Sonia Roccas

The Open University of Israel | openu · Department of Education and Psychology

We suggest that intentionality attributed to dissenting behavior in intergroup contexts (e.g., exposing one’s country’s secrets) may be conceptualized as benefitting one of four social circles. Two social circles exclude the perceiver: (a) the actor him/herself and (b) the outgroup affected by the behavior; and two circles include the perceiver: (c...

The impact of personal values on preferences, choices, and behaviors has evoked much interest. Relatively little is known, however, about the processes through which values impact behavior. In this conceptual article, we consider both the content and the structural aspects of the relationships between values and behavior. We point to unique feature...

Collective psychological ownership refers to people’s perception that an object, place, or idea belongs to their own group. We considered this concept in the context of territorial conflicts and proposed that (1) collective psychological ownership is distinct from place attachment, (2) higher ingroup identifiers are more likely to claim collective...

The current paper presents three studies, which suggest that perceiving one’s nation as transgenerational (TG) is related to a differentiation in the evaluation of ethnically German diaspora migrants and ethnically non-German (‘foreign’) migrants. First, we find that unlike ‘classical’ concepts such as right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social domi...

In our lead article (Arieli, Sagiv, & Roccas, 2019) we aimed to organize and integrate past research on personal values in organizational contexts. The role of values in predicting attitudes, preferences and behaviors, their near‐universal structure, and their relative stability across situations and over time, have been demonstrated in ample resea...

This paper reviews and integrates past research on personal values in work organizations, seeking to portray the role personal values play in shaping the choices and behavior of individuals in work settings. We start by addressing the role of values in the occupational choice people make. We then review research on the relationships of personal val...

We propose and test a theory of subjective value fulfillment. Participants from five samples reported their feelings of value fulfillment in general and in the context of specific identities: Student, Israeli, Arab, and Druze. Findings show that subjective value fulfillment has the same circular structure as value importance, but the two constructs...

A model of the relationship between need for closure (NFC) and intergroup hostility was tested in four studies. According to the model, heightened NFC promotes glorification of the ingroup which fosters support for extreme measures against the group’s perceived enemies. In a parallel process, high level of NFC induces perceptions of ingroup victimh...

In this chapter, we focus on methodological issues regarding measuring, priming, and changing values. We discuss how methodological choices such as the number of value types measured, the broadness of the measure, or the context in which the values are measured could affect the priorities of the values reported. We begin with unpacking the definiti...

The construct of values is central to many fields in social sciences and humanities. The last two decades have seen a growing body of psychological research on values, investigating their content, structure, and consequences in many cultures. In research and in everyday life, values are often confused with other personal attributes, such as attitud...

What are values? How are they different from attitudes, traits, and specific goals? How do our values influence our behavior, and vice versa? How does our culture and environment impact the relationship between values and behavior? These questions and more are rigorously examined by prominent and emerging scholars in this significant volume Values...

We examined associations between two orientations based on historical group trauma, a form of enduring group victimhood (Perpetual Ingroup Victimhood Orientation [PIVO]) and the belief that one’s group might itself become a victimizer (Fear of Victimizing [FOV]), and attitudes, cognitions, and emotions related to intergroup conflicts. PIVO was posi...

We introduce the distinction between perceiving the group as Intra-Generational (including only the present generation of group members) and Trans-Generational (including all past, present and future generations of the group). In four studies (N = 1265) administered to Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli, American and Swedish samples, we demonstrat...

Values are a central concept in the social sciences and recently have been intensively studied across disciplines. Theoreticians usually distinguish between two lines of research: personal values and values of social collectives. Personal values represent desirable goals that serve as internalized guides for individuals. Schwartz identified ten typ...

Personal values are abstract desirable goals that guide individuals throughout their lives. Sagiv, Roccas, and Hazan proposed three perspectives that consider the relationships between values and well-being. They are the “healthy values” perspective, the “goal-attainment” perspective, and the "value congruency" perspective. This chapter discusses e...

The relative importance of values is a central feature in Schwartz's value theory. However, instruments used for validating his theory did not assess relative importance directly. Rather, values were independently rated and scores then statistically centered, person-by-person. Whether these scores match those that result from explicitly comparing v...

The study investigated whether students perceive their university instructors in a virtual learning environment as leaders. Referring to the full range leadership theory (FRLT), we examined the effects of transformational and passive leadership styles of university instructors on students' satisfaction and learning outcomes. Completed web-based que...

Objective: Research on the structure of the self has mostly developed separately from research on its content. Taking an integrative approach, we studied two structural aspects of the self associated with self-improvement, self-discrepancies and perceived mutability, by focusing on two content areas, traits and values. Studies 1a-1c. Method: 338 st...

In this chapter, we discuss recent research on values and religiosity from a social psychological perspective. We focus on religion as a social identity (Hogg, Adelman, & Blagg, 2010; Ysseldyk, Matheson, & Anisman, 2010), and emphasize the aspects of religion that relate to group processes, such as norms, traditions, and common practices. We first...

The Healthy Values PerspectiveGoal AttainmentPerson-Environment Value CongruencyImplications for Immigrants' Well-BeingValue Pathways Toward Well-BeingConclusion

Research has documented a robust stereotype regarding personality attributes related to physical attractiveness (the "what is beautiful is good" stereotype). But do physically attractive women indeed possess particularly attractive inner attributes? Studying traits and values, we investigated two complementary questions: how perceived attractivenes...

We review a large body of research showing the negative impact of group identification on intergroup relations: people who strongly identify with their group tend to endorse more strongly aggressive policies, are less critical of the ingroup’s wrongdoings, and are less responsive to interventions designed to reduce conflict. Despite its robustness,...

