In pro-environmental behaviour change research, “deeply held values” were the focus of a ton of research in the eighties and the early nineties. The idea was that since researchers (starting with Shalom Schwartz) showed that there was a universal structure to how people described their values across cultural contexts, then these universal value types must act as principles for decision making, guiding people’s behaviours in predictable ways.
A ton of research followed in this vein, looking for a grand unifying theory of human behaviour, which would link values, or what people think is important in the abstract, to actual behaviour and decision making (Stern et al doing the most prominent work).
The result was that it is now resoundingly accepted that there is a weak and tenuous link between values and behaviour. Behaviour is mediated by a million different structural forces, which vary from person to person and context to context.
Values can be one of these structural barriers to change, but they do not predict change.