Values and Value-Orientations 388

 

4  The Theory of Action and Its Application

 

4.2  Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action¹ - CLYDE KLUCKHOHN AND OTHERS<

 

An Exploration in Definition and Classification

 

                Human life is - and has to be - a moral life precisely because it is a social life, and in the case of the human species cooperation and other necessities of social life are not taken care of automatically by in-

stincts as with the social insects.  In common-sense terms, morals are socially agreed upon values relating to conduct.  To this degree morals - and all group values - are the products of social interaction as embodied in culture.  From this point of view the examination which follows largely proceeds.  On the other hand, there is a sense in which "conscience" may be said to be the last residuum of instinctive behavior in man - other than the relatively few human reflexes.  At very least "conscience" certainly has a biological basis, though a broad and long-term one.  Later in this essay the relations and distinctions between "values" and concepts such as "motivation," "drive," and “need,” which have a strong biological reference, will be examined at some length.  First we must make a detailed exploration of the concept "value."  Since this will be oriented primarily by considerations of social science, it is probably inevitable that aesthetic values are inadequately dealt with. It is felt, as indicated below, that in a very broad and general way the same principles apply to aesthetic and expressive values as to moral and cognitive values.  However, a conceptual analysis on the aesthetic side as full as that which follows on the ethical must be a separate task. 

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                ¹ Various drafts of this paper have had the benefit of a critical reading by David Aberle, Chester I. Barnard, Munro Edmonson, Rose Goldsen, Florence Kluckhohn, Donald Michael, Donald Marquis, Robert Morison, Henry A. Murray, Thomas O'Dea, Talcott Parsons, John Peirce, John M. Roberts, Lauriston Sharp, Eliseo Vivas, E. Z. Vogt, John W. M. Whiting, and Robin Williams; their comments and criticisms have led to

major revisions. 

 

                Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Nebraska and to the Division of Social Sciences, Rockefeller Foundation, for opportunities which have contributed to the writing of this paper. 

In April 1948, I was privileged to give the Montgomery Lectures at the University of Nebraska on the subject "An Anthropologist Looks at Values."  Participation in the project, "A Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures," supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, has greatly facilitated my research and

thinking in this field. Finally, I am indebted to the "Summary of Discussions of the Cornell Value Study Group" (June 11, 1949). I am grateful to this group and to its chairman, Robin Williams, for permission to quote liberally from this valuable but unpublished memorandum. 

 

                It would be improper to claim single authorship for this paper, for I have borrowed ideas, sentences, and phrases from unpublished memoranda and oral communications from at least the following colleagues and students David Aberle, Eleanor Hollenberg, William Lambert, David MeClelland, Kaspar Naegele, Thomas O'Dea, John M. Roberts, Katherine Spencer, Arthur Vidich, E. Z. Vogt, and John W. M. Whiting. 

I have been benefitted by their help in the "Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures" project. 

On the other hand, none of these individuals is to be blamed for any statement made herein; responsibility, though not originality, rests entirely with the senior author.  Finally, I have incorporated with minor changes a few sentences from the chapter on values in Part II of this book. 

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                Charles Elton, the ecologist, has observed that it is not much use to observe and describe animals until you can name them.  Data and reasoning can bring about more confusion than enlightenment unless they are firmly attached to referents which, if not universally accepted, are at least thoroughly understood. Indeed some philosophers today even define science as "the techniques for giving words precise meanings."  A concept is a word which has been given a precise meaning.  The term value urgently requires an attempt at precise definition of the conceptual territory covered and not covered before it can serve effectively as an analytical element in the theory of action.  Moreover, as the Cornell value-study group has observed:

 

                The concept "value" supplies a point of convergence for the various specialized social sciences, and is a key concept for the integration with studies in the humanities.  Value is potentially a bridging concept which can link together many diverse specialized studies - from the experimental psychology

of perception to the analysis of political ideologies, from budget studies in economics to aesthetic theory and philosophy Of language, from literature to race riots ... 

 

                Sophisticated use of value-theory can help to correct the wide-spread static-descriptive bias of the social sciences.  (The pervasive emphasis, for example, upon static-equilibrium theories in economics; upon "social structure" in sociology: upon static "need-reduction" theories of personality in psychology.)

 

                In addition to the varied and shifting connotations of value in ordinary speech, the word is a technical term in philosophy, economics, the arts, and, increasingly, in sociology, psychology, and anthropology.  There can hardly he said to be an established consensus in any one of these fields. 

L. M. Fraser has shown that in economics there are three main senses, each with subvariants.² 

In philosophy, there are numerous competing definitions.³  One current of philosophical thought has distinguished the right (ethics) from the good (values). Charles Morris has recently defined the study of values as "the science of preferential behavior."  Ralph Barton Perry's well-known definition is "any object of any interest."  Reading the voluminous, and often vague and diffuse, literature on the subject in the various fields of learning, one finds values considered as attitudes, motivations, objects, measureable quantities, substantive areas of behavior, affect-laden customs or traditions, and relationships such as those between individuals, groups, objects, events.  The only general agreement is that values somehow have to do with normative as opposed to existential propositions.

 

                ² Economic Thought and Language (London, 1937).

 

                ³ The social scientist will find Value Theory: A Cooperative Inquiry (1949), edited by Ray Lepley, perhaps the most useful introduction to the current state of philosophical discussion. 

 

390 The Theory and Its Application

 

NORMATIVE AND EXISTENTIAL PROPOSITIONS

 

                It is often said that all value judgments are selective and discriminative ways of responding. If this is accepted, there is nothing which cannot be - which has not been - "valued" by someone in some situation.  The work of Adelbert Ames and Hadley Cantril, among others, has demonstrated the evaluative element in sheer perception.  It is easy to magnify out of all proportion the distance from the indicative to the optative and imperative modes.  Existential propositions often have nonempirical elements - for example, "There is a God."  Charles Morris has shown that factual, wish, and appraisal sentences all have empirical, syntactical, and pragmatic or technic reference, but they differ in the degree to which various elements of reference are

present.⁴  There is a difference of emphasis, but the difference is seldom of an all-or-none character.

A judgment that a person is destructive, greedy, jealous, envlous is not too different from a physician's statement about a dysfunction of the heart or lungs.  It can be argued that in both cases the underlying as-

sumption is that of a lack of healthy fulfillment of naturally given potentialities. 

 

                In reaction against the prevalent intellectual folklore regarding the utter separateness of fact and value, some scholars have tried to merge the two categories.  E. L. Thorndike, for example, in his 1935 presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said:

 

                Judgments of value are simply one sort of judgments of fact, distinguished from the rest by two characteristics: They concern consequences.  These are consequences to the wants of sentient beings.  Values, positive and negative, reside in the satisfaction or annoyance felt by animals, persons or deities. 

