Values, Strivings, and the Direction of Personality

Last Updated May 22, 2026

Values, strivings, and direction belong near the center of personality psychology because a person is not only someone who differs from others in stable traits, but someone whose life is organized around what matters, what is pursued, and what is judged worthy. Traits describe recurrent tendencies. Values orient judgment. Strivings give motive a lived form. Together, they shape the direction of personality: the ends a person seeks, the conflicts they endures, the standards they internalize, and the futures they work toward, resist, or refuse.

A serious science of personality therefore cannot stop at describing how people typically act. It must also ask what they are trying to realize, what they take to be good, what claims they experience as binding, what projects absorb their effort, and how enduring patterns of character become organized around purpose. Personality has structure, but it also has direction. The person is not simply a profile of traits moving through situations; the person is a value-bearing, striving, conflict-laden, socially situated agent whose life becomes organized around ends.

This article argues that values and strivings are essential to personality psychology because they connect trait structure to lived purpose. They explain why people with similar trait profiles may build radically different lives, why goals can become sources of meaning or distress, why internal conflict can drain personality of coherence, and why culture and power shape not only what people do but what they come to believe is worth doing.

Values and strivings give personality a directional architecture. They do not replace traits, but they explain how traits are aimed. A disciplined person may build a life of care, domination, craft, scholarship, service, accumulation, control, or repair. An open person may pursue art, science, spirituality, status, novelty, or justice. Emotional steadiness may support compassion or cold authority. Without values and strivings, personality psychology can describe style while missing purpose.

Why values and strivings matter

Personality becomes far more intelligible when it is understood as directional. It is not enough to know that a person is conscientious, emotionally reactive, agreeable, open, inhibited, assertive, or socially dominant. One must also ask: toward what ends are these tendencies being deployed? What standards organize judgment? What projects absorb effort? Which concerns are central, and which are merely instrumental? Values and strivings matter because they connect stable individual differences to purpose, commitment, sacrifice, and the lived organization of conduct.

This directional layer is one reason modern personality psychology treats goals, motives, personal projects, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity as essential parts of the field rather than peripheral supplements. Traits remain central, but they are only one level of personality architecture. Values and strivings help explain why similar trait profiles can produce very different lives. Two highly conscientious people may differ profoundly if one is organized around service and the other around prestige, or if one seeks truth while another seeks control.

Values and strivings also matter because they reveal personality’s evaluative dimension. Human beings do not merely prefer. They judge. They rank. They experience some ends as worthy, others as shameful, others as obligatory, others as forbidden, and others as tempting but morally compromised. Personality is therefore shaped by more than desire strength. It is shaped by the moral and evaluative order in which desires are interpreted.

Strivings also give personality its daily form. A person’s broad values may be abstract, but strivings are lived repeatedly: trying to care well, trying to be admired, trying to avoid humiliation, trying to remain honest, trying to prove oneself, trying to stay safe, trying to preserve faith, trying to create something beautiful, trying to be useful, trying not to become like a parent, trying to repair what one has damaged. These repeated projects are the bridge between values and lived personality.

Finally, values and strivings matter because conflict is unavoidable. People rarely live by one value alone. They must negotiate care and ambition, security and freedom, loyalty and truth, belonging and independence, comfort and growth, achievement and integrity. A personality organized around incompatible or externally imposed strivings may become divided, exhausted, or defensive. A personality organized around coherent and well-internalized strivings may experience greater meaning, agency, and direction.

To understand personality deeply, then, one must ask not only what a person is like, but what they are for, what they are against, what they are trying to become, and what kind of life their values make imaginable.

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Values, goals, and personal strivings

Values are broad, relatively enduring beliefs about what is important, desirable, and worthy. They function as transsituational standards that guide evaluation and choice. Goals are more concrete: represented end states or outcomes that a person seeks to attain. Personal strivings, in Robert Emmons’s influential formulation, are the characteristic objectives individuals are typically trying to accomplish in everyday life. These levels are related but not identical. Values supply evaluative direction. Goals specify intended outcomes. Strivings express these concerns in recurrent lived form.

The distinction matters because personality psychology needs a language for both principle and pursuit. A person may value benevolence, set a goal of caring for a sibling, and have a standing striving to be dependable for loved ones. Another may value achievement, pursue promotion, and show a recurring striving to outperform peers. Another may value truth, set a goal of honest communication, and develop a standing striving to avoid self-deception. Values, goals, and strivings therefore form a layered architecture of direction rather than a single undifferentiated motivational mass.

Values are often more general than goals. A person can value justice across many domains without having a single specific justice-related goal at every moment. Goals translate values into actionable ends. Strivings translate repeated goals into characteristic life patterns. A person who values learning may set goals around study, but their deeper striving may be “to keep becoming more intellectually honest.” A person who values security may set financial goals, but the deeper striving may be “to never be vulnerable again.”

Strivings are especially revealing because they often expose the lived tension between endorsed values and psychological needs. A person may claim to value compassion while repeatedly striving for superiority. Another may value independence while constantly striving for approval. Another may value authenticity while striving to avoid conflict. The study of strivings helps reveal not only what people say they value, but what they repeatedly organize life around.

This layered approach also helps explain why goals can become identity-defining. Some goals are merely instrumental: finishing a task, getting through a meeting, saving money for a trip. Others become self-defining because they express central values and organize a long arc of effort: becoming a physician, raising a child well, preserving a language, building a craft, serving a community, protecting a tradition, seeking truth, or repairing a damaged relationship. Personality direction becomes clearest when values, goals, and strivings converge.

Values, goals, and strivings therefore provide a vocabulary for the purposive side of personality. They allow the field to study not only how people behave, but what they are trying to make their behavior serve.

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Traits versus direction

Traits describe how a person tends to think, feel, and behave. Values and strivings describe what that person is trying to make of those tendencies. This difference is fundamental. Traits are descriptive and dispositional. Values and strivings are directional and often normative. They tell us what matters to the person, what they aim toward, what they sacrifice for, and how they judge competing possibilities.