Does diversity promote tolerance? We propose that reactions to group heterogeneity depend on individual value priorities. In three studies we investigate how values moderate the effect of raising the salience of group heterogeneity (versus homogeneity) on tolerance. As hypothesized, the findings indicate that conservation values moderate the effect...

Is identification a product of personality or of the context? We examine this question by adopting a multidimensional conceptualization of identification (the CIDS model) that integrates research perspectives on personality and contextual effects. We investigate (Study 1) the relationships of traits to identification with the nation (students, N = ...

The centrality of values in cross-cultural research has more than doubled over the last three decades. This Special Issue investigates values across cultures and focuses on two main levels: individual and national. At the individual level, values express broad, trans-situational motivational goals, affecting individuals’ interpretation of situation...

We examined the moderating role of personal values on social projection. Study 1 was conducted prior to the 1999 Israeli elections among activists of the Center party, a newly established centrist party. The more importance activists attributed to conservation values (values that emphasize stability and certainty) the more they projected their poli...

We examine relations of personal value priorities to identification with one's nation. We hypothesize that relations of values to identification depend on the motivations that can be attained by identifying with a nation. Study 1 confirmed the hypothesis that identification with one's nation correlates positively with conservation values and negati...

Taking a cross-cultural perspective, we review recent advancement in theory and empirical research on the relationships between personal values and behavior. Although personal values have been examined in many studies, systematic, theory-based, cross-cultural comparisons of the relations of personal values and behavior are rare. In this review, we...

ValuesVigorVirtue EthicsVirtuesVitalityVocationReferences

Building on the contributions of diverse theoretical approaches, the authors present a multidimensional model of group identification. Integrating conceptions from the social identity perspective with those from research on individualism-collectivism, nationalism- patriotism, and identification with organizations, we propose four conceptually disti...

This article puts forward a parsimonious framework for studying subjective perceptions of real-life intergroup conflicts. Four studies were conducted to explore how individuals perceive the strategic properties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Studies 1 and 2 found theory-driven associations between people's subjective perception of the conflic...

The authors examined the relationships between 2 modes of national identification (attachment to the in-group and the in-group's glorification) and reactions to the in-group's moral violations among Israeli students. Data were collected during a period of relative calm in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as during a period of great intensif...

Uncovering the complex relationships between religiosity and values may provide a better understanding of what it means to be religious or nonreligious. This article reviews research on values and religiosity across cultural and religious groups. Although religious groups differ in the importance they attribute to different values, the pattern of c...

Emotion can result from interpreting group actions as reflecting on the self due to an association between the two. This volume considers the nature of collective guilt, the antecedent conditions necessary for it to be experienced, how it can be measured, as well as how collective guilt differs from other group based emotions. Research from Austral...

Economists often play crucial roles in designing and implementing public policies; thus it is of importance to better understand the values that underlie their decisions. We explore the value hierarchies of economists in four studies: The first two studies examine whether value differences exist between students of economics and other social scienc...

Factors related to students’ selection of Internet-assisted vs. traditional distance learning environments (IDL vs. TDL) at the Open University of Israel were investigated. The two groups differed in their demographic variables, academic achievements and value priorities. The IDL group had a higher percentage of males, and a different age distribut...

Two studies examined the moderating role of the importance attributed to self-enhancement and self-transcendence values on the association of group status with identification. In the first study, students reported their personal value priorities, their identification with a group, and their perception of the status of that group. The more importanc...

Three studies explored the effects of the relative status of the multiple groups of which individuals are simultaneously members. In all studies participants reported their identification and their perception of the status of two groups (either real or experimental) of which they were simultaneously members. Results of all three studies lend suppor...

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that affect the difficulty of verbal analogies in a psychometric exam. Two types of attributes were derived from theoretical cognitive models: (a) knowledge attributes, which were defined by word rarity and the degree to which the relation between the words was intensional, and (b) process attributes...

The authors relate Big Five personality traits to basic values in a sample of 246 students. As hypothesized, Agreeableness correlates most positively with benevolence and tradition values, Openness with self-direction and universalism values, Extroversion with achievement and stimulation values, and Conscientiousness with achievement and conformity...

In this article, we introduce the concept of social identity complexity—a new theoretical construct that refers to an individual's subjective representation of the interrelationships among his or her multiple group identities. Social identity complexity reflects the degree of overlap perceived to exist between groups of which a person is simultaneo...

This study examines associations of immigrants' well-being with the discrepancies they perceive between their own acculturation attitudes and the acculturation expectations of members of the host society. A hundred immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union reported their personal value priorities, their satisfaction with life, their attitud...

Several recent studies found that the behavior of economists was less cooperative than the behavior of non-economists. However, other studies found that economists behaved no differently than other individuals. In this paper, we study this issue by examining personal value priorities of economics students and students from other disciplines. Values...

Past research has shown that individual religiosity relates posi tively to valuing conformity, security, tradition, and benevolence toward close others, and negatively to valuing stimulation, self- direction, universalism, power, and achievement. These findings replicated in four different religions in five countries where church- state relations w...

We examined the impact of intergroup similarity on two aspects of intergroup relations. Drawing on social identity and belief congruence theory, we hypothesized that — at high levels of intergroup similarity — increasing similarity has dual, seemingly opposed effects: It increases ingroup favouritism in evaluations but also increases readiness for...

Findings of a large survey indicate that the structure of leadership in an asynchronous learning environment is consisted with the one repeatedly found in the context of face-to-face leadership. Correlations with students' satisfaction were highly positive for transformational leadership (including contingent reward), low positive for management by...