If the occurrence of X can have no influence on the satisfaction or discomfort of any one present or future, X has no value, is neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable.  Values are functions of preferences.  Judgments about values - statements that A is good, B is bad, C is right, D is useful – refer ultimately to satisfactions or annoyances in sentient creatures and depend upon their preferences.  (Competent students judge the existence of things by observations of them: they judge the values of things by observations of

their consequences.⁵) 

 

                ⁴ Signs, Language and Behavior (1946). See also Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (1944), esp. chap. iii, which shows "how emotive and descriptive meanings are related, each modifying the other." 

 

391 Values and Value-Orientations

 

Reservations that are necessary concerning consequences as an operational test of values (at least as far as the more ultimate values are concerned) will be presented in the last section of this paper.   With Thorndike's statement that the linkage between normative and existential propositions rests in the con-

ception of the nature of things in relation to human interests we are in hearty agreement. 

 

                Ray Lepley, in a paper entitled "The Identity of Fact and Value," has argued that the separation of the two categories results solely from our conventional habits of thought:

 

                The belief that valuative statements as expressive of means-end relations are inherently different from scientific propositions as denoting cause-effect relations has apparently risen, as has the view that valuative sentences are less verifiable than factual statements, from failure to see that the whole gamut

of events and relations can be referred to by both forms of statement, and this failure has perhaps in turn risen from failure to escape wholly from what Dewey has deplored as the subjectivistic psychology. 

The habit of looking at personal and social events and relations from the inner, subjective viewpoint and referring to them in more valuative terms and of surveying non-human organic and especially inorganic events and relations and the outer, objective viewpoint and denoting them in more factual terms has given rise to the notions that means-end and cause-effect relations are inherently different, and that therefore factual and valuative propositions are inherently different because they respectively denote these two supposedly distinct kinds of relations.⁶ 

 

This much is certainly true: "The whole gamut of events and relations can be referred to by both forms of statement."  Here is the source of much of our confusion. One can and does think both about values and about existence.  And the two modes are often linked in the same proposition.  "This is a value for me" is an existential proposition about me.  When the scientist says, "This is valid," he is making an evaluation in terms of an existential standard, but he is not affectively neutral toward his utterance, for it is made partly in

terms of his highest values: truth, validity, correctness. 

 

                There can be no doubt that an individual's or a group's conceptions of what is and of what ought to be are intimately connected. As McKeon says:

 

In the context of cultural expressions, ideas and ideals are not opposed to facts or derived from interests but are themselves facts.  In that factual context the preferable and the possible are determined by what men want or think they want and by the social order which they plan or dream as means to attain it, not by what can be shown to be better for them on sorne grounds of practical or scientific argument and on some analysis of fact and practicability, or by what they can secure or think they can secure by negotiation

with those possessed of related and opposed interests.⁷ 

 

                ⁵ Science, January 3, 1936.

                ⁶ Philosophy of Science, X (1943), 124-131. 

 

392 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Northrop is probably right in maintaining that primitive ⁸ concepts of nature and primitive postulates about nature underlie any value system.  Values go back to a conception of nature, "verified" by facts which are in some sense independent of culture.  However, the primitive concepts and primitive postulates are not independent of culture.  We live in a world where the same sets of phenomena are being accounted for by different postulates and concepts.  Different cultures are tied to different conceptualizations. 

 

                It can, however, be said that in all cultures "normal" individuals recognize some natural limitations upon what can be.  To take an almost absurd hut clear example: In their conceptions of a desirable state of affairs people do not postulate conditions under which the law of gravity ceases to operate, the threats and irritations of climatic variations disappear completely, or food and drink appear spontaneously ready for consumption. 

 

                Values are constrained within the framework of what is taken as given by nature.  If the nature of human nature is conceived as intrinsically evil, men are not enjoined to behave like gods; though if human nature is believed to be perfectible, they may be. In other words, existential propositions also supply the clues for major values.  The Navaho think of the natural order as potentially harmonious.  It is therefore a prime value of Navaho ceremonialism to maintain, promote, or restore this potential harmony.⁹ 

 

                George Lundberg has done a service in calling attention to the interdependence between normative and existential propositions, but he has strained unduly to dissolve the distinction completely.

He writes:

 

                The first step toward the recognition of the essential basic similarity of scientific and ethical statements will have been taken when we recognize that all "should" or "ought" statements, as well as scientific statements, represent an expectation which is, in effect, a prediction.  This is true of such varied

forms as "if the gasoline line and the ignition are both in order (etc.), then the engine ought to start"; or "he [under stated or implied circumstances] ought to be ashamed," (i.e., "if he were a 'decent,' 'civilized,' socially sensitive person, then he ought to be ashamed").  Sometimes the actual expectation may be very low and, in fact, may represent merely the individual's wishful thinking, that is, expectation according to the standards of an ideal or dream world; e.g., "People should not (ought not) gossip ; 'We should love our enemies."  (Incidentally, the latter statement involves a semantic confusion of its own in that, by definition, an enemy is someone not loved, i.e., if we loved our enemies we would no longer regard them as enemies.)

Expected behavior of some kind (under whatever circumstances are assumed), is implicit in all "ought" statements.  Mankind often disappoints us; our predictions in this area are not, as yet, as accurate as those of the meteorologist.  But this is merely saying that (a) the probability of the sequence "if - - - then" varies; that (b) the stipulated conditions or desiderata vary; and that (c) both may be misgauged in physical as well as in social affairs.  Thus, all "ought" statements are essentially of the "if - - . then" type characteristic

also of all scientific statements. 

 

                ⁷ Conflicts of Values in a Community of Cultures", Journal of Philosophy, XLVII (1950), 202. 

 

                ⁸ In, of course, the meaning of modern logic. 

 

                ⁹ See Clyde Kluckhobn, "The Philosophy of the Navaho Indians," in Ideological Differences and World Order, edited by F. S. C. Northrop (1949). 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 393

 

                Why, then, do we have the deep-seated feeling regarding the difference between scientific and ethical statements?  One, and perhaps the principal, reason is that certain implicit unspoken premises in ethical statements are usually overlooked, whereas in scientific statements these premises are always recognized.  This fact, in turn, is related to a subtle and unrecognized assumption that, while scientific statements describe events of nature, ethical statements describe only personalistic judgments, wishes, or whims, whether of men or of gods. These latter are assumed not to be amenable to the methods found effective in predicting "natural" phenomena.  Actually, as I have pointed out elsewhere, (Can Science Save Us? pp. 2633, 97-103), the word "Values" refers to valuating behavior of some sort and as such can be studied scientifically like any other behavior.  Most of our statistics on prices, salaries, occupations, migrations, consumption and, for that matter, all so-called "voluntary" or "choice" behavior whatsoever are studies of human "Values." 