This is why values and strivings can sharply differentiate people who look similar in trait space. A high-openness person may devote that openness to artistic exploration, scientific curiosity, spiritual searching, political imagination, moral inquiry, or cosmopolitan status display. A low-neuroticism person may use emotional steadiness for compassionate leadership, patient caregiving, strategic calculation, or cold domination. High conscientiousness may serve duty, ambition, fear, craft, service, perfectionism, or control. Traits alone cannot answer the question of direction. Personality requires both pattern and purpose.

The distinction also clarifies why traits cannot be treated as moral categories by themselves. Extraversion is not inherently good or bad. It can support sociability, leadership, warmth, manipulation, domination, distraction, or dependence on stimulation. Agreeableness can support compassion, cooperation, moral sensitivity, avoidance, self-erasure, or conflict suppression. Conscientiousness can support responsibility, excellence, rigidity, workaholism, or obedience to harmful systems. Values and strivings determine what traits are mobilized toward.

Direction also explains why the same trait can be experienced differently by the person who possesses it. A highly disciplined person may experience discipline as freedom because it serves valued commitments. Another may experience discipline as imprisonment because it is organized around shame and external pressure. A socially cautious person may experience caution as wisdom, trauma residue, moral restraint, or fear of rejection. Traits become lived through the meanings attached to them.

For this reason, personality psychology needs to resist both trait reductionism and motivational vagueness. Traits give structure; values give orientation; strivings give lived recurrence. A complete account asks how dispositional tendencies, evaluative commitments, and recurring projects become organized into one personality system.

Traits answer the question, “what patterns does this person show?” Values and strivings answer the question, “toward what kind of life are those patterns being directed?”

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Values as personality architecture

Values are not merely opinions about what is good. They are organizing principles of personality. They shape attention, decision-making, moral judgment, emotional response, social affiliation, goal selection, and self-evaluation. A person who values security will notice different risks than a person who values stimulation. A person who values universalism will judge social problems differently from a person who prioritizes conformity or power. A person who values benevolence may experience guilt where another experiences indifference. Values organize what matters.

Values also help structure the relation between the self and the world. They define what the person treats as worth approaching, protecting, sacrificing, resisting, or becoming. They are not always explicit. Some values are consciously endorsed; others are absorbed through family, class, religion, nationality, profession, institutional life, trauma, or survival. A person may not be able to state their values clearly, yet their life may still be organized around them.

Values often become emotionally charged because they are connected to identity. When a central value is affirmed, the person may experience pride, meaning, gratitude, belonging, or resolve. When a central value is violated, the person may experience anger, guilt, shame, betrayal, disgust, grief, or moral injury. Values therefore link motivation to affect. They explain why some events matter far beyond their practical consequences.

Values also shape interpretation. A person who values loyalty may interpret dissent as betrayal. A person who values truth may interpret silence as cowardice. A person who values autonomy may interpret guidance as control. A person who values tradition may interpret change as threat. These interpretations are not merely cognitive; they arise from the value system through which the world is evaluated.

Values are also hierarchical. People may value many things, but not all equally. Conflicts reveal rank order. A person may claim to value family and career, but decisions under pressure show which takes priority. A person may claim to value honesty and belonging, but social risk may expose the deeper ordering. Value hierarchy becomes visible when costs appear.

For personality psychology, values provide architecture because they organize the person’s motivational field. They show how apparently separate goals become connected, how conflicts emerge, why certain choices feel identity-defining, and how moral judgment becomes woven into personality.

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Schwartz and the structure of values

One of the most influential contemporary frameworks for values is Schwartz’s theory of basic personal values. In that framework, values are transsituational goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives, and they are organized in a structured system rather than as a random list of preferences. The theory identifies broad value families such as self-direction, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence, universalism, hedonism, and stimulation. It also emphasizes that these values stand in relations of compatibility and conflict. A value system is therefore not just a set of separate priorities. It is a patterned motivational order.

This structural insight matters greatly for personality psychology. It means that values do not simply add another list of variables to the field. They provide a map of how some directions in life reinforce each other while others compete. A person strongly oriented toward power and achievement may be organized differently from someone strongly oriented toward universalism and benevolence, even if both are equally energetic and disciplined. The direction of personality is shaped not just by strength of motivation but by the arrangement of values within a broader motivational field.

Schwartz’s framework is especially useful because it treats values relationally. Self-direction and stimulation often share an affinity because both emphasize openness to change. Security, conformity, and tradition often share an affinity because they emphasize conservation, order, and continuity. Benevolence and universalism share concern for others, though benevolence is often more focused on close others while universalism expands moral concern more broadly. Power and achievement can align around self-enhancement, status, and personal success.

The theory also helps explain value conflict. A person cannot always maximize openness to change and conservation at the same time. They cannot always maximize self-enhancement and self-transcendence simultaneously. These tensions are not defects in the model; they describe the structure of motivational life. Personality direction often involves negotiating value conflicts rather than simply choosing one pure value.

This is why values are not merely moral ideals. They are motivational systems. They influence which opportunities feel attractive, which obligations feel binding, which losses feel intolerable, and which compromises feel like betrayal. A person’s value structure helps explain why they experience some decisions as practical and others as existential.

For personality psychology, the major contribution is that value structure gives the field a way to study direction systematically. It allows researchers to ask how value priorities differ across persons, how values relate to traits, how values change across the lifespan, how cultures organize value hierarchies, and how value conflict shapes wellbeing, identity, and behavior.

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Personal strivings as lived motivation

Emmons’s personal-strivings framework brought the directional problem closer to lived experience. Instead of asking only what broad values people endorse, it asked what they are actually trying to do in daily life. Personal strivings might include trying to be a good parent, trying to stay disciplined, trying to gain recognition, trying to avoid embarrassment, trying to deepen spiritual life, trying to maintain peace in the household, trying to be taken seriously, or trying to stop repeating a family pattern. These strivings make personality visible as an ongoing project rather than only as a trait profile.

