The Psychology of Human Values

Gregory R Maio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317223320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This original and engaging book advocates an unabashedly empirical approach to understanding human values: abstract ideals that we consider important, such as freedom, equality, achievement, helpfulness, security, tradition, and peace. Our values are relevant to everything we do, helping us choose between careers, schools, romantic partners, places to live, things to buy, who to vote for, and much more. There is enormous public interest in the psychology of values and a growing recognition of the need for a deeper understanding of the ways in which values are embedded in our attitudes and behavior. How do they affect our well-being, our relationships with other people, our prosperity, and our environment?

In his examination of these questions, Maio focuses on tests of theories about values, through observations of what people actually think and do. In the past five decades, psychological research has learned a lot about values, and this book describes what we have learned and why it is important. It provides the first overview of psychological research looking at how we mentally represent and use our values, and constitutes important reading for psychology students at all levels, as well as academics in psychology and related social and health sciences.

Part I
Beginnings in the Empirical Study of Human Values

The term value can mean different things to people. Sometimes, it's the price we would pay to buy something, like a car or a mobile phone. Other times, it's a non-monetary sense of admiration or attachment, as when we “value” a person's opinion or friendship. This book focuses on another way that the term is used. Specifically, it looks at abstract ideals like honesty, equality, freedom, and humility. In recent decades, social psychological research on human values has taught us a great deal about them and how they play a role in attitudes, behavior, and other important processes (e.g. intergroup conflict, well-being).

Before launching into a description of this psychological research, it is important to first describe how human values have been conceptualized historically. Relevant historical observations come from numerous disciplines, including anthropology, economics, history, human geography, philosophy, political science, sociology, and theology. Summarizing insights from all of these disciplines would require another book. For this volume, it is enough to selectively highlight work in two domains where thinking about values has been the most prominent and well-known, religion and philosophy, while noting relevant observations from other disciplines at different points in the book.

Chapter 1 therefore begins with a discussion of classic religious and philosophical perspectives, and then moves to a description of two early models of human values in psychological research. The discussion of these models will highlight their influential assertions about values, such as their roles as important parts of our self-concept. The chapter will then outline how psychologists have measured and studied values. Values have been assessed using a variety of techniques, and this chapter will introduce the more prominent methods.

Despite laying a foundation for research on values, the seminal models of values left major questions unresolved. How many values are there? How are values similar and different from each other? How do values help to explain attitudes and behavior? We can make substantial progress toward addressing these issues if we have models that comprehensively describe different types of values. Chapter 2 describes several models that have been influential in addressing this concern.

1
A Brief History of Values

Introduction

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

Discussions of contemporary issues in the United Kingdom often have a particular focus. Politicians and policy makers debate the well-being of a nation by referring to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). They repeatedly worry about the behavior of consumers, and endlessly debate environmental and health care impacts on the treasury and the economy. If Oscar Wilde could see us now, he might wonder if we still know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Is the well-being of a nation reflected only by its GDP? What about health, happiness, and time with family? Are people in a nation merely “consumers” and not also “citizens”? Do environmental and health policies have to bestow immediate financial benefits in order to be pursued?

These types of questions all have bearing on the study of human values: abstract ideals that we consider to be important. People care a great deal about abstract ideals like achievement, health, happiness, equality, family, helpfulness, forgiveness, freedom, national security, tradition, and pleasure. We can find it difficult to put a price on these ideals, and we defend them passionately. Abortion, banking regulation, censorship, child protection, criminal punishment, discrimination, free trade, immigration, health care, religious freedoms, and assistance for the unemployed are just some of the issues that bring values into emotional debates, which can become more than mere wars of words. Values are used to justify individual acts of violence, collective protests over perceived injustice, and wars between nations.

What are people thinking about when they defend their values in these ways? This book strives to show how values operate in people's minds. Psychological research has made important strides in understanding values in the past century. To set the stage for looking at this research, this chapter highlights ideas of fundamental relevance from religion and philosophy, and then looks at the seminal contributions in psychology. This brief and unabashedly selective review helps to set the stage for thinking about the research described in later chapters.

Do Religions Say Anything in Common about Values?

Whether you are religious or not, it is impossible to escape the fact that explicit statements of values occur in religious teachings. Two elements that are universally central to religious teachings are also pertinent to values: recognition of a tension between self-interest and self-transcendence, and an emphasis on the importance of dedicated practice and ritual.

Self-Interest versus Self-Transcendence

One of the world's most popular and oldest faiths, Buddhism, teaches that the main object in life should involve the cessation of suffering. This ideal is reflected in the Buddhist dictum against killing all sentient beings, and it is encompassed by the four sublime virtues of Buddhism – kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity – and by the Buddhist use of meditation to reach a heightened sense of union with others and the universe. These aspects of Buddhism make it one of humanity's longest serving advocates for selfless pursuits and harmony with nature.

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies …

(Gordon Gecko, in the infamous 1987 film, Wall Street)

In most faiths, an important theme is a tension that exists between taking care of oneself versus helping others. We must feed, clothe, and house ourselves, but just how far should we go toward earning the money that is necessary for these things? When does self-interest become greed? We always seem to want more and are rarely certain that we have enough. At the same time, we can encounter others who clearly have much less, and we may or may not feel compelled to share the spoils of our labors. Should we give and how much should we give?