 

                Consider, from this point of view, the following illustrations:

(1) "If {specifying all the necessary and sufficient conditions], then we shall (with stated degree of probability) avoid another war."  How does it differ from this statement:

(2) "We ought to avoid another war"?  Implicit in the "ought" form of this statement is the unspoken premise "if we want to avoid all the undesirable consequences entailed in another war, then we should (ought to) prevent another war." This proposition depends for its validity on

(a) the accuracy of the estimated probability that another war would, in fact, entail the expected undesirable consequences, and

(b) the reliability of the prediction that certain conditions prevent or produce war (the "if" clause of statement I) - both of them questions that can be approached by the same scientific methods as the first proposition. The reader is invited - and challenged to produce a single "ought" statement which cannot be more fully expressed in the "if - - - then" form.  At least one premise usually will be found unspoken, implicit, and taken for granted.  That premise implies a desideratum which, it is assumed by the speaker of an "ought" statement, is a necessary and sufficient condition for the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of what it is

asserted "ought" to happen.¹⁰ 

 

                What Lundberg apparently fails to see is the somewhat arbitrary process of selection involved in his "unspoken" premises relating to the desirable.  Values, as has been pointed out, are limited by nature and depart in some sense from nature, but are only to a limited extent given by nature.  Existential propositions purport to describe nature and the necessary interconnections of natural prenomena.  Values say, in effect: "This appears to be naturally possible.  It does not exist or does not fully exist, but we want to move toward

it, or, it already exists but we want to preserve and maintain it.  Moreover, we aver that this is a proper or appropriate or justified want."  Lundberg also equivocates in his use of "expected" between what is anticipated as a result of the operation of natural processes and what is demanded or hoped for in terms of humanly created standards.  Finally, it should be noted that existential statements often reflect prior value judgments.  In scientific discourse, at least, our propositions relate to matters we consider important. 

 

                ¹⁰ "Semantics and the Value Problem," Social Forces, XXVII (1948), 11~116. Cf. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited by Shils and Finch (1949), esp. pp.50-55. 

 

394 The Theory and Its Application

 

                "Nature" is one frame of reference; "action" is another frame of reference.  In the former, one need only ask, "Is this the case (fact) ?"  In the latter, one must ask both this question and, "Ought this to be the case (value) in the conceptions of the subject(s) of the enquiry?"  The two frames of reference, as has been shown, are intimately related.  Perhaps one further statement is in order:

 

                Because man inevitably builds up for himself an assumptive world in carrying out his purposive activities, the world he is related to, the world he sees, the world he is operating on, and the world that is operating on him is the result of a transactional process in which man himself plays an active role.  

Man carries out his activities in the midst of concrete events which themselves delimit the significances he must deal with.¹¹ 

 

                Existence and value are intimately related, interdependent, and yet – at least at the analytical level - conceptually distinct.  It is a fact both of introspection and of observation that there are three fundamental types of experiencing: what is or is believed to be (existential) ; what I and/or others want (desire) ; what I and/or others ought to want (the desirable).  Values are manifested in ideas, expressional symbols, and in the moral and aesthetic norms evident in behavioral regularities.  Whether the cognitive or the cathectic

factors have primacy in the manifestation of a value at a particular time, both are always present.  Values synthesize cognitive and cathectic elements in orientations to an object world, most specifically a social object world – that it, a social relationship system.  Values define the limits of permissible cost of an expressional gratification or an instrumental achievement by invoking the consequences of such action for other parts of the system and for the system as a whole.

 

                ¹¹ H. Cantril, A. Ames, Jr-, A. H. Hastorf, and W. H. Ittelson, "Psychology and Scientific Research: III. The Transactional View in Psychological Research," Science, November 18,1949. 

 

395

 

DEFINITION OF VALUE FOR THE THEORY OF ACTION

 

                No definition can hope to incorporate or synthesize all aspects of each conception established in the various fields of learning and yet remain serviceable.  Selection or construction of a definition for our purposes must depend upon convenience (considering, of course, the problems at hand) and upon meeting the special requirements of basic social science.  Convenience demands doing as little violence as possible to whatever established core of meaning may exist in familiar usages in ordinary language and scholarly

terminology.  It also requires simplicity so far as this is consistent with precision. 

 

                Value implies a code or a standard which has some persistence through time, or, more broadly put, which organizes a system of action. Value, conveniently and in accordance with received usage, places things, acts, ways of hehaving, goals of action on the approval-disapproval continuum.  Furthermore, following Dewey, "the desirable" is to be contrasted with "the desired."  Cathexis and valuation, though concretely interdependent in some respects, are distinguished in the world of experience and must therefore be distinguished conceptually. In all cultures people have wants for themselves and for a group which they blame themselves for wanting - or which at very least they do not feel or consider to be justifiable.

Such cases represent negative valuation, to be sure, but the point here is the nonidentity of the desired

and the desirable.  The existence of the value element transforms the desired iut~ the not desired or into the ambivalently desired ¹²  

 

A value is a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group

of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means, and ends of action. 

A commentary on each term in this definition will be set forth below.   It should be emphasized here however, that affective ("desirable"), cognitive ("conception"), and conative ("selection") elements are all essential to this notion of value.  This definition takes culture, group, and the individual's relation to culture and place in his group ¹³ as primary points of departure. Later a definition within the psychological frame of reference will be presented. 

 

                ¹² Pragmatically speaking, values are also more or less stable ways of resolving ambivalence.

That is, actors perhaps most often think about and refer to values when they are in doubt about alternative courses of conduct: when the long-run results of the possible selections of paths of behavior are not immediately obvious or scientifically demonstrable or when the pressures of personal motivation are strong on one side and social sanctions or practical expediency of some other kind strong on the other side. 

 

                ¹³ For example, a value is classified in a following section as "idiosyncratic" or "personal" only because the group is taken as the standard of reference and because values are taken as communicated and transmitted by symbolic means. 