This approach is especially valuable because it connects motivation to wellbeing, conflict, meaning, and everyday self-regulation. A life organized around coherent, valued strivings tends to look very different from a life divided by chronic internal conflict or animated mainly by externally imposed demands. Personal strivings therefore make it possible to study personality as directed action in context rather than as a static inventory of dispositions.

Personal strivings often reveal the difference between public goals and private motives. A person’s public goal may be to succeed professionally, but the deeper striving may be to prove they are not worthless. Another person’s public goal may be to keep a family together, but the deeper striving may be to avoid abandonment, preserve loyalty, or repair inherited harm. The same outward goal can carry different psychological meaning depending on the striving beneath it.

Strivings can also be approach-oriented or avoidance-oriented. Trying to create meaningful work differs from trying not to fail. Trying to build intimacy differs from trying not to be rejected. Trying to live honestly differs from trying not to be exposed. Avoidance strivings are often understandable, especially when shaped by threat, shame, trauma, or social risk, but a life dominated by avoidance may become constricted. Personality direction depends not only on what is pursued, but on whether pursuit is organized around growth, fear, repair, domination, care, or escape.

Strivings also vary in ownership. Some are deeply endorsed: “This is what I care about.” Others are introjected: “I must do this or I am worthless.” Others are externally imposed: “I have to perform this because others demand it.” Others are defensive: “I must never appear weak.” The lived quality of striving depends on whether the person experiences the project as chosen, coerced, inherited, demanded, or necessary for survival.

Personal strivings therefore reveal personality in motion. They show how values become projects, how projects become habits, and how habits become life direction.

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Goal hierarchies, projects, and life organization

Goals are often organized hierarchically. A person may have low-level goals such as sending an email, exercising, finishing a report, apologizing, or attending a meeting. These can serve mid-level projects such as maintaining a relationship, building professional competence, supporting health, or repairing trust. Those projects can serve higher-level values such as care, achievement, integrity, freedom, faith, security, creativity, or justice. Personality direction becomes clearer when these levels are connected.

Goal hierarchy matters because many struggles in personality are struggles of alignment. A person may be busy but directionless when low-level goals are disconnected from higher values. Another may have strong ideals but little practical structure when values are not translated into actionable goals. Another may have effective routines that serve a value they no longer endorse. Another may feel divided because different goal systems serve incompatible identities.

Personal projects organize time. They determine what receives attention, which routines matter, what sacrifices are accepted, what relationships are prioritized, and what kinds of failure hurt most. A person’s calendar, emotional triggers, recurring worries, and repeated efforts often reveal their motivational architecture more clearly than abstract self-description does.

Goal hierarchies also shape resilience. When a lower-level goal fails, a person can adapt if the higher value remains clear. If one job fails but the deeper value is meaningful contribution, the person may find another path. If one relationship changes but the deeper value is love and care, the person may revise the form of commitment. But if a lower-level goal has become fused with identity—if “this achievement” equals “my worth”—failure can become existentially devastating.

Life organization therefore depends on flexibility as well as commitment. A person needs enough value clarity to stay oriented, enough practical goal structure to act, and enough flexibility to revise means when circumstances change. Direction without flexibility becomes rigidity. Flexibility without direction becomes drift.

This is why values and strivings are central to personality development. Development is not only becoming more or less extraverted, conscientious, or emotionally stable. It is also learning which ends are worth pursuing, which goals no longer fit, which inherited demands should be refused, and which commitments deserve a life.

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Value conflict, goal conflict, and psychological cost

Human beings rarely pursue only one value or one striving at a time. They typically live within systems of competing commitments: achievement and intimacy, security and freedom, belonging and truth, care and ambition, status and integrity, tradition and change, autonomy and obligation. Values can conflict because the realization of one may require sacrificing or delaying another. Personal strivings can conflict because they compete for time, energy, moral attention, and self-definition.

This conflict has psychological consequences. Research on personal strivings has linked conflict among strivings to lower wellbeing and greater distress, while value theory likewise emphasizes tensions built into motivational systems. Personality direction is therefore not simply about having strong goals. It is also about whether those goals can be coordinated. A divided architecture of desire often produces friction, ambivalence, exhaustion, and self-undermining.

Some conflict is ordinary and unavoidable. A person cannot always be fully available to family and fully available to work. A person cannot always choose safety and exploration simultaneously. A person cannot always preserve peace and speak the truth without cost. Mature personality does not eliminate conflict. It learns how to interpret, prioritize, and bear conflict without collapsing into confusion or denial.

Other conflict is more damaging because it reflects incompatible internalized standards. A person may feel obligated to be endlessly productive and endlessly available to others. Another may be driven to achieve but ashamed of ambition. Another may value authenticity but fear rejection if they speak honestly. Another may value care while living inside systems that reward indifference. Such conflicts can produce chronic guilt, anxiety, resentment, and fragmentation.

Goal conflict also creates opportunity costs. Time, attention, energy, money, emotion, and social trust are finite. To pursue one goal is often to neglect another. Personality direction therefore requires not only desire but ordering. The person must decide what can be sacrificed, what cannot, and what kind of self is being formed by repeated sacrifices.

Conflict becomes especially painful when values are identity-defining. If loyalty and truth conflict, the person may feel that any choice betrays the self. If achievement and care conflict, the person may experience either ambition or love as morally compromised. If security and freedom conflict, the person may feel trapped between fear and authenticity. Such conflicts are not merely practical. They are existential.

A serious psychology of values and strivings must therefore study coordination, not only endorsement. The question is not merely “what does this person value?” but “how do these values fit together, what happens when they conflict, and what does the person do when no option preserves every central commitment?”

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Self-determination, internalization, and volition

Self-Determination Theory is especially important because it distinguishes not only what people pursue, but how their motives are regulated. Some goals are pursued with greater autonomy and endorsement; others are pursued under pressure, shame, surveillance, fear, reward, punishment, or internalized demand. The theory’s emphasis on autonomy, competence, and relatedness helps clarify that direction is not merely a matter of external achievement. The quality of striving matters too.

