Values are relatively general cultural prescriptions of what is right, moral and desirable. Values provide the broad foundations for specific normative regulation of social interaction. Personal values are based on the influence of external world and can change over time. Personal values are related to choice and are generally influenced by groups or systems, such as culture or religion. Moral values help determine what is morally right or wrong, like freedom, fairness, and equality. Value systems are proscriptive and prescriptive beliefs and they affect ethical behavior of a person. Primary values are generally strong and secondary values are suitable for changes. Personal values provide an internal reference for what is good, beneficial, important, useful, beautiful, desirable and constructive.
What makes an action valuable may in turn depend on the ethical values of the objects it increases, decreases or alters. Values are one of the factors that generate behavior and influence the choices made by an individual. Personal values exist in relation to cultural values, either in agreement with or divergence from prevailing norms. Without normative personal values, there would be no cultural reference against which to measure the virtue of individual values and so cultural identity would disintegrate.
Self and Values - An
Interactivist Foundation for Moral Development
Robert L. Campbell, John Chambers Christopher, Mark H. Bickhard. The standard research programs in moral development have been
criticized for adopting a narrow and restrictive view of the moral domain. There has been a dearth of
alternative theories that account for the diversity of mature moral viewpoints both within
and outside Western culture. We present an interactivist framework that takes into account
the plurality of moral perspectives. It does so by addressing fundamental issues of
psychological ontology and providing an account of values and the self based on the
interactivist conception of knowledge and the knowing-levels treatment of consciousness
and developmental stages. We discuss foundational questions
such as the nature of the self, how it develops and the relationship between the self and
values or morals, with special attention to the nature and source of value conflicts.
The Measurement of Values
and Individualism-Collectivism
Shigehiro Oishi, Uhich Schimmack, Ed Diener, Eunkook M. Suh, University of
Illinois-Urbana-Champaign.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 24, No. 11, 1177-1189 (1998).
This study presents alternative measures of S. H. Schwartz's theory of values using
pairwise comparisons and goal concepts. Not only did the three measures of values-the
Schwartz Value Survey (SVS), the Pairwise Comparison Value Survey (PCVS), and the Personal
Striving Value Survey (PSVS) - converge but they were also correlated in similar ways with
the Individualism-Collectivism Scale (ICS). This provides evidence that the newly
developed scales can be alternatives to the Schwartz Value Survey, which allows future studies of values
using multiple measures. Moreover, the findings provide support for Schwartz's conception
of values as higher order goals. The present findings have several implications for the
study of values and their linkage to the study of individualism-collectivism and the
self-concept.