 

                ¹⁴ In spite of the fact that conception is a noun this definition is thoroughly congruent with Lepley's "adjectival" position on value:  "The underlying issue - . . is whether 'value' is a noun standing for something that is an entity in its own right or whether the word is adjectival, standing for a property or quality that belongs, under specifiable conditions, to a thing or person having existence independently of being valued.  If the first view is adopted, then to say that a diamond, or a beloved person, or holding an official position, has or is a value, is to affirm that a connection somehow has been set up between two separate and unlike entities.  If the second view is held, then it is held that a thing, in virtue of identifiable and describable events, has acquired a quality or property not previously belonging to it.  As a thing previously hard becomes soft when affected by heat, so, on this view, something previously indifferent takes on the quality of value when it is actively cared for in a way that protects or contributes to its continued existence.  Upon this view, a value-quality loses the quasi-mystical character often ascribed to it, and is capable of identification and description in terms of conditions of origin and consequence, as are other natural events" (Value, p. 8). 

 

396 The Theory and Its Application

 

                A conception identifies value as a logical construct comparable to culture or social structure.¹⁴ 

That is, values are not directly observable any more than culture is.  Both values and culture are based upon what is said and done by individuals but represent inferences and abstractions from the immediate

sense data.  The statement, "people ought to help each other," is not a value in strict usage but rather one manifestation of a value. In its analytic meaning, the locus of value is neither in the organism nor in the immediately observable world; its locus is rather that of all scientific abstractions.  Concretely, of course, any given value is in some sense "built into" the apperceptive mass or neural nets of the persons who hold that value - in the same way that a culture is "built into" its carriers.  However, the social science abstraction "value" is not abstracted from neurological properties but from verbal and nonverbal behavioral events.  These internalized symbolic systems do have a special status as regards methodology, requiring in part, at least at present, a verstehen rather than an erklaren type of interpretation. 

 

                A value is not just a preference but is a preference which is felt and/or considered to be justified - "morally" or by reasoning or by aesthetic judgments, usually by two or all three of these.  Even if a value remains implicit, behavior with reference to this conception indicates an undertone of the desirable - not just the desired.  The desirable is what it is felt or thought proper to want. It is what an actor or group of actors desire - and believe they "ought" or "should" desire - for the individual or a plurality of individuals. 

This means that an element, though never an exclusive element, of the cognitive is always involved; and hence the word conception was deliberately included in the definition.  The observer imputes to actor or actors ideas held in an implicit sense. Values are ideas formulating action commitments.  These ideas

are instigators of behavior "within" the individual but are not to be conceived as internal social "forces" in the classical sense of the word "force."  Operationally, the observer notes certain kinds of patterned behavior.  He cannot 'explain" these regularities unless he subsumes certain aspects of the processes that determine concrete acts under the rubric "value." 

 

                ¹⁵ It is true that William McDougall defined "sentiment" as a combination of an affective disposition with a cognitive disposition, the centering of a system of emotions about the idea of some object.  His "sentiments" run the gamut of specificity all the way from the "concrete particular" (e.g., love for a certain painting) through the "concrete general" (e.g., love for paintings) to the "abstract" (e.g., love for beauty). 

His notion of the "sentiment" is similar at many points to ours of a "personal value" (see "Organization of the Affective Life," Acta Psychologica, XI [1937], 233-346). 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 397

 

                The history of thought has always more or less clearly distinguished values from sentiments,¹⁵ emotions, drives, and needs.  To the extent that man is a species characterized by a propensity for rationalizing his acts verbally, the consistent connection between values and notions of approval and dis-

approval implies the potentiality for rational justification.¹⁶   Values are eminently discussable, even though in the case of implicit values the discussion does not mention what the observer would call the value hut rather centers on approval or disapproval of concrete acts, with the value left as the tacit premise that is the least common denominator of the reaction to these acts.  Finally, something which is "desirable" (not something merely "desired") means an emancipation from immediate physiological stresses and from the press of a specific, ephemeral situation.  Such generalization and abstraction is referable only to the realm of concepts. While there are, of course, more general and more specific values, conception also implies reference to a class of events which may encompass a variety of content and differ considerably in detail.¹⁷ 

 

                The phrase explicit or implicit is necessary to our definition since it is an induction from experience that some of the deepest and most pervasive of personal and cultural values are only partially or occasionally verbalized and in some instances mus{be i~ferential constructs on the part of the ob

server Fo~expla~~½sis~&ncfes in behavior An ~

alm6st ~   - actor as WLelJ~

as ~y observer. On the other hand, the fact that everybody cannot readily verbalize such conceptions does not remove them from the realm of value.  It may legitimately be asked, "Can a conception be implicit?" 

The answer is that "verhalizable" is not to be equated with "clearly and habitually verbalized."  The actor's values are often inchoate, incompletely or inadequately verbalized by him.  But implicit values remain "conceptions" in the sense that they are abstract and generalized notions which can be put into words

by the observer and then agreed to or dissented to by the actor.  Verbalizability is a necessary test of value. 

 

                This is perhaps a way of saying that such matters as instinctual behavior and needs are below the level of abstraction and hence not part - directly - of the realm of value. Values must be susceptible of abstraction by the observer and formulable by the observer in such terms that the subject can understand and agree or disagree. The subjects on ordinary verbalization with respect to values will often be oblique or indirect, and implicit values will he manifested only in behavior and through verbalizations that do not directly

state the pertinent values. 

 

                ¹⁶ To say, following certain contemporary usage, "Eating spinach is a value for Smith," because Smith likes spinach or prefers spinach to broccoli is to confuse the desired with the desirable. This practice both negates one of the few constant differentia of value (that of approval-disapproval) and makes the category value so broad as to be useless.  It is much more convenient to separate "value" and "preference," restricting "preference" to those selections which are neutral (i.e., do not require justification or reference to

sanctions) from the point of view of the individual and/or the culture.  Of course, if Smith justified his preference for spinach in rational or pseudo-rational terms of vitamins, mineral content, and the like, it then becomes by definition one of his values.  If, however, he simply says "I just like spinach better than broccoli," it remains a mere preference. 

 

                ¹⁷ Cf. Perry's relational definition of values: "Value arises whenever interest is taken

in something and does not inhere in an object as isolated entity." 

 

398 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Values are clearly, for the most part, cultural products.  Nevertheless, each group value is inevitably given a private interpretation and meaning by each individual, sometimes to the extent that the value becomes personally distinctive.  Furthermore, the facts that values change and that new values are in-

vented could not be accounted for, did we not posit idiosyncratic as well as group values.  Moreover, as the Cornell value-study group has noted:

 

                Some values are directly involved in the individual's existence as a "self." values which manifest this quality appear to be especially important in many ways; they are powerful in the world.  These values are registered or apprehended as part of the "self," as a psychological entity or system, no matter how diverse the structure or content of specific systems may be.  (The quality in question is further suggested by alternative phrasings; such values act as components of super-ego or ego-ideal; they are constitutive of the person's sense of identity; if violated, there is guilt, shame, ego-deflation, intropunitive reaction.)

