Abstract:
Personality traits and personal values are two important domains of individual
differences. Traits are enduring and distinguishable patterns of behaviour whereas values
are societally taught, stable, individual preferences that guide behaviour in order to reach
a specific end state. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relations
between self and peer report within the domains of personality traits and values, to
examine the correlations between values and traits, and to explore the amount of
incremental validity of traits and values in predicting behaviour. Two hundred and fiftytwo
men and women from a university setting completed self and peer reports on three
questionnaires. In order to assess personality traits, the HEXACO-PI (Lee & Ashton,
2004) was used to identify levels of 6 major dimensions of personality in participants. To
assess values, the Schwartz Value Survey (Schwartz, 1992) was used to identify the
importance each participant placed on each of Schwartz's 10 value types. To measure
behaviour, a Behavior Scale, created by Bardi and Schwartz (2003), consisting of items
designed to measure the frequency of value-expressive behaviour was used. As expected,
correlations between self and peer reports for the personality scales were high indicating
that personality traits are easily observable to other people. Correlations between self and
peer reports for the values and behaviour scales were only moderate, suggesting that
some goals, and behaviours expressive of those goals, may not always be observable to
others. Consistent with previous research, there were many strong correlations between
traits and values. In addition to the similarities with past research, the present study
found that the personality factor Honesty-Humility was correlated strongly with values
scales (with five correlations exceeding .25). In the prediction of behaviour, it was found
that both personahty and values were able to account for significant and similar amounts
of variance. Personality outpredicted values for some behaviours, but the opposite was
true of other behaviours. Each domain provided incremental validity beyond the other
domain. The impUcations for these findings, along with limitations, and possibilities for
future research are also discussed.
