Towards a New Hierarchy of Personal Values: Activating Values in Biculturals Through Language

The modern world is a cultural mosaic, and many people continue to move across borders, contributing more and more to this ongoing process. This reality increases levels of diversity and cultural innovation around the world and also develops biculturalism, which is the internalization of two different cultures. So how can the use of different languages influence the way biculturals judge themselves? This study aims to study personal values in an innovative way, proposing that values are not very stable as proposed in the main theory about this construct. The results of a field experiment show that Brazilian-Argentine biculturals can ‘slide’ between self-enhancing and self-transcendence value’s dimensions according to the language they are dealing with.