was quite diverse in its interests and goals. Some participants were in fields known to favor more humanistic and egalitarian values (humanities and human sciences majors), while others were in fields known to promote more materialistic values (engineering, mathematics, biology) and even competitive ones (business). Irrespective of their field of study, participants judged the social utility of values in the same way, with a high degree of consensus. In contrast, judgments of social desirability were moderated by students’ affiliations: students in more materialistic and competitive fields found power values less undesirable than students in more humanistic fields, while the latter found self-transcendence values much more desirable than the former. This finding is consistent with a number of studies showing that individuals and groups who work in, or have interests and goals related to, market-oriented organizations or fields (i.e., people working in for-profit organizations, students in business) place more importance on self-enhancement values than individuals or groups working in, or having interests in, social-oriented organizations or fields (i.e., people working in non-profit organizations, students in psychology) whereas the latter endorse self-transcendence values to a higher extent (Arieli et al., 2020).

Finally, it should be noted that the greater social utility attributed to self-enhancement values over self-transcendence ones is not an isolated finding. In fact, they replicate results obtained using implicit measures of values. For example, Van Berkel et al. (2015) showed that participants asked to respond quickly by giving their first, gut-level, answer, a procedure known to produce judgments similar to other indirect measures such as the IAT (Gawronski & Hahn, 2018), judged power and achievement values more positively than benevolence and universalism. Dentale et al. (2018, Study 1) found similar results using two IATs, one contrasting achievement to benevolence and the other contrasting power to universalism. The similarity between the judgments obtained under a social utility focus and indirect measures is concerning and requires a more systematic investigation. However, it is important to note that this similarity is already compatible with an interpretation of indirect measures as a way to capture the most salient features in the environment (Payne et al., 2017). According to this interpretation, indirect tools do not measure people’s preference for, or endorsement of, a value, but rather its importance and salience in the environment. One can easily imagine that what makes a value salient and important is its social utility. It should come as no surprise that the explicit judgment of the social utility of values produced the same result as the indirect measure.

One lingering question when it comes to personal values is their relationship to behavior (Roccas & Sagiv, 2017). Given that the present work shows that people can simultaneously hold two contrasting value prioritizations in mind, a legitimate question is which hierarchy is more predictive of behavior. From the parallel sketches in the previous paragraph between indirect measures of values and judgments of their social utility, it can be inferred that social utility judgments will be more predictive of a behavior than social desirability ones. Indeed, in Van Berkel et al. (2015, Study 6) as in Dentale et al. (2018, Study 2), the indirect measure of values was a better predictor of behavior than the direct measure (a measure of the importance of values). The better predictive validity of judgments of social utility obviously requires more formal testing. But if confirmed, it would help to integrate contrasting findings in the literature and notably the hiatus between a general self-reported preference for self-transcendence values and the parallel constant growth in indicators of materialistic, competitive behavior measured in most capitalist societies (Twenge & Kasser, 2013). Given this gap between the values people consider desirable and their behavior, it is reasonable to ask whether the social desirability of self-transcendence serves a palliative function. Indeed, valuing humanistic and egalitarian values in a world of competition and inequality can be seen as a way of distorting one's understanding of one’s lived realities and of obscuring and reproducing the harsh nature of the social functioning (Bettache, 2024).

Our empirical efforts do have limitations. One limitation is that the data were collected only in the French context. However, given the cross-cultural consensus on the prioritization of values (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2022), there is no theoretical reason to expect different results regarding the social desirability of personal values. With regard to perceptions of social utility, it should be noted that France is probably one of the Western societies where opposition to liberalism is the strongest (Girerd et al., 2021), and thus where the valorization of self-enhancement should be highly disputed. Consequently, the finding that even French participants recognize the social utility of values that they would otherwise consider socially undesirable is reassuring as to the validity of the results obtained. A promising cross-cultural investigation would be to examine the relationship that exists between judgments of the social desirability and social utility of personal values, whether the correlation between the two judgments is negative, zero, or positive. Indeed, a possible hypothesis would be that the relationship between the two dimensions is all the more positive that people have internalized the social utility of values. From this perspective, one should expect a positive correlation in countries where the principles of a competitive economy are culturally accepted (such as the United States, see Schwartz, 2007) and a negative correlation in countries where these principles are much more disputed (such as France). The current results only partially support this interpretation, since in our sample, although negative, the correlations were weak and not significant (r_{mean-Study 1} (138) = -.18; r_{mean-Study 2} (1881) = -.04).

In the same vein, another limitation was that participants were only students. Research suggests that this type of sample is not fully representative of the general population (Henrich et al., 2010). However, one reassuring fact about the representativeness of the present results is that they are consistent with data obtained from more representative population. As discussed above, the results obtained from business versus humanities and social sciences majors mirrored those from studies involving individuals and groups working in market-versus social-oriented organizations (Arieli et al., 2020).

Finally, the heterogeneity of the operationalizations of social desirability and social utility could be considered a limitation. Study 1 employed a self-presentation paradigm whereas Study 2 used more traditional self-report instructions. Additionally, despite the efforts made to standardize the social utility instructions using similar terms (i.e., “value in today’s (contemporary) society”), the social desirability instructions varied considerably more. Indeed, the social desirability instruction in Study 2 was equivalent to the standard instruction in Study 1. While the differences in operationalization were justified by the high correlations between the standard and social desirability instructions, it should be recognized that correlation does not imply equivalence in capturing the same concept. Nevertheless, the fact that the results of both studies were quite similar send a reassuring message as to the equivalence of these instructions.

To conclude, the finding that people consider self-transcendence values to be the most important is reassuring for our vision of humanity. It has fueled theoretical work suggesting the advent of a post-materialist society (Inglehart, 1977). However, the present work suggests that the whole story may not be so rosy, and that this preference only stands under the specific focus of social desirability. However, when asked to consider personal value priority from a social utility point of view, people consider self-enhancement to be the most important values. The specific focus adopted when judging personal values is thus crucial to understand people’s priorities.