Social Values History

Section 1: The Theoretical Foundations of Social Values Research

The Environics Social Values measurement system seeks to understand the structure of Social Values in a society and monitor changes in those values over time. The roots of the method go back more than a century and a half to a curious young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville. De Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s in order to examine, first-hand, the social and political life of the world’s “first new nation.” His Democracy in America is to Social Values research what Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is to the understanding of economics. Later in the nineteenth century, economist Thorstein Veblen took another giant step forward in the description and understanding of changes to human Social Values with his Theory of the Leisure Class.

A generation ago, academic social scientists such as Maslow, Riesman, Bell, Rokeach, and Thurstone began to describe and measure Social Values, and to explore their dynamics and manifestations in contemporary societies. They also identified a hierarchy of Social Values. For example, Maslow saw a structure and evolution of values from those associated with physical survival at the base level of human needs to those associated with self-actualization at the highest intellectual and moral levels of motivation. Individuals, and even whole societies, could be roughly characterized according to this values hierarchy depending on the beliefs and concerns they displayed most strongly.

In everyday parlance, the term “values” has come to take on a rich panoply of meanings and connotations. Take, for instance, the ubiquitous “family values,” whose precise nature is often assumed without articulation. However, in the 1960s psychologist Milton Rokeach first theorized about and defined Social Values in more precise and scientific terms as having the following properties:

• They are beliefs;
• They are conceptions of, preferences for, and prescriptions about de-sirable modes of conduct or established orientations toward living and existence (in other words, the means of living);
• They are conceptions of, preferences for, and prescriptions about de-sirable end-states of existence and social ideals (in other words, the ends of living).

Examples of the first type of beliefs, the means of living, include such values as honesty, hard work, or even “playing the system.” Examples of the second type, the ends of living, include such values as status, health, peace, enlightenment, and power and influence.

Such formative and fundamental beliefs about the desirable means and ends of human conduct and existence are thought to be largely moulded in adolescence and early adulthood experience. Social Values are informed by a person’s prevalent perceptions and learning provided both in the family and in his or her close kinship group, and by exposure to the predominant socio-historical environment and influences of the times into which he or she is born, is being raised, and comes of age (by which we mean “reaches sentient awareness of the world”). Once massively defined by institutions such as the church and state, values have never been as idealistic or ideological as they were cast in Rokeach’s view, but rather can also serve, quite pragmatically, as a person’s or society’s adaptation to, and justification of, current personal or cultural practices. Those practices—from interpersonal honesty to Machiavellianism, and from social assistance to genocide—are more often than not framed, or even “spun,” in terms of the higher-order values they serve.

In terms of today’s social scientific jargon, at Environics we consider values also to be evidence of “motivated cognition.” These are beliefs that both determine and reflect our responses to the world as we struggle to meet such basic psychological and sociological needs as biological survival, connection with our close kinship groups, and our species’ predilection toward organizing socially in hierarchical and status-defined groups. So, beyond their definition as desirable or prescribed means and ends of living, the term “values” has come to capture the deeper motivations behind human behaviour, tendencies of thought and feelings—unconscious as well as conscious—and the intra- and interpersonal dynamics related to them.

As we peel the onion of human motivation, we see that a host of different aspects of people’s worldviews are well captured by an assessment of their “values,” so defined. These aspects include assumptions, perceptions, and habits of thought; attitudes, judgments, and opinions; and intentions, tendencies, and actions. Values stand in, then, as a good description for a multitude of mental, emotional, and motivational postures with which we conduct our transactions with others and ourselves. What our research really attempts, then, is a rather broadband analysis of the worldviews of individuals and of collectives, big and small.