Two people may pursue the same visible goal for very different motivational reasons, with different developmental consequences. One student may study because learning is meaningful and self-endorsed. Another may study because failure would bring humiliation. One worker may pursue excellence because craft matters. Another may pursue excellence because worth depends on praise. One caregiver may serve from love and commitment. Another may serve because guilt makes refusal impossible. The same behavior can have different motivational quality.

Internalization is therefore central to personality. People do not simply inherit goals whole. They take up, resist, reinterpret, or absorb social demands with varying degrees of ownership. A family expectation, religious duty, professional norm, cultural ideal, or institutional demand may become deeply endorsed, reluctantly accepted, defensively performed, or rejected. The direction of personality is partly shaped by which values become truly one’s own and which remain forms of compliance or defensive adaptation.

Self-determination does not mean isolated individualism. Autonomy in this tradition is not the absence of relationship or obligation. It is the experience of volition and endorsement. A person can autonomously choose care, duty, discipline, tradition, or sacrifice if those commitments are integrated into the self. Conversely, a person can appear independent while being driven by shame, status pressure, or fear of vulnerability.

Competence matters because strivings require a sense of effective action. A valued goal that feels impossible can become demoralizing. Relatedness matters because strivings are often sustained by belonging, recognition, love, and shared meaning. Values become more livable when people have environments that support autonomy, competence, and relationship.

A serious personality psychology therefore has to distinguish chosen commitment from compelled performance. It must ask not only what a person pursues, but whether the pursuit is owned, whether it supports agency, and whether the social world makes meaningful striving possible.

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Identity, characteristic adaptations, and life direction

Values and strivings are closely tied to what personality theorists often call characteristic adaptations: goals, projects, motives, values, plans, coping strategies, and interpretive patterns that contextualize broader traits. They also connect strongly to identity. People often understand themselves through what they are trying to become, what they refuse to become, and what they take to be nonnegotiable. The direction of personality is therefore not just behavioral. It is existential and narrative.

This helps explain why some values and strivings feel identity-defining while others remain strategic. A person may treat intellectual honesty, family loyalty, artistic creation, social justice, spiritual discipline, public service, scientific rigor, or caregiving as central to who they are. When this happens, motivation is no longer merely instrumental. It becomes part of the self’s architecture. Personality direction is most visible where values, strivings, and identity converge.

Identity also gives values temporal continuity. A person does not simply value something in a moment; they carry it forward. They may remember earlier commitments, judge present action against them, and imagine future selves in relation to them. Values become identity-defining when they organize memory, action, and future possibility. A person may say, “This is what I stand for,” “This is the kind of person I refuse to become,” or “This is the work my life has been moving toward.”

Characteristic adaptations make this identity practical. Values must become plans, routines, habits, relationships, environments, and forms of self-regulation. A person who values compassion may need routines of attention and patience. A person who values truth may need habits of inquiry and courage. A person who values creativity may need protected time, skill development, and tolerance for failure. Identity without adaptive structure remains aspiration.

Values can also become sources of self-conflict when identity is organized around competing demands. Someone may identify as both devoted caregiver and ambitious professional, both loyal family member and truth-teller, both independent person and faithful member of a tradition. These identities may coexist productively or strain one another. Personality direction involves negotiating such tensions across time.

Values and strivings therefore help personality psychology understand the person as a life in motion. Traits describe enduring tendencies; characteristic adaptations show how those tendencies are fitted to roles and contexts; identity gives the person a story of what these commitments mean. Direction emerges from their interaction.

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Culture, power, and the social shaping of values

Values are personal, but they are never socially innocent. Families, schools, workplaces, religious traditions, states, markets, media, professions, and peer groups all shape what people come to treat as worthy. They socialize ideals of success, duty, care, conformity, distinction, sacrifice, discipline, desire, purity, productivity, patriotism, consumption, humility, and freedom. Some value orientations are rewarded and institutionalized; others are marginalized or punished. This means the direction of personality is partly formed within unequal social worlds.

A serious account of values and strivings must therefore include culture and power. What a person pursues cannot be explained solely by private preference. It is also shaped by opportunity, constraint, legitimacy, and social recognition. Personality direction is partly a record of what kinds of striving a person was permitted, encouraged, or forced to make their own.

Culture supplies value languages. In some settings, the good life is framed through independence, achievement, authenticity, and self-expression. In others, it is framed through family duty, religious devotion, communal responsibility, honor, humility, or continuity with tradition. These are not merely abstract differences. They shape what people notice, what they feel guilty about, what they admire, what they hide, and what they pursue.

Power shapes which values become socially dominant. A labor market may teach people to value productivity over care. A school may reward compliance while claiming to value creativity. A nation may celebrate freedom while restricting whose freedom counts. A family may praise sacrifice while benefiting from one person’s self-erasure. A profession may call status-seeking excellence. Institutions do not merely reflect values; they manufacture and reward them.

Marginalized communities often face value conflicts imposed from outside. A person may have to balance authenticity with safety, cultural loyalty with institutional success, family obligation with personal aspiration, spiritual commitment with social exclusion, or survival with dignity. Such conflicts should not be reduced to private ambivalence. They may reflect the unequal distribution of risk and recognition.

Culture also shapes which strivings are imaginable. People need models of possible lives. They need stories, roles, institutions, mentors, and public recognition that make certain futures thinkable. If a society does not recognize a person’s gifts, history, language, or dignity, their strivings may be constrained before they are even named.

Values and strivings are therefore both personal and political. A personality psychology of direction must ask not only what the person values, but what worlds taught, rewarded, punished, distorted, or denied those values.

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Development and change in values and strivings

Values and strivings develop across the life course. Childhood begins the process through attachment, imitation, discipline, family narrative, religious or cultural formation, reward, punishment, and early experiences of safety or threat. Children learn what is admired, what is forbidden, what brings love, what brings shame, what must be hidden, and what kind of person they are expected to become. Early values are rarely chosen in a fully reflective sense, but they are powerful foundations.

Adolescence intensifies value exploration. Young people begin to compare inherited values with peer values, institutional expectations, media ideals, political identities, religious commitments, and emerging self-understanding. They may accept family values, rebel against them, reinterpret them, or hold them in unresolved tension. Strivings become more explicitly tied to identity: becoming successful, attractive, moral, independent, loyal, creative, admired, safe, or free.

