Moral Psychology - Cultural Values

Cultural Values

Morality didn’t arise from individual choice but from a collection of human decisions to try and create a structure while living together. Constraints by their environments and natural human desires influenced these decisions. The evolution of human social instincts overlap with the evolution of culture. Cultural morality has provided a way of managing conflict. Cultural morality requires behavior that is cooperative and considerate of others, it discourages potentially unhealthy self-interest, and encourages other-regarding emotions beneficial in society. Furthermore, it can provide an outlet of self-interest motivations in other-regarding actions.

In his 1992 study, Schwartz, in collaboration with Roccas and Sagiv, studies how value priorities are effected by the “social experience,” how they affect “behavioral orientation and choices,” (p. 1) and how/why they differ across cultures and nations. Schwartz writes, “Studies combining our abstract level of measurement with contextually specific measures would increase our understanding of how values enter into concrete decision-making” (Schwartz, 47) and he proposes that, "Identifying moderators of universal or culture-specific value priorities would help us better understand the operation and functioning of value priorities"(Schwartz, 2). The valuable observation is made that "Structures probably evolve alongside transformations of societies and social conditions, or “may even change rapidly in response to major technological, economic, political, and security upheavals” (Schwartz, 47). He finds that the majority of cultures prioritize these 10 value types: Self-Direction, Stimulation, Hedonism, Achievement, Power, Security, Conformity, Tradition, Benevolence, and Universalism. Within these value types there are values that cultures all prioritize to varying degrees. The study ultimately concludes that its data and postulations are supported enough, according to researchers, to justify their use when conducting further research into similar questions about values and universality, and “about how the whole integrated system of value priorities relates to background, attitude, and behavior variables.” The article is clear that ”By identifying universal aspects of value content and structure, this article has laid the foundations for investigating culture-specific aspects in the future,” (Schwartz, 60).

Additionally, Schwartz also conducted a study on cultural values, defining cultural values as “conceptions of the desirable that guide the way social actors (e.g. organizational leaders, policy-makers, individual person) select actions, evaluate people and events, and explain their actions and evaluations” (p. 24) . To infer national value priorities, individual values within 49 nations were aggregated to represent overall themes of the broader nation. Schwartz selected 7 value types based on societal issues. The opposing value dimensions were: Autonomy vs. Conservatism, Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism, and Mastery vs. Harmony. The current study examined a dominant social group within the nations, studying urban school teachers within the most common school systems. Teachers are believed to play a role is value socialization, and are the “key carriers of culture,” reflecting a midrange of value priorities in society. A comparative analysis was conducted with samples of college students in each nation. The value profiles of the five nations had significant results in that not only did the students and teachers yield similar results, but similar geographic regions had similar values, illustrating a correlation between geographical proximity and shared cultural values. Schwartz proposes testable hypotheses based on this national data within areas of work including: work centrality, societal norms about work, and work goals.