Values versus Interests

The Two Dragons is a series of blog posts about dilemma in business. 

The Citadel

Many years ago I watched a television series called The Citadel, based on A.J. Cronin's novel, with a young Ben Cross in the leading role. He played an idealistic doctor starting his practice, a man who refused to give in to certain practices that were easy and efficient but fell short of his high standards of medical care. He paid a price for that refusal, and he paid it willingly.

Later in the series, we hear the same man say that he will do those things anyway, casually, as if there had never been a problem. His wife noticed the shift before he did. It was not a shift in words. His vocabulary of principle remained intact. It was a shift in values. Something had quietly been traded away, and the only person in the room who saw the transaction was the one watching him.

That scene has stayed with me, because it captures something we all live with but rarely name: the difference between values and interests, and how easily one gets substituted for the other.

The two things we defend

Values and interests look alike. They are often dressed in the same language, both make claims on our behavior, and both are things we defend with passion. But they are not the same thing.

A value is a conviction about what is good, right, or worth protecting, independent of whether it benefits us. Honesty is a value. So are fairness, ecological responsibility, human dignity. Values are, by nature, community-building: they describe how we want to live together, and they apply even when they cost us something. Research bears this out: values operate as broad, cross-situational guides — they shape prosocial, political, environmental, and work-related behavior across the whole span of a life, not just in single decisions (Sagiv & Schwartz, 2021; Arieli, Sagiv & Roccas, 2019).

An interest is a stake, something we stand to gain or lose. My salary, my market position, my company's contracts, my country's access to resources. Interests can be perfectly legitimate, but they are fundamentally egocentric: they are about my position, or our position, in the world. And in behavioral research, interests show up as the more proximal drivers: they dominate precisely in situations with clear conflicts over outcomes, where people weigh personal gain, expected payoffs, and reciprocity (Pletzer et al., 2018; Gifford & Nilsson, 2014).

Put simply: values set the direction of the journey; interests decide many of the individual turns and choices. The confusion arises because we defend both with equal conviction, and from the outside (sometimes even from the inside) a passionate defense of an interest looks exactly like a passionate defense of a value.

Why values matter in the first place

Before looking at how the two get tangled, it is worth stating plainly what values do for us. They give direction: when there is a fork in the road, a value tells you which branch is yours. They define what is acceptable and what is not and they draw the lines we agree not to cross. They build community, because shared values are what turn a collection of individuals into a we, a community, a family, a nation, a civilization. And above all, they build trust: I can cooperate with you, rely on you, be vulnerable to you, precisely because I know what you will and will not do.

This trust-building function is not just a nice metaphor; it is measurable. A meta-analysis of behavior in social dilemmas found that people with prosocial value orientations cooperate more, and that a substantial part of this effect runs through expectations: valuing cooperation makes you expect cooperation from others, and that expectation itself makes cooperation happen (Pletzer et al., 2018). Values, in other words, do not only steer our own behavior. They shape what we believe about each other, and thereby what becomes possible between us.

The moment you let a value go, you do not merely lose the value, you lose your trustworthiness.

Which is why abandoning them is so costly. The moment you let a value go, you do not merely lose the value, you lose your trustworthiness. People start perceiving you as inconsistent, perhaps opportunistic, perhaps manipulative. And here lies a crucial asymmetry that deserves more attention than it gets.

Values work like trust: once abandoned, they are extraordinarily difficult to restore. A single visible betrayal can undo years of consistency, and no speech afterward repairs it, because the audience has learned that your speeches, and your values, are negotiable.

Interests do not work that way. When you sacrifice an interest, you lose something real like money, power, status, a contract, a market. But the loss is recoverable, and more importantly, people perceive you as consistent. Paradoxically, the person who visibly gives up an interest to protect a value comes out stronger, while the person who gives up a value to protect an interest comes out permanently diminished, even if, on paper, he lost nothing at all.

So whenever you feel tempted to let a value slide "just this once," be careful. You are about to trade an asset that cannot be bought back for one that can.

When they align, we feel virtuous

Sometimes values and interests point in the same direction, and then life is easy. The consultant who genuinely believes in transparency and also builds their business on it. The company whose profitability depends on the circular economy it sincerely champions. When values and interests align, we get to be principled and prosperous, and we rarely stop to ask which one is actually driving.

Environmental research offers a humbling illustration of how hard that question is to answer. Studies of pro-environmental behavior show that much of it is motivated by non-environmental goals, saving money, improving one's health, rather than by ecological values themselves (Gifford & Nilsson, 2014). People insulate their homes because of the energy bill, not for the planet. The behavior is identical but the driver is not. Alignment feels like proof of virtue, but it proves nothing. The real test of a value only comes when it starts to cost you something.

When they diverge

Sooner or later, values and interests diverge. And at that moment, three things can happen and only one of them is truly honest.

