关键词: 价值观, Schwartz, 集体主义, 个人定向, 社会定向

Abstract: Values, as guiding principles of human life, are influential in human’s attitudinal and behavioral decisions. Schwartz’s theory of values is a milestone and has been frequently cited and adopted in most values study during the past two decades. This study is to verify applicability of the Schwartz’s value theory (Schwartz et al., 2012) with Chinese people. The latest version of Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) was translated into Chinese version and 2569 Chinese people from diverse regions were measured with PVQ Chinese version. The results showed that the values structure of Chinese people fit well with the theoretical pattern of the Schwartz’s theory. The average Cronbach’s ? of 19 values is 0.66, ranging from 0.54 for power-dominance to 0.80 for security-societal. The results of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) well fit the Schwartz’ theoretical model. Moreover, the study aimed at describing the characteristics of Chinese people’s system of values, especially dynamic relations among the different types of values. The results suggested that Chinese people ranked conformity-rules, benevolence-caring, benevolence-dependability, security-societal, and security-personal at the forefront, while power-resources and power-dominance were put at the end. On the second-tier value dimensions, Chinese people expressed more openness and social focus values than conservation and personal focus values, emphasized on self-transcendence and growth values than self-enhancement and self-protection values. These tendencies show that rapid economic development has already influenced values of Chinese. These findings are consistent with Inglehart’s prediction about economic development is coherent with cultural change. It is worth noting that on the “personal focus-social focus” dimension, the positive correlations among personal focus values are not strong as prediction based on Schwartz’s theory, but correlations among social focus values are pretty high, which well fit with the theory’s assumption. The most impressive results are correlations among social- and personal- oriented values. There is a hypothesis in Schwartz’s theory that the more any two distant values at either direction in the value circle, the more antagonistic they are. Interestingly, some values that emerge in opposite direction in the circular order which supposed the most conflict relations appeared strong positive correlations, such as self-direction-thought ( belongs to personal focus values) vs. tradition/conformity-rules ( belongs to social focus values), and achievement ( belongs to personal focus values) vs. benevolence ( belongs to social focus values). In Chinese people’s rank order of values, power-dominance and power-resources are right at the bottom, and it had nothing to do with other values at the same time. It is not only against presumed value relations of the Schwartz’s theory, but also different from many ideas about Chinese people’s features proposed by distinguished scholars. One reasonable explanation about the contradiction is that the items to measure power values are not good for Chinese people due to subtle cultural tradition. The author suggests that values about power in China have a nature of duality, which means that there are inconsistent between value expressed and value selection in action. So there is a challenging task to find a way to measure people’s real value orientation with behaviors. On the other hand, Chinese people show some integration among social- and personal-oriented values, which is a particularly typical feature announced by many well-known experts. This feature is most pronounced in the achievement value, which showed a stronger correlation with benevolence-caring and benevolence-dependability. It is reasonable to believe that it comes from Confucianism beliefs about the Doctrine of the Mean. The author proposed a new concept of “dialectical focus” to emphasize such tendencies of Chinese people with relationship of values.

Key words: Schwartz, value, collectivism, personal-focus, social-focus