How your personal values change as you age, according to a large new study

People’s personal values shift in predictable ways as they age, and examining these values at a finer level of detail can reveal far more about a person’s stage of life than broader measures alone, according to new research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

For decades, psychologists have known that personality changes over a person’s lifetime. Young people tend to be more focused on excitement, pleasure, and personal achievement, while older adults typically place greater emphasis on security, tradition, and social harmony. These trends are generally well-established—but most research has only examined values at a broad level, grouping them into large categories that can mask important complexity underneath.

The researchers behind this new study wanted to know whether a more detailed look at individual values—things like curiosity, risk-taking, or helping others—might reveal patterns that broader groupings miss. They also wanted to test whether these finer-grained values could more accurately capture how people change across their lives compared to the wider categories typically used in psychology.

Led by Andrés Gvirtz of King’s College London, the team analyzed data from 80,814 people aged 18 to 75 (57.4% female and 35.8% male), collected through an online survey hosted by TIME Magazine between 2017 and 2023. Each person completed a 20-question survey called the Twenty-Item Values Inventory, measuring how much they identified with specific principles—such as being creative, seeking fun, respecting authority, or caring for others.

The researchers then used a combination of traditional statistics and machine-learning models to see how well these values could predict a person’s age. They compared the results across three levels: four broad, higher-order value categories (like “Openness to change”), ten mid-level basic values (like “Self-direction”), and twenty highly specific value nuances (like “Curiosity” or “Creativity”).

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The results confirmed that people’s values do shift meaningfully with age—but the full story only emerged when looking at the finest level of detail. At the broadest level, the data showed familiar patterns: older people placed more importance on conservation and stability, while younger people leaned toward openness and self-enhancement.

However, when the researchers zoomed in further, more complex and sometimes contradictory patterns appeared. Within the basic value of “conformity,” for example, valuing respect increased with age, while valuing behaving properly actually decreased. Similarly, within “benevolence,” older participants placed more importance on being attuned to others’ needs, but less on actively helping people. These opposing trends cancelled each other out at the broader level, making the nuances invisible without closer examination.

The detailed value items also proved substantially better at predicting age. Broad value categories explained roughly 4% of the variation in participants’ ages, while the most specific value items explained around 12%—approximately three times as much predictive power. The researchers found that, using just the 20 specific value questions, their computer models could accurately guess which of two randomly selected participants was older with an 80% success rate, provided the participants had an age gap of at least 20 years.

As the researchers note, aggregating specific values into broader categories “leads to a loss of critical information, creates conflicting results when nuances diverge, and significantly reduces predictive power.”

The study is not without its limitations. As this was a cross-sectional study—meaning it compared different people at different ages rather than tracking the same individuals over time—it cannot rule out the possibility that some differences reflect generational rather than developmental change. For example, people who are currently in their 60s grew up in a different social and economic era, which may have shaped their values independently of their biological age.

Furthermore, the dataset was heavily skewed toward younger adults from the United States, meaning the findings may not perfectly translate to older or non-Western populations.

The study, “Human Values Across the Lifespan: Age-Graded Differences at Three Hierarchical Levels and What We Can Learn From Them,” was authored by Andrés Gvirtz, Matteo Montecchi, Amy Selby, and Friedrich M. Götz.