Associates: Dr Laurel Evans and Dr Lorraine Whitmarsh
Students: Colin Foad, Paul Hanel

There are a number of important ways in which instantiations of values may vary.  For instance, many English phrases show how the value of freedom can be instantiated as serving exploratory motives (e.g., “free speech,” “free will”), self-interest motives (“free enterprise,” “free market”), or benevolent motives (e.g., “free love”). Converging with evidence from prior research on effects of issue framing (Lakoff, 2009), these differences in types of instantiation may be key factors in creating polarized views about how values should be applied.  This has enormous implications for understanding how social-political communications about values are structured and understood.

This research project provides a much-needed examination of basic cognitive differences in how values are instantiated. Our past research has provided a provocative insight into the relevance of prior value instantiations, but this research only examined how instantiations vary in typicality or concreteness (for a review, see Maio, 2010); it is important to go further by testing whether other types of differences between instantiations affect subsequent behaviour. Indeed, instantiations of cognitive concepts in general can vary in a number of other ways (Barsalou, 1987). For instance, some instantiations of the value of helpfulness may exhibit better ease of recall (e.g., donating to charity), expression of the ideal (e.g., donating £1000 instead of £1), or fit to the average instantiation (e.g., a perceived average donation of £5).

In this research, we are exposing participants to instantiations that vary on these dimensions. We then examine the participants’ decisions in new situations that are not directly connected to the prior instantiations, except insofar as they promote the same abstract value (e.g., helpfulness). Together, these experiments assess the extent to which the features of the prior instantiations affect the likelihood of ‘seeing’ the value’s relevance in a subsequent scenario. The experiments also include measures testing whether the effects of value instantiation depend on individual differences in value endorsement (which may affect ease of recall, the perceived “average,” or other ways in which the instantiations are interpreted). Overall, the data are helping to solve extant mysteries concerning how people map values from one situation to the next and decide between different behavioural options.