Religions specialize in offering advice on this issue. Maimonides, a great Jewish moral philosopher, offered a typology of charitable acts. In his Golden Ladder of Charity, the lowest rung involves giving reluctantly. The next rung is a cheerful act of giving that does not meet the person's need. Roughly in the middle are acts given cheerfully and in anticipation of need, but in a manner that indirectly reinforces lower status in the recipient. At the highest level are acts that anticipate and prevent need, preventing the recipient from experiencing a lower status than the giver (e.g. through anonymous donation).

Early Christianity also emphasized self-sacrifice, such that only the most basic needs are sought and avarice was held up as the root of evil. A pivotal Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas, argued that the possession of surplus wealth is injurious to those who possess little and that it would be lawful for someone in need to take from those with too much. Believers could also cite many biblical references, such as Jesus' declaration that it would be easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven. This contempt for greed and avarice contributed to the Catholic Church's strong injunction against usury (i.e. charging interest on a loan, especially unreasonable interest).

Yet, the outrageous avarice of many early popes and the Roman Catholic church's imposition of high tithes for its own benefit helped to fuel the emergence of Calvinism and the Protestant churches in the sixteenth century (Armstrong, 2010; Chamberlin, 1969). This movement asserted that the acquisition of wealth was a sign of divine grace. Wealth was worth acquiring for its own sake, though not in a fashion that reflects mere greed. As a result, the pursuit of wealth and divine salvation were seemingly united. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but this powerful blend predated tremendous commercial growth of the British Empire, the Dutch Republic, and the United States – nations that were bastions for growth in the Protestant view.

Islam offers a perspective that resides in between these views. Its conception of Zakat is similar to but also distinct from the Catholic Church's early practice of the tithe. Zakat is a religious duty prescribing that solvent and mentally sound adult Muslims allocate 2.5 percent of their wealth each year to people in need. As long as Muslims follow this rule, they are free to earn as much as they want. Similar to the early Catholic Church, usury is typically forbidden. Thus, the Muslim faith offers a clear and specific trade-off between principled concern for others and self-interest.

All of these examples reveal a deep link between religious faith and beliefs about the balance between concern for the self and concern for others. At the same time, religions often offer reasons to follow the balance that they advocate. One oft-cited reason is the potential for reciprocity. The importance of reciprocity is highlighted in many aphorisms from religious leaders: “One should seek for others the happiness one desires for himself” (Buddha); “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others” (Confucius); “Love thy neighbour as thyself” (Jesus); “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor” (Rabbi Hillel); “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself” (Muhammad). In each case, there is an emphasis on treating others in ways that you would wish to be treated – a belief that has come to be known colloquially as “the golden rule.”

There are differences in the precise interpretation and application of this golden rule in different faiths (Wattle, 1996). Faiths differ in the extent to which they emphasize care for others versus avoidance of harm; there are differences in the extent to which they promote obligation to people outside of one's own family, community, and religious groups; it is not always clear that the reciprocity is supposed to occur for strangers as much as for kin or neighbors. Furthermore, it is not even clear that reciprocity is supposed to occur only for positive acts and avoidance of negative ones. Reciprocity can also entail harming those who harm us, while expecting that our own injuries to others may be returned. This idea was famously expressed in the code of Hammurabi of Babylon, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This half of the principle helps to keep others in check – we avoid being taken advantage of or taking advantage relentlessly – and is explicitly accepted in some faiths (e.g. Satanism) and rejected in others (e.g. Christ's admonition to “turn the other cheek”).

Both the commonality in focus (i.e. self versus others) and the differences in interpretation (e.g. an eye for an eye; turn the other cheek) highlight a critical issue that is also reflected in the psychological research on values. As we will see in this book, values can help us to balance between competing motives in an abstract way (e.g. self versus others), but their effects also depend critically on how they are concretely interpreted.

The effects of values may also depend on how they are justified. There is an ambivalent and ineffable quality to most religions' justifications for their core values. Religious doctrines often state that their values help to attain some divine state and valuable metaphysical outcome (enlightenment, heaven, avoidance of hell, higher level of reincarnation), or better experiences in our present lives. Our personal consequences can be shaped in a number of ways: we may be helped or hurt by the ones we have helped or harmed; we may be helped or hurt by other people unconnected to the initial act (e.g. through bad karma, “what goes around comes around”); or we may receive manifestations of God's wrath and blessings in the here and now.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven.

(Matthew 5:12, The Holy Bible, King James Version)

Perceptions of divine ends and personal outcomes vary substantially between and even within faiths. For example, Christians in the same denomination (e.g. Catholics) may differ in the extent to which they view God as a separate omnipotent being or as a mysterious entity inseparable from ourselves (Armstrong, 2010). Nonetheless, the frequent reliance on supernatural ends can make the values seem hollow. What if these ends do not arise? What if we will not get to heaven by being compassionate? What if we will not avoid hell's fires by resisting temptation? If people truly rest their values on such assumptions, it is frightening to ponder what would happen if people came to believe that a metaphysical divine end is not at stake.

There is also an ironic side-effect of an emphasis on supernatural or divine ends. By being very mindful of these ends, do believers fail to reach the high levels of detachment and self-transcendence that their faiths require? If people believe that they help thems...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface: The Problem of Human Values
• PART I Beginnings in the Empirical Study of Human Values
• PART II Values in Psychology
• PART III Forces that Shape Values
• PART IV When and How Values Matter
• EPILOGUE: Where Do We Go From Here?
• Index