The world now recognizes that there are three primary reasons that people view nature as valuable. People can—and do—value nature because it (a) provides benefits to people (i.e., it has instrumental value), (b) is inherently valuable for its own sake (i.e., it is intrinsically valuable), or (c) because of the unique relationship between people and nature (i.e., its relational value).

The two former reasons for valuing nature have featured prominently within Western discourse and most research over the last three decades has primarily focused on unpacking the instrumental–intrinsic dichotomy; a false dichotomy if there ever was one. Recently, however, people have realized that there are reasons—important reasons, which are prevalent in many countries around the world—that do not fit so neatly in the categories of ‘valued solely because it benefits people’ (instrumental) and ‘valued solely for its own sake’ (intrinsic).

Previously, we validated a scale meant to capture these three reasons for valuing nature (which we call value-bases) and found that relational value-bases were the much better predictor of pro-environmental outcomes compared to instrumental and intrinsic values (you can read more about it here). The trouble is we only validated it in the United States which represents a prototypical individualistic Western country. This meant that we couldn’t be sure whether the same findings would generalize to other countries and cultures. In fact, some major proponents of relational values suggest that such values are so place-based and culturally bound that they cannot be generalized from one country to another.

So, we set out to test whether the distinction between the three value-bases was consistent across countries even when those countries have vast cultural differences. We utilized a large dataset (+2000 participants) from five countries (Japan, Taiwan, France, Italy, and the US) to test whether we find the same value-basis structure across the subsamples.

I will spare you the analytical details—if you are interested, the paper is linked below. Suffice it to say that we found our scale measures the ‘same things’ in the ‘same way’ regardless of the culture it was measured in.

What does this mean?

It means more or less that the ‘recipe’ for relational values is nearly identical across cultures. They use the same ingredients (the same set of items work in all cultures) and with the same ratios (the items all feed into relational values in the same way) and those ingredients are distinct from the recipes for instrumental and intrinsic values (the items for relational values fit better with relational values than they do with the others). So, while some countries might like to bake ‘bigger cakes’ than others (i.e., might endorse relational values more strongly), their ‘cakes’ seem to have the same ingredients.

More academically, this suggests that relational environmental values might be universal—and so too might be their distinction from instrumental and intrinsic values. Only time, and a lot more data (from a lot more countries) will tell!

You can read more about it here:

Lengieza, M. L., Swim, J. K., DeCoster, J., Guerriero, J. G., Saito, O., le Coent, P., Sella, L., Chien, H., Hérivaux, C., Rota, F. S., & Ragazzi, E. (2025). A Five-Culture Validation of the Environmental Value-Bases Scale: A Measure of Instrumental, Intrinsic, and Relational Environmental Values. Sustainability, 17(22), 10102. https://doi.org/10.3390/su172210102

You can read the original validation paper here:

Lengieza, M. L., Aviste, R., & Swim, J. K. (2023). Nature as community: An overlooked predictor of pro-environmental intentions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102127; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102127