Personal values predict political attitudes. Previous research in the United States suggests that so-called "society-focused" personal values such as universalism or conservation do so more than "self-focused" values such as self-direction and power. This study seeks to test the relevance of this distinction in a different context with four political attitudes using the European Social Survey. Three mechanisms are suggested to explain effects of self-focused values on political attitudes. Although society-focused values were generally found to be more important in predicting political attitudes, self-focused values made a significant and often substantial contribution. On average, self-focused values were able to predict around half of the variance in political attitudes that society-focused values were. Power in particular played a role in predicting political attitudes, especially support for economic redistribution. Further analyses support the ideas that (1) even the most self-focused value (i.e., hedonism) can play a relevant role in predicting political attitudes, and (2) self-interest may play a role in explaining the effect of self-focused values on political attitudes. Together, these findings highlight that a priori excluding self-focused values from analyses of political attitudes-as studies have done in the past-may lead to important effects being overlooked.

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Cultivation research suggests that media use, particularly TV, is associated with a wide range of politically relevant views and attitudes, including perceptions of the world as a mean and dangerous place, authoritarianism, and perceived meritocracy. However, little attempt has been made to understand how these effects relate to one another and to broader models of political psychology. We present a new Cultivation–Political Psychology Interface Model, which uses Duckitt’s Dual Process Model (2001) of political psychology as a lens to understand cultivation research. Many seemingly distinct cultivation effects related to political attitudes can thus be reduced to two overall dimensions: dangerous and competitive worldviews. We identify evidence gaps, particularly in terms of competitive-worldview effects and related political attitudes. Our model generates a landscape of attitudes and beliefs, whereby some attitudes are hypothesized to be more upstream than others, leading to testable hypotheses for future research.