 

                The word desirable is crucial and requires careful clarification.  It places the category in accord with the core of the traditional meaning of value in all fields, with the partial exception of the economic.  Value statements are, by our tradition, normative statements as contrasted with the existential propositions to which they are closely related.  In the ethical sphere the desirable includes both the jus (strictly legal or cultic prescriptions) and the fas (general moral commandments) of the Roman jurists.  The desirable, however, is not restricted to what is commonly designated as the "moral."  It includes the aesthetic and those elements of the cognitive which reflect appraisal.  The cue words are "right" or "wrong," "better or worse."  It can be argued that these words are crude scalar dimensions just as Lundberg suggests that ought can be considered an implicit conditionality.  Nevertheless it remains a fact that in all languages such words have strongly affective and conative tinges.  Even the arts not only record values but are always in some sense implicit criticisms of society.  The cue words are certainly used whenever it is felt that there is an incomplete matching between an existent state of affairs and what is possible in nature. " Things would be a lot simpler if people acted the way they 'ought' to." Perhaps there is an underlying assumption of least

effort as the goal and hence desirable. At any rate there can be no question at all that when one talks of values one gets somehow into the realm of cathection. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 399

 

                The individual, as Henry A. Murray says, can cathect anything from an object to a philosophical idea.  Since value always involves affect, cathexis and value are inevitably somehow interrelated.  Sometimes the relationship is that the value is little more than a rationalization for a cathexis.¹⁸  A probable

example is the widespread conception among the working class that regular sexual intercourse is necessary for health - at least the health of the male.  In other cases, cathexis in the strict sense and value in the strict sense pull against each other. Disvalued activities are cathected.  People are strongly attracted to adulterous relationships.  Conversely, a man goes to church on Sunday when (apart from the value element) he would strongly prefer to start his golf game early. 

 

                The reason that cathexis and value seldom coincide completely is that a cathexis is ordinarily a short-term and narrow response, whereas value implies a broader and long-term view.  A cathexis is an impulse; a value or values restrain or canalize impulses in terms of wider and more perduring goals. 

A football player wants desperately to get drunk after his first big game, but this impulse conflicts with his values of personal achievement and loyalty to his teammates, coach, and university.  In a society where livelihood depends upon the cooperation of members of the extended family, the group must attach strong sanctions to values which minimize friction among the relatives who live and work together. 

 

                More abstractly, we may say that the desired which is disvalued (i.e., cathected but not desirable) is that which is incompatible with the personality as a system or with the society or culture as systems. Values define the limits of permissible cost of impulse satisfaction in accord with the whole array of hierarchical enduring goals of the personality, the requirements of hoth personality and sociocultural system for order, the need for respecting the interests of others and of the group as a whole in social living. 

The focus of codes or standards is on the integration of a total action system, whether personal or sociocultural. 

 

                The influence of value upon selective behavior is, then, always related to the incompatibilities ¹⁹  and consequences, among which are those which follow upon rejection of other possible behaviors. 

In cultural systems the systemic element is coherence: the components of a cultural system must, up to a point, be either logically consistent or meaningfully congruous.  Otherwise the culture carriers feel uncomfortably adrift in a capricious, chaotic world. In a personality system, behavior must be reasonably regular or predictable, or the individual will not get expectable and needed responses from others because they will feel that they cannot "depend" on him.  In other words, a social life and living in a social world both require standards "within" the individual and standards roughly agreed upon by individuals who live and work together.  There can be no personal security and no stability of social organization unless random carelessness, irresponsibility, and purely impulsive behavior are restrained in terms of private and group codes.  Inadequate behavior is selfish from the viewpoint of society and autistic from the viewpoint of personality.  If one asks the question, "Why are there values?" the reply must be: "Because social life would be impossible without them; the functioning of the social system could not continue to achieve group goals; individuals could not get what they want and need from other individuals in personal and emotional terms, nor could they feel within themselves a requisite measure of order and unified purpose."  Above all, values

add an element of predictability to social life. 

 

                ¹⁸ For further consideration of cathexis, motivation, sentiment, and value see the last section below under "Psychology." 

 

                ¹⁹ It is perfectly true that both personalities and cultures can continue to function in the face of many internal incompatibilities.  Integration is tendency rather than literal fact.  We all live with more incompatibilities than our personality models would suggest were possible.  Too many, however, are a threat to the preservation of the system as a system.  Moreover, what appear superficially as incompatibilities are seen on closer examination to he functions of varying frames of reference.  Compare the aged philosophical chestnut, "One can't step into the same river twice.” 

 

400 The Theory and Its Application

 

                With many older peo'ple, as has often been remarked, the sharp contrast between wjsh and 4uty tends to become obliterated.  Only in the exceptional personality, however, is the Confucian state reached in which "you want to do what you have to do and have to do what you want to do."  Values and motivation are linked, but only rarely do they coincide completely.  Values are only an element in motivation and in determining action; they invariably have implications for motivation because a standard is not a value unless

internalized.  Often, however, these implications are in the nature of interference with motivation conceived in immediate and purely personal terms.  When there is commitment to a value - and there is no value without some commitment ²⁰ - its actualization is in some sense andd to some degree "wanted"; but it is wanted Only to the extent that it is approved.  Desirability and desiredness are both involved in the internal integration of the motivational system.  But values canalize motivation. This is what has happened in the case of old people whose personalities are both well adjusted and internally harmonious. 

 

                The word desirable, then, brings out the fact that values, whether individnal or cultural (and the line between these is elusive), always have an affective as well as a cognitive dimension.  Values are never immediately altered by a mere logical demonstration of their invalidity.  The combination of conception

with desirable establishes the union of reason and feeling inherent in the word value.  Both components must be included in any definition.  If the rational element is omitted, we are left with something not very different from "attitude" or "sentiment."  When the affective aspect is omitted, we have something resembling "ethics plus aesthetic and other taste canons."  The elements of "wish" and "appraisal" are inextricably united in "value." 

 

                ²⁰ Including, of course, repudiation in the case of negative values.