The first is the slippery slope: using values to defend interests. This is the most corrosive move available to us, because it corrupts the values themselves. History offers no shortage of examples. The United States has more than once invaded a country under the banner of ousting a dictator, a genuine pro-democratic value, in principle. But strikingly often, there is an interest standing right behind the flag, and its name is frequently oil. The capture of Nicolás Maduro is a recent case in point. Maduro was, by almost any standard, a crooked president. The value-based case against him was real. But by the time the operation unfolded, with oil negotiations running in the background and open talk of who would control Venezuela's oil reserves afterward, it was hard to find the values anywhere in the room. What remained was interest, wearing the vocabulary of principle.

The same pattern plays out closer to home. In Belgium there is an ongoing debate about severing ties with Israel. The debate itself is conducted in the language of values like human rights, international law, moral responsibility. But listen carefully to the responses, and they are mostly about interests: trade relations, economic exposure, diplomatic cost. The question asked is rarely "what is right?" but "what would it cost us?". This is a perfectly legitimate question, as long as we do not pretend it is the first, value-based one.

The second is quiet incoherence: espousing values while pursuing contrary interests. Humans are remarkably good at this. We can be sincerely ecologically minded and still hold fossil fuel investments in our portfolio. We can believe in work-life balance and reward the colleagues who ignore it. This is rarely hypocrisy in the theatrical sense, it is compartmentalization. We keep our values in one room and our interests in another, and we make sure the doors stay closed.

The third is the honest one: abandoning interests to safeguard values. Declining the lucrative contract. Divesting, at a loss, from the holding that contradicts what you stand for. Speaking up when silence would have been safer.

This raises the question we should ask ourselves more often: what does it cost us if we put values before interests? The honest answer is: something. Possibly something significant. But perhaps that is exactly what it means to put values first. A value that never costs anything has never been tested. It is more a decoration, not a conviction. The price is not an unfortunate side effect of living by values. The willingness to pay it is the proof that they are values at all.

What the research says: values are real, but conditional

It would be comforting to believe that good people simply act on their values, full stop. The behavioral literature tells a more sobering — and more useful — story.

A systematic review of the values–behavior paradigm concludes that values reliably predict behavior, attitudes, and choices, but as one influence among several, never as the sole driver (Nazirova & Borbala, 2024; Meglino & Ravlin, 1998). Crucially, the strength of that influence depends on the situation: when external pressure is strong through Incentives, sanctions, and also social norms, value-expressive behavior drops sharply. Norms and sanctions can override personal values in practice even while people continue to publicly endorse those very values (Nazirova & Borbala, 2024; Meglino & Ravlin, 1998). That last clause deserves rereading: the endorsement survives but the behavior does not. Science has, in effect, documented the Citadel doctor.

When under pressure, the endorsement survives but the behavior does not.

In organizations, the picture is the same. Personal values predict occupational choices and workplace behavior, but incentives and constraints can outweigh them. Values matter most when situational pressure is low (Arieli et al., 2019). Meta-analytic work on cultural values finds moderate effects overall, but notably weaker links for concrete, incentive-laden outcomes such as absenteeism, turnover, and effort (Taras, Kirkman & Steel, 2010). And culture itself moderates how strongly values translate into action at all, by shaping whether people even use internal convictions as a guide, and defining what a given behavior means in context (Roccas & Sagiv, 2010; Sagiv & Schwartz, 2021).

The overall pattern is precise and unflattering: values guide broad, cross-situational behavior; interests win when behavior is tied to immediate payoffs, incentives, or strong social constraints. Behavior usually reflects both, with context determining which one dominates.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a design principle. If situational pressure is what makes values erode, then living by your values is not primarily a matter of willpower in the moment. It is a matter of arranging your situations in advance. The person who does not want to be corrupted should not negotiate alone. The company that wants ethical decisions should not tie every bonus to quarterly numbers. We protect our values the way we protect anything fragile, which is noy by not placing them where the pressure is greatest. The cat and the milk, you know.

Money as a solvent

Within that pattern, one pressure deserves special mention: money. Money dissolves ethics, roughly in proportion to the amount involved.

When money enters a decision, ethical considerations tend to go down. When a lot of money enters, something worse happens: considerations we would normally recognize as unethical start to go up. They become "pragmatic," "realistic," "what anyone in our position would do." The vocabulary shifts before the behavior does: we stop saying "wrong" and start saying "complicated."

This is not because people with money are worse people. It is because interests scale and values do not. A value is the same size whether ten euros or ten billion are at stake. An interest grows with the stakes — and at some point it grows large enough to hire the values as its spokespersons.