Emerging adulthood often reorganizes values through education, work, intimacy, migration, political awakening, religious change, failure, and independence. People discover what inherited ideals cost in practice. Some values become more deeply endorsed; others are discarded. Some strivings become realistic projects; others collapse under constraint. This period can produce both expansion and disillusionment.

Adulthood often tests values through responsibility. Work, partnership, parenting, caregiving, leadership, debt, illness, grief, and moral accountability reveal whether values can survive inconvenience. A value becomes real when it costs something. A person may discover that they value family more than status, truth more than comfort, security more than novelty, or dignity more than belonging. Development often clarifies hierarchy through pressure.

Midlife and later life bring further revision. People may reassess ambition, legacy, care, faith, mortality, regret, and contribution. Values may shift from acquisition to meaning, from performance to relationship, from external validation to integrity, from novelty to continuity, or from private success to generativity. These shifts are not universal, but they show that personality direction remains developmental.

Values can also change after trauma, illness, migration, moral injury, bereavement, conversion, political struggle, recovery, or major failure. Such experiences may reorder the motivational system. What once seemed central may become secondary. What once seemed abstract may become urgent. Personality development includes this reordering of what matters.

A lifespan account of personality must therefore study not only whether traits change, but how people revise their values, abandon strivings, internalize new commitments, and reinterpret the direction of their lives.

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Moral personality and responsibility

Values and strivings are central to moral personality because they organize what a person treats as worth protecting, pursuing, sacrificing, or refusing. Moral character is not only a matter of possessing traits such as honesty, compassion, courage, or self-control. It also depends on what those capacities are directed toward. Courage may serve justice or cruelty. Discipline may serve care or domination. Loyalty may protect the vulnerable or excuse harm. Values give moral direction to capacities.

Responsibility enters because people can be called to examine their values and strivings. A person may inherit values from family, culture, institution, or trauma, but adulthood often requires asking whether those values deserve continued loyalty. Some inherited strivings may need integration; others need refusal. A serious personality psychology must recognize both formation and accountability. People are shaped, but they also participate in shaping what they endorse.

Moral conflict often appears as value conflict. Telling the truth may threaten loyalty. Protecting peace may require confronting injustice. Caring for one person may limit care for another. Pursuing excellence may threaten humility or relationship. Such conflicts do not always have clean resolutions. Moral personality is partly the capacity to remain responsible under competing goods.

Values can also be distorted. A person may call control “responsibility,” status “excellence,” fear “prudence,” self-erasure “care,” revenge “justice,” or conformity “morality.” Personality psychology should not accept value labels uncritically. It should ask how values function: what they protect, what they justify, what they obscure, and whom they serve.

At the same time, moral analysis must avoid simplistic blame. People’s values are shaped by insecurity, coercion, exclusion, violence, poverty, propaganda, family systems, and institutional incentives. Some strivings that appear selfish may have roots in survival. Some compliance may reflect danger. Some ambition may reflect the need to escape degradation. Responsibility should be contextual, not abstract.

The moral personality is therefore a directed personality. It is not enough to ask whether a person is strong, disciplined, warm, stable, or intelligent. One must ask what those qualities serve, what harms they excuse, what goods they protect, and whether the person is willing to revise their strivings in light of truth and responsibility.

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Mathematical lens: value systems and directed personality

The architecture of values and strivings can be expressed formally by treating personality direction as an ordered motivational system. Suppose a person has a vector of value priorities:

A person’s recurring strivings can be represented as a second vector:

The linkage between values and strivings can then be modeled by a weighted relation matrix \(A\), where \(a_{jm}\) indicates how strongly striving \(m\) serves value \(j\). In compact form, the directional organization of strivings can be written as:

Goal conflict can be modeled by incompatible payoff structures. If an action \(x\) serves multiple valued ends with different weights, overall utility may be expressed as:

Motivational quality can be modeled in need-based terms. If autonomy \(A\), competence \(C\), and relatedness \(R\) support the internalization and vitality of goal pursuit, one may write:

A value-conflict index can also be represented as the weighted tension among endorsed values:

Finally, a model of life-direction coherence can combine value clarity, striving ownership, goal feasibility, and conflict:

These equations do not reduce purpose to mathematics. They clarify the architecture: values, strivings, ownership, conflict, and social feasibility operate together to shape the direction of personality.

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R: modeling values, strivings, and goal conflict

The R example below illustrates how a researcher might analyze basic value priorities, personal strivings, motivational quality, conflict among strivings, and life satisfaction. The workflow treats direction as a structured system rather than a loose collection of preferences.

# Values, Strivings, and the Direction of Personality
# R workflow for modeling value priorities, personal strivings,
# motivational quality, conflict, and life satisfaction

# Install packages if needed
# install.packages(c("readr", "dplyr", "ggplot2", "broom", "modelsummary"))

library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
library(broom)
library(modelsummary)

# Read data
# Expected columns:
# person_id, value_context,
# benevolence, universalism, self_direction, achievement,
# power, security, tradition, stimulation,
# striving_meaning, striving_status, striving_care,
# striving_autonomy, striving_competence, striving_relatedness,
# striving_conflict, striving_ownership, life_satisfaction
data <- read_csv("values_strivings_personality.csv")

# Inspect structure
glimpse(data)
summary(data)

# Create value composites and striving indices
data <- data %>%
  mutate(
    self_transcendence = (benevolence + universalism) / 2,
    self_enhancement = (achievement + power) / 2,
    openness_to_change = (self_direction + stimulation) / 2,
    conservation = (security + tradition) / 2,
    value_tension_self_transcendence_enhancement =
      abs(self_transcendence - self_enhancement),
    value_tension_openness_conservation =
      abs(openness_to_change - conservation),
    value_tension_total = (
      value_tension_self_transcendence_enhancement +
        value_tension_openness_conservation
    ) / 2,
    striving_prosocial_orientation = (striving_meaning + striving_care) / 2,
    striving_status_orientation = striving_status,
    motivational_quality = (
      striving_autonomy +
        striving_competence +
        striving_relatedness +
        striving_ownership
    ) / 4,
    life_direction_coherence = (
      motivational_quality +
        striving_prosocial_orientation +
        self_transcendence
    ) / 3 - striving_conflict / 7
  )