 

401

 

                The word influences would have been rejected out of hand by most sectors of the scientific world until quite recently. It was fashionable to regard ideas of any sort as mere epiphenomena, verbal rationalizations after the fact.  Mechanists, behaviorists, and positivists ²¹ maintained, and natural science

knowledge justified them in maintaining, that human beings responded only to particulars - not to universals such as ideas.  This group agreed, though for different reasons, with the idealists and dualists that "scientifically verifiable knowledge of biological and other natural systems provides no meaning for purposes, for universals, or for human behavior which is a response to and specified as to its form by a temporally persistent normative social theory." ²² 

 

                However, the work during the past twenty years of Arturo Rosenblueth, Lorente de No, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and other neurologists, physiologists, and mathematicians has demonstrated that not only can human heings reason deductively, but that, given the structural and physiological

properties of their nervous systems, they must reason deductively, responding to general ideas as well as to particulate stimuli.  The anthropologist Leslie White has been proven right in saying that symbolism is "that modification of the human organism which allows it to transform physiological drive into cultural values." 

In addition to the newly discovered neurological basis of the determinative force of ideas in human behavior, one might also on a cruder empirical level say simply, "Consider the history of Russia since the

November Revolution." ²³ 

 

                Selection is used in the definition as a more neutral word than choice.²⁴  There is no intention   or any necessity - to beg any metaphysical questions regarding "free will" or "determinism."  However, it is proper to point out that for certain purposes the statements, "the actor can choose" and "the actor behaves in some respects as if he had the possibility of choice," are equivalent.  From the viewpoint of the social scientist the propositions, "choice is real" and "choice is psychologically real," lead inevitably to about the same operations. In any case, the matter at issue here is clear-cut: as the observer sees behavior, the actor or actors have open in the observable world more than one mode, or means, or direction of action, each of which is "objectively" open.

 

                ²¹ leading logical positivist, while denying the "ohjectivity" of value judgments has recently conceded their influence upon action (A. J. Ayer, "On the Analysis of Moral Judgments," Horizon [London], XX [1949], no.117; see esp. pp. 175-176). 

 

                ²² F. S. C. Northrop, "Ideological Man in His Relation to Scientifically Known Natural Man," in Ideological Diflerences and World Order (Yale University Press, 1949), p.413. This article also gives hihijographical references to the works of the writers referred to in the next paragraph. 

 

                ²³ Of course, the fundamental question is that of frame of reference, not of ontology.  More than one frame of reference is legitimately operative in the scientific world.  In the social sciences selection ("choice") and evaluation are inherent in the frame of reference.  The biological sciences are prohably a meeting ground between the physical and social sciences in this respect. 

 

                ²⁴ The union of "desirable" and "selection" in the definition signifies that both affective and conative elements are essential - neither has universal primacy.

 

402 The Theory and Its Application

 

                The reality of "choice" in human action presents one major opportunity for the study of values.  Values are operative when an individual selects one line of thought or action rather than another, insofar as this selection is influenced by generalized codes rather than determined simply by impulse or by a purely rational calculus of temporary expediency.  Of course, in the long run, the person who disregards values is not behaving expediently, for he will be punished by others.  Most selective behavior therefore involves either the values of the actor or those of others or both. 

 

                The social scientist must be concerned with the differing conceptions of "choice" from the viewpoints of the individual actor, a group of actors, and of the observer.  Most situations can be met in a variety of ways.  From the actor's point of view, his degree of awareness of these various possibilities

will vary in different situations: in some cases he will make a conscious choice between alternatives for action; in others, an action will appear inevitable and the actor will not be aware that any selection is being made.  From the viewpoint of the observer as scientist, "choice" becomes a process of selection from a range of possibilities, many (or even all) of which may not be obvious from a cultural point of view or from the viewpoint of any given individual. These three angles of vision may overlap or diverge in differing degrees. 

 

                Available, in our definition, is another way of saying that genuine selection is involved.  It does not imply that the same amount of "effort" or "striving" is necessarily involved in one mode, means, or end as opposed to another.  It implies merely that various altematives are open in the external world seen by the observer.  Nor is the question of "functional effectiveness" prejudged.  So far as the satisfaction of the actor's need-dispositions are concerned, this cannot always be estimated in terms of the consequences of a

"choice" as seen from the standpoint of an observer.  It is clear that there is always an  economy of values," for no actor has the resources or time to make all possible "choices."  But the effectiveness of a selection must be interpreted, in part, in accord with the intensity with which the actor feels the value - regardles ~f how little sense the "choice" makes according to an observer's rational calculus. 

 

                In any case, selection of modes, ends, and means of action is assumed to involve orientation to values.  The relation between such selections and the objective limitations upon them (imposed by the biological nature of man, the particular environment, and the general properties of social and cultural

systems within which men inevitably live) become problems for value research.  For example, in the case of the comparative study of five cultures in the Ramah area, one could examine the alternatives that are open to all five societies in particular situations and the varying "choices" which have been made.  There is a range of possibilities for dealing with drought (and other common environmental pressures), and each group has "selected" varying emphases in coping with this common problem - a selection which is determined in part by its particular value system as well as by such situational factors as technological equipment and capital. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 403

 

                Conceptions of the desirable are not limited to proximate or ultimate goals.  Ways of acting are also valued; there is discrimination in approval-disapproval terms of the manner of carrying out an action, whether the act itself be conceived as a means or as an end.  It is equally a fact of ordinary expen en cc that, even when an objective is agreed upon, there is often violent disagreement about the "rightness" or "appropriateness" of the means to be selected.  Of course, the distinction between ends and means is somewhat transitory, depending upon time perspective. What at one point in the history of the individual or the group appears as an end is later seen as a means to a more distant goal.  Similarly, the discrimination between modes and means is sometimes blurred (empirically, not analytically).  Mode refers to the style

in which an instrument is used.  For example, the English language is learned by some foreigners as a means of obtaining positions with our establishments abroad.  But the language is spoken by some softly, by others loudly, by others with exaggerated precision of enunciation.  These variations in the utilization

of the instrument are attributable, in part, to the cultural or personal values of the learners. 

 

                In summary, then, any given act is seen as a compromise between motivation, situational conditions, available means, and the means and goals as interpreted in value terms.  Motivation arises in part from biological and situational factors.  Motivation and value are both influenced by the unique

life history of the individual and by culture.

 

OPERATIONAL INDICES

 

                Surely one of the broadest generalizations to be made by a natural historian observing the human species is that man is an evaluating animal.  Always and everywhere men are saying, "This is good"; "that is bad"; "this is better than that"; "these are higher and those lower aspirations."  Nor is this type of behavior limited by any means to the verbal. Indeed it might be said that the realm of value is that of "conduct," ²⁵ not that of "behavior" at all.  Approval is shown by many kinds of expressive behavior, by deeds of support and assistance.  Acts regarded as "deviant," "abnormal," and "psychotic" provide clues to conduct valued by a group.  Disapproval of the acts of others or of the particular actor is manifested on a vast continuum

 

                ²⁵ "Conduct" here means regularities of action-motivation which are explicitly related to or which imply conceptions of desirahie and undesirahie hehavior. 

