University Students' Value Priorities and Emotional Empathy

A comparison of Schwartz's typology of values and the Spranger-Allport-Vernon typology suggested that business students would give higher priorities to power and achievement values, social science students to universalism values and technology students to security values. It was also hypothesised that social science students would score higher on empathy than business students who would be more empathic than technology students. Universalism and benevolence values were expected to be associated with high empathy and based on the social role theory of gender differences, it was predicted that value priorities would be more strongly associated with value priorities in men than in women. These predictions were supported from the data collected from 138 students of business, social sciences and technology using the Schwartz Value Survey, and the Mehrabian-Epstein measure of empathy.