# Correlation matrix
cor_vars <- data %>%
  select(
    benevolence,
    universalism,
    self_direction,
    achievement,
    power,
    security,
    tradition,
    stimulation,
    self_transcendence,
    self_enhancement,
    openness_to_change,
    conservation,
    value_tension_total,
    striving_meaning,
    striving_status,
    striving_care,
    striving_conflict,
    motivational_quality,
    life_direction_coherence,
    life_satisfaction
  )

cor_matrix <- cor(cor_vars, use = "pairwise.complete.obs")
print(round(cor_matrix, 2))

# Model 1:
# life satisfaction predicted by value priorities,
# strivings, motivational quality, and conflict
model_life_satisfaction <- lm(
  life_satisfaction ~ self_transcendence +
    self_enhancement +
    openness_to_change +
    conservation +
    striving_meaning +
    striving_status +
    striving_care +
    motivational_quality +
    striving_conflict,
  data = data
)

# Model 2:
# Does motivational quality buffer striving conflict?
model_buffer <- lm(
  life_satisfaction ~ striving_conflict * motivational_quality +
    self_transcendence +
    self_enhancement +
    openness_to_change +
    conservation,
  data = data
)

# Model 3:
# life-direction coherence as an outcome
model_direction <- lm(
  life_direction_coherence ~ self_transcendence +
    openness_to_change +
    striving_ownership +
    striving_conflict +
    value_tension_total,
  data = data
)

summary(model_life_satisfaction)
summary(model_buffer)
summary(model_direction)

# Clean model outputs
tidy(model_life_satisfaction, conf.int = TRUE)
tidy(model_buffer, conf.int = TRUE)
tidy(model_direction, conf.int = TRUE)

modelsummary(
  list(
    "Life Satisfaction" = model_life_satisfaction,
    "Conflict Buffer" = model_buffer,
    "Life Direction Coherence" = model_direction
  )
)

# Create directional profiles
data <- data %>%
  mutate(
    transcendence_level = if_else(
      self_transcendence > median(self_transcendence, na.rm = TRUE),
      "higher_transcendence",
      "lower_transcendence"
    ),
    enhancement_level = if_else(
      self_enhancement > median(self_enhancement, na.rm = TRUE),
      "higher_enhancement",
      "lower_enhancement"
    ),
    conflict_level = if_else(
      striving_conflict > median(striving_conflict, na.rm = TRUE),
      "higher_conflict",
      "lower_conflict"
    ),
    direction_profile = paste(
      transcendence_level,
      enhancement_level,
      conflict_level,
      sep = "_"
    )
  )

profile_summary <- data %>%
  group_by(direction_profile) %>%
  summarise(
    n = n(),
    self_transcendence_mean = mean(self_transcendence, na.rm = TRUE),
    self_enhancement_mean = mean(self_enhancement, na.rm = TRUE),
    motivational_quality_mean = mean(motivational_quality, na.rm = TRUE),
    striving_conflict_mean = mean(striving_conflict, na.rm = TRUE),
    life_direction_coherence_mean = mean(life_direction_coherence, na.rm = TRUE),
    life_satisfaction_mean = mean(life_satisfaction, na.rm = TRUE),
    .groups = "drop"
  )

print(profile_summary)

# Plot striving conflict and life satisfaction
ggplot(data, aes(x = striving_conflict, y = life_satisfaction)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.6) +
  geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = TRUE) +
  labs(
    title = "Striving Conflict and Life Satisfaction",
    x = "Striving Conflict",
    y = "Life Satisfaction"
  )

# Plot motivational quality and life-direction coherence
ggplot(data, aes(x = motivational_quality, y = life_direction_coherence)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.6) +
  geom_smooth(method = "lm", se = TRUE) +
  labs(
    title = "Motivational Quality and Life-Direction Coherence",
    x = "Motivational Quality",
    y = "Life-Direction Coherence"
  )

# Save outputs
write_csv(data, "values_strivings_personality_scored.csv")
write_csv(profile_summary, "values_strivings_direction_profile_summary.csv")

This workflow is useful because it shows how value priorities and everyday strivings can be analyzed together rather than treated as separate literatures. It also distinguishes value content, motivational quality, conflict, and life-direction coherence.

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Python: estimating value priorities and motivational tradeoffs

The Python example below performs a parallel analysis, estimating relations among values, strivings, motivational quality, conflict, life-direction coherence, and life satisfaction.

# Values, Strivings, and the Direction of Personality
# Python workflow for estimating value priorities,
# motivational quality, conflict, and life-direction coherence

# Install packages if needed:
# pip install pandas numpy statsmodels

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import statsmodels.formula.api as smf

# Read data
# Expected columns:
# person_id, value_context,
# benevolence, universalism, self_direction, achievement,
# power, security, tradition, stimulation,
# striving_meaning, striving_status, striving_care,
# striving_autonomy, striving_competence, striving_relatedness,
# striving_conflict, striving_ownership, life_satisfaction
df = pd.read_csv("values_strivings_personality.csv")

print(df.head())
print(df.info())
print(df.describe(include="all"))

# Value composites
df["self_transcendence"] = (
    df["benevolence"] + df["universalism"]
) / 2

df["self_enhancement"] = (
    df["achievement"] + df["power"]
) / 2

df["openness_to_change"] = (
    df["self_direction"] + df["stimulation"]
) / 2

df["conservation"] = (
    df["security"] + df["tradition"]
) / 2

# Value-tension indices
df["value_tension_self_transcendence_enhancement"] = (
    df["self_transcendence"] - df["self_enhancement"]
).abs()

df["value_tension_openness_conservation"] = (
    df["openness_to_change"] - df["conservation"]
).abs()

df["value_tension_total"] = (
    df["value_tension_self_transcendence_enhancement"]
    + df["value_tension_openness_conservation"]
) / 2