 

404 The Theory and Its Application

 

from overt aggression, through persistent avoidance, to the subtle nuances of culturally standardized facial expressions.²⁶  Self-disapproval is indicated by defensive verbalizations, by motor reactions which in that culture express guilt or shame, by ~cts of atonement.  No adults, except possibly some psychotics, behave with complete indifference toward standards which transcend the exigencies of the immediate situation or the biological and psychological needs of the actor at the moment.  Even criminals, though they may repudiate many or most of the codes of their society, orient their behavior toward the codes of their own deviant groups and indeed (negatively) to the cultural standards.  There is almost no escaping orientation to values.

 

                The first area of action, then, which is relevant to the study of values is that where approval or disapproval is made explicit by word or deed.  "Ought" or "should" statements and all statements of preference (where the preference is directly or indirectly shown to be regarded as justifiable in moral

and/or rational, including aesthetic, terms) are constantly made in daily behavior.  They are also embodied in the formal oral or written literature of the group, including laws, mythology, and standardized religious dogmas.  Neither in the case of the individual nor in that of the groups are such "ought" or "should" statements random or varying erratically from event to event or from situation to situation.  There is always some degree of patterned recurrence. 

 

                The observer should watch not only for approval and disapproval but for all acts which elicit strong emotional responses. What, in a given society, is considered worth-while to die for?  What frightens people - particularly in contexts where the act is apparently interpreted as a threat to the security or stability of the system?  What are considered proper subjects for bitter ridicule?  What types of events seem to weld a plurality of individuals suddenly into a solidary group?  Tacit approval-disapproval is constantly mani-

fested in the form of gossip. Where gossip is most current is where that culture is most heavily laden with values.  The discussability of values is one of their most essential properties, though the discussion may be oblique or disguised - not labeled as a consideration of values. 

 

                The second area relevant to the study of values is that of the differential effort exhibited toward the attainment of an end, access to a means, or acquisition of a mode of behavior.  Brown will work hardest to get a scholarship in a college of engineering, Smith to get a chance to act in a summer theater.²⁷ 

Americans in general will strive hardest and undergo more deprivations for success in the occupational system, whereas members of other cultures will characteristically give their fullest energies only to preserving a received tradition or to types of self-fulfillment that do not make them a cynosure of the public eye. 

 

                ²⁶ It is, of course, required by the definition that regularities of action or of motivation be referable to an expressed or underlying conception. 

 

                ²⁷ These examples may imply only motivation but in such cases motivation is partls determined by value elements. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 405

 

                The third area, that of "choice" situations, blends into the second.  When two or more pathways are equally open, and an individual or a group shows a consistent directionality in its selections, we are surely in the realm of values, provided that this directionality can be shown to be involved in the approval-disapproval continuum.  An example of an individual "choice" situation is the following: Three college graduates, from the same economic group, of equal I.Q., and all destined eventually for business, are offered by their fathers the choice of a new automobile, a year of travel, or a year of graduate study.  Such "choice" points come up frequently in life histories.  An example of a "choice" situation at the group level is: Five groups, each with a distinct culture, who carry on subsistence agriculture in the same ecological area in the Southwest, are faced with severe drought.  Two groups react primarily with increased rational and technological activity, two with increased ceremonial activity, and one with passive acceptance. It should be profitable to observe members of two or more groups confronted with any objective crisis situation (war, epidemic, and the like). Under such circumstances the durability of values may come to light and hence the manner in which various challenges make or do not make for the suspension of values.  Both individual and group crises (birth, death, illness, fire, theft) and conflict situations (marital, political, economic) throw values into relief. 

 

                Statements about the desirable or selections between possible paths of action on the basis of implicit conceptions of the desirable are crucial in the study of values.  Neither of these, however, "are" values.  They are rather manifestations of the value element in action.  One measures heat by a ther-

mometer, for example, but, if one is speaking precisely, one cannot say that a temperature of ninety degrees "is" heat.  The concept of "force" in physical science is comparable. No one ever sees "a force"; only the manifestations of a force are observed directly.

 

OPERATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF VALUES ²⁸

 

                It is interesting that it is precisely in the fields rejected by the behaviorists, positivists, and reductionists that perhaps the best social science techniques have been developed: the procedures of public-opinion polling and various projective instruments.  The former are well suited to the establishment of

explicit values and the latter to the discovery of implicit values.

 

                ²⁸ Other remarks on operational methods will be found throughout this paper.  It is impossible here to refer to all the literature on methodology for the study of values.  Mention should he made, however, of George D. Birkhoff's Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), an attempt to arrive at objective determination of universal aesthetic values, and of Ralph White's attempts at rigorous establishment of values by content analysis.  See his "Value Analysis: A Quantitative Method for Describing Qualitative Data,"

Journal of Social Psychology, XIX (1944), 351~358. Rashevsky's mathematical approach to this problem is also noteworthy. See also S. C. Dodd, "How to Measure Values," Research Studies of the State College of Washington, XVIII (1950), 163-168. 

 

406 The Theory and Its Application

 

                There is, first of all, the establishment of regularities in "should" or "ought" statements by the usual procedures of sampling, formal and informal interviews, recording of normal conversations, analysis of the oral or written lore of the group.²⁹  One must discover the prescriptions of individuals and of groups about what behavior a person of given properties should manifest in more or less specified situations. The red herring, "This doesn't tell us what the values of the individual or the society 'really' are but gives us only

speech reactions," should not be drawn across this argument. The f~ct of uniformities in code or standards is of signal importance, regardless of what the deviations in behavior may be.  Acts, as has been said, are always compromises among motives, means, situations, and values.  Sometimes what a person says about his values is truer from a long-term viewpoint than inferences drawn from his actions under special conditions.  The fact that an individual will lie under the stress of unusual circumstances does not prove

that truth is not a value which orients, as he claims, his ordinary behavior.  As a matter of fact, people often lie by their acts and tell the truth with words.  The whole conventional dichotomy is misleading because speech is a form of behavior. 

 

                It is true, of course, and important that the expression of group values is a way of remaining safe in most cultures.  Surface conformity values are often not really learned in the sense of being internalized - rather they have been memorized and are used as outward and visible signs of acceptability.  Sometimes the majority of a group may indeed conform only on the surface, deluding each other until a crisis situation exposes the superficiality or purely verbal character of certain values.  However, the persistence of

"verbal" values is itself a phenomenon requiring explanation.  The point is that one dare not assume ex hypothesi that verbal behavior tells the observer less about the "true" values than other types of action. Both verbal and non-verbal acts must be carefully studied. 