This is what happened in the Second World War. When industrialists connected their business to the Nazi-horror, they were interest-driven. It is amazing how fast they adapted their operations to the Nazi-economy. They became rich. But many died in and around their factories (De Jong, 2022). Christophe Busch, director of the Hannah Ahrendt Institute in Belgium, called this during a recent lecture that I attended, the cocktail of instrumantalism and efficiency-thinking that led to a dehumanization of Jews and other groups. He wrote a book on it "The Devil in each of us", describing how ordinary people can engage in collective violence (Busch, 2021).

Values are binary

Part of what makes values demanding is that they cannot be followed haphazardly. They are, in an important sense, binary. You are honest or you are not. You cannot be a bit dishonest, and I am not talking here about the white lie that spares a colleague's feelings about a haircut. I am talking about the substance of the value. A value that applies "usually," "when convenient," or "unless the stakes are high" is not a value with exceptions. It is an interest with good manners. The Citadel doctor did not become a different man through one dramatic betrayal. He became one through a series of small, reasonable-sounding exceptions, each one binary, each one a switch quietly flipped.

The stories we tell ourselves

Of course, none of this happens without psychology lending a hand. When we notice a gap between what we say and what we do, we experience cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is unpleasant, so the mind gets to work resolving it. That is where the storytelling begins.

It's only this once. It's for a good cause. Why should I suffer when everybody else does the same? It's really not that bad. Our brain is a master at reducing the stress of dissonance, not by changing the behavior, which is expensive, but by adjusting the story, which is free. Notice that none of these stories says "I have decided to abandon my value." The value is never renounced but it is narrated around. This is how people end up, like the doctor in The Citadel, saying the same words with entirely different meanings, and genuinely not noticing. It is also why the research finding above that public endorsement of values survives even when the behavior does not, is not hypocrisy in the cynical sense. It is the dissonance machine working exactly as designed.

A practical test

So how do you tell values and interests apart, in yourself and in others? A few questions help.

• Who benefits if I win this argument? If the answer is mainly "me" or "us," you may be defending an interest, however noble the vocabulary.
• Would I still defend this if it cost me something? A value survives that question. An interest does not.
• Am I applying this principle consistently, or only when it serves me? Selective principles are interests wearing costumes.
• What story am I telling myself right now — and would I accept it from someone else? Dissonance-reducing stories sound remarkably less convincing in another person's mouth.
• And finally: what pressure am I under, right here, right now? If the research is right that situational pressure is what bends values, then the moment of greatest pressure is exactly the moment to trust your own reasoning least.

None of this means interests are illegitimate. We all have them, and we are entitled to defend them. The problem is never having interest, it is disguising them. There is nothing wrong with a country saying "this is about our energy security" or a company saying "this regulation hurts our business." There is something deeply wrong with wrapping those interests in the language of freedom, human rights, or protecting families because every time a value is used as camouflage, the value itself is devalued, for all of us.

Values are the infrastructure of trust. They are the thing that makes cooperation possible between people whose interests conflict. That infrastructure erodes every time it is misused, and like trust, it is far easier to demolish than to rebuild.

The invitation, then, is not to become saints. It is to become honest bookkeepers of our own motives: to know, at any given moment, whether we are defending a value or an interest and to accept that putting values first will, sometimes, cost us something.

Because that cost, in the end, is the only evidence that our values were ever real. Understanding this, is crucial in business and in life.

References

Arieli, S., Sagiv, L., & Roccas, S. (2019). Values at work: The impact of personal values in organisations. Applied Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12181

Busch, C. (2O21). De Duivel in elk van ons. Antwerpen, Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 848 pp.

De Jong, D. (2022). Nazi Billionaires. 400pp.

Gifford, R., & Nilsson, A. (2014). Personal and social factors that influence pro-environmental concern and behaviour: A review. International Journal of Psychology, 49(3), 141–157. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12034

Meglino, B., & Ravlin, E. C. (1998). Individual values in organizations: Concepts, controversies, and research. Journal of Management, 24, 351–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639802400304

Nazirova, Z., & Borbala, S. (2024). Values, attitudes and the behaviour paradigm: A systematic literature review. Journal of Human Values, 30, 214–239. https://doi.org/10.1177/09716858241236902

Pletzer, J., Balliet, D., Joireman, J., Kuhlman, D. M., Voelpel, S., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2018). Social value orientation, expectations, and cooperation in social dilemmas: A meta-analysis. European Journal of Personality, 32, 62–83. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2139

Roccas, S., & Sagiv, L. (2010). Personal values and behavior: Taking the cultural context into account. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00234.x

Sagiv, L., & Schwartz, S. (2021). Personal values across cultures. Annual Review of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-125100

Taras, V., Kirkman, B. L., & Steel, P. (2010). Examining the impact of Culture's Consequences: A three-decade, multilevel, meta-analytic review of Hofstede's cultural value dimensions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(3), 405–439. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018938