# Striving and motivational-quality indices
df["striving_prosocial_orientation"] = (
    df["striving_meaning"] + df["striving_care"]
) / 2

df["striving_status_orientation"] = df["striving_status"]

df["motivational_quality"] = (
    df["striving_autonomy"]
    + df["striving_competence"]
    + df["striving_relatedness"]
    + df["striving_ownership"]
) / 4

df["life_direction_coherence"] = (
    df["motivational_quality"]
    + df["striving_prosocial_orientation"]
    + df["self_transcendence"]
) / 3 - (df["striving_conflict"] / 7)

# Correlations
corr_vars = [
    "benevolence",
    "universalism",
    "self_direction",
    "achievement",
    "power",
    "security",
    "tradition",
    "stimulation",
    "self_transcendence",
    "self_enhancement",
    "openness_to_change",
    "conservation",
    "value_tension_total",
    "striving_meaning",
    "striving_status",
    "striving_care",
    "striving_conflict",
    "motivational_quality",
    "life_direction_coherence",
    "life_satisfaction",
]

print(df[corr_vars].corr(numeric_only=True).round(2))

# Model 1:
# life satisfaction predicted by value priorities,
# strivings, motivational quality, and conflict
model_life_satisfaction = smf.ols(
    "life_satisfaction ~ self_transcendence + self_enhancement + "
    "openness_to_change + conservation + striving_meaning + "
    "striving_status + striving_care + motivational_quality + "
    "striving_conflict",
    data=df,
).fit()

# Model 2:
# Does motivational quality buffer striving conflict?
model_buffer = smf.ols(
    "life_satisfaction ~ striving_conflict * motivational_quality + "
    "self_transcendence + self_enhancement + "
    "openness_to_change + conservation",
    data=df,
).fit()

# Model 3:
# life-direction coherence as an outcome
model_direction = smf.ols(
    "life_direction_coherence ~ self_transcendence + "
    "openness_to_change + striving_ownership + "
    "striving_conflict + value_tension_total",
    data=df,
).fit()

print(model_life_satisfaction.summary())
print(model_buffer.summary())
print(model_direction.summary())

# Directional profile groups
df["transcendence_level"] = np.where(
    df["self_transcendence"] > df["self_transcendence"].median(),
    "higher_transcendence",
    "lower_transcendence",
)

df["enhancement_level"] = np.where(
    df["self_enhancement"] > df["self_enhancement"].median(),
    "higher_enhancement",
    "lower_enhancement",
)

df["conflict_level"] = np.where(
    df["striving_conflict"] > df["striving_conflict"].median(),
    "higher_conflict",
    "lower_conflict",
)

df["direction_profile"] = (
    df["transcendence_level"]
    + "_"
    + df["enhancement_level"]
    + "_"
    + df["conflict_level"]
)

profile_summary = (
    df.groupby("direction_profile")
    .agg(
        n=("direction_profile", "count"),
        self_transcendence_mean=("self_transcendence", "mean"),
        self_enhancement_mean=("self_enhancement", "mean"),
        motivational_quality_mean=("motivational_quality", "mean"),
        striving_conflict_mean=("striving_conflict", "mean"),
        life_direction_coherence_mean=("life_direction_coherence", "mean"),
        life_satisfaction_mean=("life_satisfaction", "mean"),
    )
    .reset_index()
)

print(profile_summary)

# Context summary
context_summary = (
    df.groupby("value_context")
    .agg(
        n=("value_context", "count"),
        self_transcendence_mean=("self_transcendence", "mean"),
        self_enhancement_mean=("self_enhancement", "mean"),
        openness_to_change_mean=("openness_to_change", "mean"),
        conservation_mean=("conservation", "mean"),
        motivational_quality_mean=("motivational_quality", "mean"),
        striving_conflict_mean=("striving_conflict", "mean"),
        life_direction_coherence_mean=("life_direction_coherence", "mean"),
        life_satisfaction_mean=("life_satisfaction", "mean"),
    )
    .reset_index()
)

print(context_summary)

# Flag potentially vulnerable motivational patterns
df["high_conflict_low_ownership"] = (
    (df["striving_conflict"] > df["striving_conflict"].median())
    & (df["striving_ownership"] < df["striving_ownership"].median())
)

df["high_status_low_meaning"] = (
    (df["striving_status"] > df["striving_status"].median())
    & (df["striving_meaning"] < df["striving_meaning"].median())
)

pattern_summary = pd.DataFrame(
    {
        "pattern": [
            "high_conflict_low_ownership",
            "high_status_low_meaning",
        ],
        "n": [
            int(df["high_conflict_low_ownership"].sum()),
            int(df["high_status_low_meaning"].sum()),
        ],
        "proportion": [
            float(df["high_conflict_low_ownership"].mean()),
            float(df["high_status_low_meaning"].mean()),
        ],
    }
)

print(pattern_summary)

# Model coefficients
model_outputs = pd.DataFrame(
    {
        "life_satisfaction": model_life_satisfaction.params,
        "conflict_buffer": model_buffer.params,
        "life_direction_coherence": model_direction.params,
    }
)

print(model_outputs)

# Save processed data and outputs
df.to_csv("values_strivings_personality_scored_python.csv", index=False)
profile_summary.to_csv(
    "values_strivings_direction_profile_summary_python.csv",
    index=False,
)
context_summary.to_csv(
    "values_strivings_context_summary_python.csv",
    index=False,
)
pattern_summary.to_csv(
    "values_strivings_pattern_summary_python.csv",
    index=False,
)
model_outputs.to_csv(
    "values_strivings_model_coefficients_python.csv"
)

This kind of analysis helps make direction empirically tractable. Personality can then be studied not only as a set of traits, but as an organized field of values, strivings, conflict, ownership, and commitment.

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GitHub repository

The companion GitHub repository provides reproducible research scaffolding for this article, including synthetic values-and-strivings data, documentation, validation materials, and multi-language workflows for examining value priorities, personal strivings, motivational quality, striving ownership, goal conflict, value tension, life-direction coherence, profile summaries, and motivational tradeoffs.

