Value Faces: Surfacing How Self-Presentation Shifts Across Relationships

Abstract

People present different aspects of themselves across relationships. Computational work has captured such variation in communication style. But this variation also extends to which principles people foreground or background in a particular relationship--i.e., in the values they express and how they balance them. We conceptualize these relationship-specific expressions of values as demonstrated values. To make demonstrated values visible, we introduce Value Faces, a system that analyzes a person's existing chat histories from their everyday messaging platforms using Schwartz's ten basic human values and produces separate value profiles for their different relationships. In a mixed-methods study(N=18), we find that the resulting value profiles distinguished participants' relational contexts with twice the odds of guessing, while system-inferred differences across relationships aligned with participants' perceptions of those differences. Participants used these profiles to articulate previously implicit differences in how they presented themselves, connect them to roles and changes over time, and reconsider their self-assessments.