Understanding Human Values

Milton Rokeach

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781439118887
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume presents theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in understanding, and also in the effects of understanding, individual and societal values.

PART ONE
Societal, Institutional, and Organizational Values

Chapter 2
Change and Stability in Values and Value Systems: A Sociological Perspective

Robin M. Williams, Jr.

This chapter represents a revision and elaboration of ideas that have been developed in various publications over a period of some twenty-five years (Williams, 1951, 1967, 1968, 1971; Goldsen, Rosenberg, Suchman, & Williams, 1960). Some overlap and duplication is inevitable, especially in the case of the closely related treatment of the topic in Barber and Inkeles (Eds.), Stability and Social Change (1971). Our presentation deals briefly with background questions about the nature of values and their place in the determination of behavior, but focuses mainly on theory and data concerning change in values, especially macrochanges in American society.

We start with the observation that all continuing human groupings develop normative orientations—conceptions of preferred and obligatory conduct and of desirable and undesirable states of affairs. Such normative orientations are highly diverse across different societies, and are concretely very complex. Essentially, however, the most important types of normative elements are norms (specific obligatory demands, claims, expectations, rules) and values (the criteria of desirability).

THE NATURE OF VALUES

The term “values” has been used variously to refer to interests, pleasures, likes, preferences, duties, moral obligations, desires, wants, goals, needs, aversions and attractions, and many other kinds of selective orientations. To avoid such excessive looseness, we have insisted that the core phenomenon is the presence of criteria or standards of preference (Williams, 1968, 1970). The beginning point or substrate is preference (Pepper, 1958). But sheer preference alone leaves out the conceptual and directional qualities that are of greatest interest and importance for explaining human social behavior. Values merge affect and concept. Persons are not detached or indifferent to the world; they do not stop with a sheerly factual view of their experience. Explicitly or implicitly, they are continually regarding things as good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful or ugly, appropriate or inappropriate, true or false, virtues or vices. A comprehensive initial view of the field of valuing must identify the generic characteristics; for specific purposes, more restrictive conceptions should be formulated as needed. All values have cognitive, affective, and directional aspects. Values serve as criteria for selection in action. When most explicit and fully conceptualized, values become criteria for judgment, preference, and choice. When implicit and unreflective, values nevertheless perform “as if” they constituted grounds for decisions in behavior. Individuals do prefer some things to others; they do select one course of action rather than another out of a range of possibilities; they do judge their own conduct and that of other persons.

As we examine evidences of values, we find them appearing in various admixtures with knowledge and beliefs. For our judgments of what should be are always related to our judgments of what is. Thus our present view of mental illness as illness (rather than as possession by demons, or as the result of morally culpable behavior) points to humane medical treatment rather than punishment as a “good.” The change from older orientations is partly a change in biological, psychological, and sociological knowledge, but in the long run the changed beliefs profoundly affect evaluative standards even as, in turn, changes in values will affect our conceptions of reality.

Values are not concrete rules of conduct; nor can values be merged into the concept of institution. Rather, institutions must be conceived either as complex sets of rules (Williams, 1970) or as “value-integrates” (Parsons, 1951, pp. 36-45); in either formulation, some consistent or systematic combinations of concrete criteria and objects of preference are implied. One must avoid the trap of confusing value standards with objects of cathexis, and values cannot be assimilated to either existential beliefs or to concrete evaluations (such as ideologies). Beyond question, then, values are defined by analytic constructs; they are not object-bound.

But if this conception is held, what can values possibly be—if, indeed, the existential verb makes any sense here? Can the social actor be “committed” to or come to “internalize” a particular value? If so, values must be characterized by some quality of “entitivity” (Campbell, 1958)—some boundedness or object quality. And if a value may be likened in some way to an “object” (of regard, of affect, etc.), this conclusion would appear to rule out a sheerly nominal status, that is, a concept of a value as purely a “tendency,” “vector,” or “principle” as inferred by an external observer. Otherwise, values would be analogous to principles of syntax wholly unknown to the speakers of a language. In this event, the particular manifestations of correct or appropriate values would be positively regarded, to be sure, but one would be stretching the point to assert that the values themselves were objects of positive regard.

