What do Lithuanians value today compared to a decade ago? And why have those values shifted? These are the questions at the heart of a study I recently published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, co-authored with colleagues at Kaunas University of Technology. Drawing on six waves of the European Social Survey covering 11,199 Lithuanian respondents between 2010 and 2020, we tracked how personal values have changed over time, and tried to understand what is driving those changes.
The short answer is: values in Lithuania have changed, but not in the ways most theories would predict.
What we measured, and why it matters
The study draws on Shalom Schwartz’s framework of human values, which organises personal values into four broad groupings. Self-transcendence covers concern for others and the world, values like benevolence and universalism. Self-enhancement reflects ambition and status-seeking, values like achievement and power. Conservation captures security, conformity, and tradition. Openness to change encompasses autonomy and the appetite for new experiences.
These four groupings tell us something important about how people orient themselves in their social world and their responses to the conditions around them. And crucially, they do not all change for the same reasons.
Three forces behind value change
We were interested in disentangling three different influences on values. Age effects are the predictable shifts that come with moving through life: as people get older, research consistently shows they become less focused on personal achievement and novelty and more oriented toward tradition, security, and concern for others. These are universal patterns tied to the life course. Period effects, by contrast, are shifts that affect everyone alive at the same time, regardless of age, because something in the broader environment has changed. And cohort effects are the lasting imprints of the historical era in which a person was raised, the idea that growing up under Soviet rule, or under independence and EU membership, leaves a distinctive mark on one’s values that persists into adult life.
Lithuania offers a particularly compelling context for separating these effects. The country has experienced not one but multiple dramatic disruptions: Soviet occupation, independence in 1990, economic collapse in the early 1990s, EU accession in 2004, the global financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The period covered by our study, 2010 to 2020, was anything but stable. Unemployment peaked at nearly 18% in 2010, youth unemployment reached 35% that same year, and roughly a quarter of the total population emigrated between 1990 and 2020.
To capture cohort differences, we organised respondents into four political generations whose formative experiences differ sharply. The Stalin generation (born before 1945) lived through occupation, war, and the imposition of the Soviet system. The Soviet generation (born 1945 to 1969) was socialised under intensive ideological indoctrination and institutional conformity. The late Soviet generation (born 1970 to 1989) experienced the upheaval of independence and the collapse of the USSR as young adults. And the Independent EU generation (born after 1989) has no memory of Soviet rule but grew up in a period of economic uncertainty and mass emigration.
What we found
The age effects were largely as expected. As Lithuanians grow older, they place greater importance on conservation values and self-transcendence, and less on self-enhancement and openness to change. These patterns held across all political generations and were consistent with what research in other countries has found.
The period effects were more striking. Self-enhancement values showed the sharpest fluctuation over time, rising sharply from 2010 to 2012 before declining steadily through to 2020. Openness to change dipped across most of the decade before recovering slightly after 2014. The Soviet and late Soviet generations followed very similar trajectories across all four dimensions, which makes sense: they share a broadly common socialization history, and their values appear to have been relatively stabilized by it.
The most surprising findings, however, involve the youngest cohort, the Independent EU generation. Standard modernization theory, associated most prominently with Ronald Inglehart, predicts that younger generations raised in conditions of relative prosperity and democratic freedom should show increasing self-expression and openness, shifting away from traditional and security-oriented values. That is not what we observed. Instead, the Independent EU generation showed a decline in openness to change and self-enhancement over the period of the study, and an increase in conservation values. In the latter years of the study, this generation also showed a sharp rise in self-transcendence, placing greater importance on concern for others.
A generation trapped between scarcity and modernity
These findings are, on the surface, paradoxical. This is the first generation with no memory of Soviet rule, the generation that grew up in an EU member state, with access to mobility, education, and a more open society than any that preceded them. And yet their values, at least during this decade, moved in a more conservative direction.
We think the explanation lies precisely in the economic context of their formative years and early adulthood. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic upheaval of the 1990s are not abstract historical events for this generation: they are the backdrop against which these individuals grew up, entered the labor market, and tried to build adult lives. Youth unemployment in Lithuania was among the highest in the EU during the early years of this decade. Many of their peers emigrated, dramatically reshaping the social landscape around them. The scarcity hypothesis, which holds that people prioritize values that reflect their most pressing unmet needs, helps explain the pattern. When personal achievement feels foreclosed by economic circumstances, the importance placed on achievement values tends to decline. When the environment feels uncertain, security and tradition gain salience.
There is also likely a selection effect operating here. The emigration of large numbers of young Lithuanians during this period, particularly those motivated by ambitions for career advancement and personal growth, may mean that those who remained were disproportionately more conservative in their orientations to begin with, or became more so in response to what they witnessed around them.
What is also striking is how differently the Soviet legacy generations responded to the same period fluctuations. The Soviet and late Soviet cohorts showed far less sensitivity to the economic disruptions of 2010 to 2020. Having been socialized under conditions of scarcity, political repression, and constrained personal freedoms, these generations appear to have developed a resilience of sorts, a value structure that was less destabilized by economic turbulence than that of their younger compatriots.
What this tells us about value change more broadly
These findings push back against simple narratives about how societies modernize. The assumption that democratization and economic development will reliably produce a shift toward self-expression and openness to change does not survive contact with the Lithuanian data. Values are not just a reflection of how prosperous or free a society is at a given moment. They carry the weight of history, and they respond to the specific conditions that different generations encounter in their most formative years.
For Lithuania, a society that has been in near-continuous transition for three decades, this means that values remain contested terrain, shaped simultaneously by Soviet legacies, post-independence economic realities, and the particular vulnerabilities of each successive cohort. Whether the conservative turn among the youngest generation proves to be a temporary adaptation to economic hardship, or a more durable feature of their value profile, is a question only further longitudinal research will be able to answer.
What is clear is that the story of Lithuanian values is not one of steady linear change. It is a story of generations navigating radically different pasts, coping with a turbulent present, and carrying the traces of both into their orientations toward the future.
This post is adapted from: Mockaitis, A.I., Kumpikaitė-Valiūnienė, V., Duobienė, J., Banevičienė, I., & Žičkutė-Daugelavičienė, I. (2025). Between past and present: Age, period and cohort effects on changing values in Lithuania. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00220221251326957
Funding for this research was granted by the Lithuanian Research Council, Nr. S-MIP-23-115
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Professor Audra I. Mockaitis 