Children's values: Universality,conflict, and sources of influence

An important question for psychological science is what types of psychological values guide individuals throughout life, and what factors increase or decrease the importance of these values. This Quartet in Social Development focuses on research that explicitly investigates values as defined by the universal content and structure of values. A central goal of the articles in this special quartet was to investigate basic human values in children, and to chart age‐related changes as well as test developmental hypotheses. In this commentary, I reflect on what we have learned in light of other research on children's values, and specifically how future research on values could benefit by a more explicit focus on three central themes in social development: universality, conflict, and sources of influence.