Values are of paramount importance for a functioning society. We  investigate how people form and develop values, as well as their preconditions and consequences. First, understanding values of pupils may help policy makers to find out what is important to society, design effective programs to emphasize or foster certain values and estimate the effectiveness of interventions to modify value priorities. Second, understanding what is important to pupils can also help schools to design their environment to increase good citizenship and productivity and learn how behavioral patterns evolve as a result of specific underlying values. Third, young adults can reflect on what is important to them and learn how their values are formed at school, or how they can be expressed. In this project, we address these issues by investigating the co-evolution of values, social network structures and behavior on the basis of a survey with schools in Switzerland and Poland.

Authors: René Algesheimer, Jan Cieciuch, Eldad Davidov, Martin Kindschi and Heiko Rauhut