But the implied problem is not really so difficult. Observation of processes of evaluation makes it quite clear that some values are, indeed, highly explicit, and appear to the social actor as phenomenal entities: the person can state the value, illustrate its application in making judgments, identify its boundaries, and the like. Other standards of desirability are not explicit; and social actors may even resist making them explicit. Nonetheless, some criteria of this kind can be inferred from selective behavior, and when such inference is presented to the behaving actor some individuals can recognize in their own conduct a value of which they had previously not been aware. In the enormously complex universe of value phenomena, values are simultaneously components of psychological processes, of social interaction, and of cultural patterning and storage (Parsons, 1951, 1968; Albert, 1968, pp. 287-291).

PATTERNS OF VALUES

Rokeach has indicated that differences among individuals may be not so much in the presence or absence of particular values as in the arrangement of values, their hierarchies or priorities (1973; Chapter 3). Certainly differences in values across total social systems and across major distinctive “cultures” or “civilizations” typically do not consist of the total absence of some values in one case as over against their presence in another. In every full-fledged society, every one of Rokeach’s 36 values will appear—as will each of the values or themes listed by C. Kluckhohn, F. Kluckhohn, R. F. Bales and Couch, C. Morris, M. Opler, and R. Williams. Yet as total systems, societies differ radically in their patterns of values. The differences reside not only in hierarchies or priorities—the ordering of values according to importance, in some sense—but also in other important modes of relationships among values.

What are these other modes of relationships among values? What we have just said is that out of a very nearly universal or constant list of values, societies (and other less inclusive collectivities) differ in the patterning of the values. In addition to hierarchical ordering (usually imperfect and partial), societies differ, second, in the extensiveness of adherence to any particular values (Williams, 1970, Chapter 11). Thus, equality may be an elite value in an aristocratic city-state: all oligarchs agree that oligarchs are equal, no one else counts. In a modern parliamentary democracy, equality may be much more widely shared as a value among the total population. A related but not identical mode of patterning, is, third, the degree of universality of application, for example, “all Americans must be free”—when “Americans” may mean white, adult, Protestant, property-owning males, or, in contrast, when the value is extended to more and more inclusive categories of the population. Values may be patterned in a fourth mode, that of consistency: in one society, a metavalue emphasizes logical or “deontic” consistency among various values; in another society, little attention is paid to consistency, or else there is a positive appreciation of ambiguity, paradox, and irony. “Inconsistency” may be prized as “richness,” as indicative of scope and grandeur in experience.

Beginning with a sociological definition of institution as “a set of institutional norms that cohere around a relatively distinct and socially important complex of values” (Williams, 1970 p. 39), Rokeach suggests in the following chapter that institutions be regarded as “social arrangements that provide frameworks for value specialization, that is, frameworks for the transmission and implementation mainly of those subsets of values that are especially implicated in their own particular spheres of activity” (p. 51). This is a useful perspective, particularly because it provides for the structural articulation of individuals’ values with macrosocial arrangements. In highly differentiated modern societies, such diversity of values is compartmentalized in the major specialized institutions (kinship, stratification, economy, polity, education and science,¹ religion), and contradictions and incongruities are often dealt with by specialized collectivities and social statuses (e.g., those specialized in adjudication, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, therapy, suppression, or diversion).

HOW VALUES ARE STUDIED

Data, concepts, and research methods for the study of values have been drawn from several major fields of study—ranging across philosophy, the behavioral and social sciences, cybernetics, and several branches of the biological and physical sciences (Wiener, 1954; Pepper, 1958; Deutsch, 1963; Williams, 1967; Rokeach, 1968; Buckley, 1968; Parsons, 1968). The study of values cannot be confined to a single discipline or a narrow range of methods of research.

In the behavioral and social sciences, the discovery of the relative ease with which “attitudes” could be measured and manipulated in the laboratory probably has encouraged a concentration upon “problems of persuasion” rather than “problems of education and re-education” (Rokeach, 1968, 1973). The apparent usefulness of studies of opinions and attitudes to the advertising industry, to government and political leaders, to political propagandists of various kinds, and to business management probably also contributed heavily to this emphasis. At any rate, the American psychological research of the last few decades has apparently emphasized short-term effects, group conformity, and techniques of presentation and persuasion—rather than the possible long-term effects of “socialization, educational innovation, psychotherapy, and culture change on values” (Rokeach, 1968, p. 159). It is indeed very likely that a focus of attention upon quite short-range effects on relatively docile laboratory subjects would not supply a clear view of the long-range causal importance of pervasive values—which partly define the very limits of what is “possible” and “thinkable” in human conduct.