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Responsible interpretation

Research on values, strivings, and personality direction requires careful interpretation because values are close to dignity, morality, identity, culture, and power. To describe someone’s values as conflicted, externally regulated, status-oriented, achievement-focused, or low in self-transcendence is not merely to describe a variable. It is to speak about how a person understands what is worth living for and what worlds have taught them to pursue.

The first principle is non-reduction. A person cannot be reduced to a value score, striving profile, motivational-quality index, or conflict coefficient. Measures can clarify patterns, but they do not exhaust purpose. A person may endorse security because they are fearful, but also because they have known danger. A person may pursue achievement because of vanity, but also because achievement is a path out of deprivation. A person may value conformity because they lack imagination, but also because belonging and survival have required it.

The second principle is context. Values and strivings are socially formed. Families, schools, religious traditions, labor markets, states, media systems, and institutions teach people what counts as success, duty, dignity, shame, sacrifice, and worth. Researchers should avoid interpreting values as purely private preferences when they may reflect opportunity, coercion, exclusion, institutional reward, trauma, or available futures.

The third principle is humility about conflict. Value conflict is not always pathology. It may reflect the moral complexity of life. Care and ambition, truth and loyalty, security and freedom, justice and peace, autonomy and obligation often genuinely compete. A person with conflicting strivings may not be disordered; they may be living inside real moral and social tension.

The fourth principle is care with autonomy. Self-determination does not mean that only individualistic or self-expressive goals are healthy. A person may autonomously endorse duty, tradition, sacrifice, faith, caregiving, or collective responsibility. Conversely, a person may appear independent while being driven by shame, status competition, or fear. The key question is not whether a goal looks independent, but whether it is owned, meaningful, and supported by humane conditions.

The fifth principle is attention to power. Institutions can manufacture strivings that benefit the institution more than the person. A workplace can make overwork feel like virtue. A school can make compliance feel like character. A market can make consumption feel like identity. A political order can make domination feel like security. Values and strivings must therefore be interpreted critically as well as psychologically.

This article and its companion code are educational and research-oriented. They do not provide clinical assessment, diagnosis, treatment planning, personality testing, moral ranking, workplace screening, educational placement, legal evaluation, or individual prediction. Their purpose is to support disciplined analysis of values, strivings, and personality direction while preserving the dignity, complexity, and social context of persons.

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Conclusion

Values, strivings, and direction deepen personality psychology by showing that individuality is not only patterned but purposive. Traits describe tendencies. Values orient judgment. Strivings give motive a recurring form in daily life. Together, they reveal personality as organized around what a person takes to matter, what they repeatedly pursue, what they refuse, and how they negotiate the conflicts built into a finite life.

The direction of personality is therefore not a decorative add-on to trait theory. It is one of the clearest ways to understand how a person’s life becomes organized. To know a person fully is not only to know their dispositional profile, but to know what they are trying to realize, what they rank highest, what standards they experience as binding, what kinds of conflict divide them, and what worlds have taught them to seek.

A serious personality psychology must therefore join pattern with purpose. It must study traits, but also what traits serve. It must study goals, but also whether goals are owned. It must study values, but also how values are formed by culture, power, and history. Personality direction is where desire, meaning, moral judgment, identity, and social world meet.

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Related articles

• Motivation, Goals, and the Architecture of Desire
• Self-Concept, Self-Esteem, and Self-Knowledge
• Selfhood, Agency, and Personal Identity in Personality Psychology
• Narrative Identity and the Storied Self
• Personality Dynamics: Traits, States, and Situational Variability
• What Is Personality Psychology?
• The Five-Factor Model and the Architecture of Personality

Further reading

• Schwartz, S.H. (2012) ‘An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values’, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1).
• Emmons, R.A. (1986) ‘Personal strivings: An approach to personality and subjective well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), pp. 1058–1068.
• Emmons, R.A. and King, L.A. (1988) ‘Conflict among personal strivings: Immediate and long-term implications for psychological and physical well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), pp. 1040–1048.
• Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2017) Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. New York: Guilford Press.
• McAdams, D.P. and Pals, J.L. (2006) ‘A new Big Five: Fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality’, American Psychologist, 61(3), pp. 204–217.
• Sagiv, L. and Roccas, S. (2022) ‘Personal values across cultures’, Annual Review of Psychology, 73, pp. 517–546.
• Eccles, J.S. and Wigfield, A. (2002) ‘Motivational beliefs, values, and goals’, Annual Review of Psychology, 53, pp. 109–132.

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References

• Emmons, R.A. (1986) ‘Personal strivings: An approach to personality and subjective well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), pp. 1058–1068. Available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-09446-001.
• Emmons, R.A. and King, L.A. (1988) ‘Conflict among personal strivings: Immediate and long-term implications for psychological and physical well-being’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), pp. 1040–1048. Available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1988-31598-001.
• Eccles, J.S. and Wigfield, A. (2002) ‘Motivational beliefs, values, and goals’, Annual Review of Psychology, 53, pp. 109–132. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135153.
• McAdams, D.P. and Pals, J.L. (2006) ‘A new Big Five: Fundamental principles for an integrative science of personality’, American Psychologist, 61(3), pp. 204–217. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16594837/.
• Roberts, B.W., Yoon, H.J., Magee, C.A., Soto, C.J., Wright, A.G.C. and Briley, D.A. (2022) ‘Personality psychology’, Annual Review of Psychology, 73, pp. 489–516. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-114927.
• Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2000) ‘Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being’, American Psychologist, 55(1), pp. 68–78. Available at: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2000_RyanDeci_SDT.pdf.
• Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2017) Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. New York: Guilford Press.
• Sagiv, L. and Roccas, S. (2022) ‘Personal values across cultures’, Annual Review of Psychology, 73, pp. 517–546. Available at: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-125100.
• Schwartz, S.H. (2012) ‘An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values’, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). Available at: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/11/.
• Self-Determination Theory (n.d.) ‘Theory’. Available at: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/.

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