Greg Maio studies human values. He’s a professor of psychology at the University of Bath in England.* He also co-wrote the popular textbook, The Psychology of Attitudes and Attitude Change, and in 2016, his own book came out called The Psychology of Human Values. In our conversation, he shares his work on what values are and why they’re so important. We talk about when values guide or choices (and when they don’t), how people have a hard time articulating their values, and how we can design interventions around the values that people can come together on.

*In my intro for this episode, I mistakenly said the University of Bath was in Wales. It is actually in England. Greg was at Cardiff University for years before recently moving to Bath, and Cardiff is in Wales.  Sorry for the mixup!

Some things we mention in this episode:

• What are values? (See this useful online article by Dr. Maio.)
• How do values work and how has the science on this evolved? (see Maio, 2010)
• How values can act as “truisms” that make them hard to defend (Maio & Olson, 1998; Bernard, Maio, & Olson, 2003; 2005)
• Values can contribute unity on otherwise divisive issues (e.g., Wolf, Haddock, Manstead, & Maio, 2020)

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For a transcript of this episode, visit:  http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/values-with-greg-maio/

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