The dilemmas of defining value for research purposes are many, but the most crucial in many ways is the choice between a broad and a narrow definition. Highly specific definitions fail to deal with important phenomena that we are forced to recognize as having value properties. Very broad definitions tend to equate “value” with preference, desire, liking, or satisfaction (Fallding, 1965)—thus passing over the most distinctive feature of valuing, that is, the partial autonomy of criteria of desirability from desire or wish.

The growing attention now given to values in research may help to reduce the confusion in thinking about human social behavior that has often resulted from the absence of a clear discrimination between energy and information (Ackerman & Parsons, 1966, p. 37 ff.). Lacking an adequate conceptualization of values, some theorists have argued as if one could simply decide in general whether “ideas” or “material factors” were stronger determinants of behavior or whether “sexual drives” were more influential than “moral norms,” and the like. Such debates amount to elaborations of pseudoproblems, failing to deal with the relations between information and energy. Is a radar pulse stronger than a quart of gasoline? The question is manifestly absurd, unless further specified—and so are the equivalent psychological and social questions. For ideas, moral norms, values, beliefs, and symbols represent information, not energy. The energy of human action, which comes from the biological organism, and the environmental energies that the organism draws upon and that human action may release, are controlled by information, by signals, by symbols (Vickers, 1968, Chapter 7). The main cultural controls of action consist of (1) systems of knowledge and cognitive beliefs, and (2) systems of values and norms (Parsons, 1959, pp. 612-711). Without both energy and information, there is no social behavior.

A value system is an organized set of preferential standards that are used in making selections of objects and actions, resolving conflicts, invoking social sanctions, and coping with needs or claims for social and psychological defenses of choices made or proposed. Values are components in the guidance of anticipatory and goal-directed behavior; but they are also backward-looking in their frequent service to justify or “explain” past conduct.

Criteria of evaluation are always interdependent with beliefs, which orient actors to the putative realities of their existence. Such beliefs about existential realities are not wholly “arbitrary,” but they are surely open to a wide range of variation, within which they are not rigidly restrained by environmental imperatives. Actual selections of behavior result from concrete motivations in specific situations; both the motivations and the definitions of the situation are partly determined by the prior beliefs and values of the actor. A good illustration is provided by the relatively well-studied area of occupational choices. Such choices have been shown to be constrained by awareness of actual personal and environmental conditions, by values, and by beliefs about opportunities for value realization (Laws, 1976). In American society, for example, there are widely shared and somewhat stereotypic beliefs concerning occupations and employing organizations. There is some evidence that the image of the job in the large corporation is that of high pay, rapid advancement, and (somewhat less) a secure future, but of little initial responsibility or social recognition and of little development of lasting friendships (Braunstein & Haines, 1968). The preliminary testing on small samples so far reported show strongly patterned conceptions of the values prevailing in different types of organizations and occupations.

Valuations may refer to any existential objects whatsoever, including ideas and symbols as such. And social structures and processes may be affected by variations in those values held by social actors that concern nonsocial matters—physical objects, cultural objects, personalities as biopsychic entities, and so on. Not surprisingly, however, special importance for any analysis of social systems attaches to values which serve as criteria for judging social systems themselves.

The values which come to be constitutive of the structure of a societal system are, then, the conceptions of the desirable type of society held by the members of the society of reference and applied to the particular society of which they are members. The same applies to other types of social systems. A value pattern then defines a direction of choice, and consequent commitment to action. (Parsons, 1968, p. 136)

Thus, values constitute what Vickers (1968) calls “an appreciative system.” The total set of affective-conceptual criteria for preferential behavior not only is essential to deal with the world, but is constitutive of any enduring society. Any society must change in its value constitution to cope with changing adaptative problems, yet it must retain some coherence in its appreciative system (based on some minimal consensus) or the social order will break down (Vickers, 1968, p. 35). As components of the black box of the human social actor, values may be said to be complex precodings for behavioral choice—precodings that also continually change in response to current inputs.

Thus, values operate as constituents of dynamic systems of social action because of their interconnectedness, their informational or directive effects, and their capacities to serve as “carriers” of psychological energy. Values always have a cultural content, represent a psychological investment, and are shaped by the constraints and opportunities of a social system and of a biophysical environment. Changes in values are constrained and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE Societal Institutional and Organizational Values
• PART TWO Some Major Determinants and Consequences of Value Organization
• PART THREEValue Change Through Self-Awareness
• PART FOUR Value Education Through Self Awareness
• Index