What the evidence shows

The handbook, produced with the support of WWF, Action for Children, and Oxfam, shows that human values—more than facts or incentives—play a decisive role in shaping attitudes and behavior across environmental and social issues. Drawing on psychological research, particularly Schwartz’s framework, the evidence indicates that values operate as an interconnected system: activating certain values reinforces adjacent ones while suppressing opposing orientations, creating broader “spillover” effects.

It demonstrates that appeals to extrinsic values such as wealth, status, and image can undermine long-term social and environmental goals by strengthening counterproductive value sets. In contrast, engaging intrinsic values supports more durable, prosocial engagement. The handbook also shows how these insights translate into practice, with organizational strategies and tools capable of reinforcing—or weakening—desired value shifts.

Key Findings

• Schwartz's values circumplex, based on research across 68 countries and 64,271 people (later expanded to 80+ countries and 48 languages), identifies 10 universal value groups organized along two axes: self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence, and openness to change vs. conservation.

• Values that are "engaged" by communications or experience tend to strengthen neighboring values and suppress opposing ones — for example, people reminded of generosity, self-direction, and family were more likely to support pro-environmental policies than those reminded of financial success and status, without any mention of the environment.

• Historical cases (e.g., post-WWII Britain, post-reunification East Germany) show how sustained policy and institutional change can shift population-level values over time — a phenomenon the authors term "policy feedback." The U.S. civil rights era is cited as a related example of population-level value shift, though driven primarily by social movement pressure rather than policy feedback in the narrower sense.

Stand out data points

• 50% vs. 25% the drop in Swiss citizens' willingness to accept a toxic waste site nearby once financial compensation was introduced alongside the civic-duty appeal — a striking illustration of extrinsic incentives crowding out intrinsic motivation.

• 7th-to-3rd equality's jump in rank among self-reported American values between 1968 and 1971, a shift the cited research links to the civil rights movement's influence during that period — though the short window means this should be read as a documented correlation rather than an isolated causal claim.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Emotional resonance Supports scoring messages on whether they engage intrinsic values (connection, care, fairness) vs. extrinsic ones (status, fear of loss), given evidence these produce different downstream effects.

• Hope Doom Balance Tangential: the "extended parallel process" logic doesn't appear here, but the report's caution about extrinsic fear/status appeals could inform how doom-framed messaging is scored for its values impact.

• Personal relevance Intrinsic values (community, connection, self-direction) are argued to be more durably motivating than extrinsic personal-gain framing, which should inform how "personal relevance" framing is scored.

• Beneficence The report's entire thesis is that pursuing short-term wins via extrinsic appeals can undermine an advocate's own long-term goals, directly aligning with Understories' priority of optimizing for genuine impact over surface engagement.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

"None of us can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as individuals, either. All of us will hold all of the values on the circumplex to some extent."

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Last update: 23 July 2026

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