 

                The uniformities in codes and standards can, with sufficient observation, be well established and the "real" values (those that influence overt non-verbal behavior) determined by noting trends in action.  These will consist, in part, in motor events manifesting approval, disapproval, and self-disapproval - particularly when such acts are carried out at some cost to the actor in terms of the expediency of the immediate situation.  In part, trends will be discovered by observing differential efforts made by various individuals and groups toward the same and different goals, instruments, and modes of behaving when other conditions are approximately the same.  As Lundberg has pointed out:

 

                ²⁹ The work of Charles Stevenson, B. L. Whorf, Dorothy Lee, H. B. Alexander, Charles

Morris, and certain of the logical positivists provides highly sophisticated materials on

the relations between values and language. Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociolo-

gists have as yet hut little availed themselves of these resources. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 407

 

                It is possible to infer the values of groups from the way in which they habitually spend their time, money, and energy.  This means that values may he inferred from historic records of all times, from ancient documents to the latest census of manufactures, scales, and expenditures.  In this category, also, falls the large literature on budgets of monetary expenditure.³⁰ 

 

                Hull has also developed the notion of energy disposal or striving as a measuring device for the study of values:

 

                The consumption of physiological energy in the pursuit of such goals or ends may accordingly be characterized as work or striving.  Thus, generally speaking, that may be said to be valued which is striven for and, other things being equal, the maximum amount of work which an organism will execute to attain a given reinforcing state of affairs may be taken as an indication of the valuation of that state of affairs by the organism.  Here, then, we have the basis, not only for an experimental science of value, but also for a theoretical science of value.³¹ 

 

In terms of our definition, Lundberg's and ilull's notion of energy disposal must he refined; "striving" is not enough unless it can be shown to be connected with one or more conceptions of the desirable. 

 

                The Cornell group's consideration of Operations also presents some worthwhile suggestions:

 

                In our discussions, two main "operational tests" were suggested as means for identifying the presence of value-phenomena.  First, on the personality side, it is suggested that when a person violates a value he will show evidences of "ego.diminution" ³² - subjectively felt as guilt, shame, self-depreciation, etc.,

and objectively manifest in observable ways, e.g., in drawing a smaller picture of himself.  A variety of specific techniques are available for indexing reactions of this order.  A parallel test for presence of values in a social group lies in the imposition of severe negative social sanctions in the case of threat to or violation of a value.  Secondly, values may be indexed in various ways by analysis of choices - which constitute a specific kind of evidence as to "directions of interest." 

 

                ³⁰ "Human Values - A Research Program," Research Stuudies of the State College of Washington, 1950 . Lundberg's basic point is well taken, though a caveat must he entered against the culture-hound judgment inherent in the emphasis on "money."  However LePlay has utilized budget studies and other economic data in what is, substantially, the study of values.  Money is, of course, merely a cover for a very large system of needs and values which in our culture become expressed for market purposes in money.  One may compare the objection to Veblen's economic theory, a theory founded upon the unstated

cultural value premise that the ultimate objective of a society is to produce as many goods as possible and distribute them as well as possible. 

 

                ³¹ "Morat Values, Behavorism, and the World Crisis," Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, VII (1945), 8084. 

 

                ³² It might be suggested that "ego-magnification" is as worthy of observation as "ego-diminution." 

 

408 The Theory and Its Application

 

Our group discussed the relative merits of studying values in circumstances of crises and threat as over against conditions of calm routine.  Some of us prefer the one, and some the other; it seems that the only thing we can say is that both approaches are legitimate and friutful, and that their respective advantages vary with the specific problem to be studied.

 

                As to sources of evidence for research into values, a great many specific suggestions have been made, e.g., "content analysis" (explicit themes and implicit value-assumptions and implications) of communications, budget studies, interviewing parents as to their aspirations for their children, "disguised" choice-tests, and so on, indefinitely.  Out of all these specifics, two suggestions seem especially noteworthy: (1) the need to pay attention to implicit materials as well as to explicit testimony;

(2) the need to devise research techniques for recording values at the level and in the form in which they operate in actual behavior.  For example, we need to know a great deal more about the relation between asserted values, at the level of explicit testimony, and operating values which are implicit in ongoing behavior. 

 

                Perhaps the most provocative idea which emerged from our discussions of research problems is the hypothesis that when one studies values directly, the values are changed by the process of study itself.  This is a sort of "Heisenberg effect": the hypothesis is that one does not merely reveal, discover, or render explicit values which are themselves unchanged by the process of being revealed, discovered, or explicated.  Thus the mere focusing of attention upon value-problems changes the problems. In so far as this hypothesis is correct, the values we discover are in part a function of the research approach.  One research implication is the possibility of taking various groups of people, studying a certain value-problem by different methods for each group, and observing changes in behavior subsequent to the process of study. 

 

                The study of choice-behavior seems to offer the nearest approach to a research method uniquely adapted to the study of values.

 

                "Real" values, then, can be discerned by careful analysis of selections made in "choice" situations, many of which occur in the usual run of living.  But the investigation can be supplemented and refined by hypothetical selections, projective techniques, questionnaires, and simple experiments.  The observation and investigation of behavior in crisis situations is particularly rewarding. In the comparison of values of groups, it should be particularly significant to examine those values that are clustered around recurrent human situations (such as the scapegoat problem) and those that crystallize about the invariant points of reference of all culture patterns and the functional prerequisites of social systems.³³ 

 

                ³³ "D. Aherle, A. Cohen, A. Davis, M. Levy, and F. Sutton, "The Functional Prerequisites of a Society," Ethics, LX (1950), 100-111. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 409

 

                To the extent to which the functional prerequisites are indeed "constants," they are also inevitable foci, on the sociocultural level, for value judgments. It should be noted, however, that any listing of "invariant points of reference" is done from the standpoint of a detached analyst.  From the standpoint of the actor it is the meaningful congruence of the symbolically learned cultural values that counts.  We must, in any case, ultimately go beyond such lists and construct schemes that can be useful cross-culturally in describing

the manner of solution of such constant problems and the way in which a given group creates, elaborates, or suppresses certain values and thus comes to sustain a unique value system. In the construction of such schemes, we must be aware of the dangers of elevating into general and scientific conceptual schemes our own culture's representations of the desirable. In some measure, the universe of value discourse of one individual or of one culture is probably never fully translatable into that of another.  For that reason, it is all the more important to understand clearly the principles one uses for constructing schemes in terms of which to compare value systems.  It is necessary to experiment with various conceptual schemes relative to the same value phenomena. 

 

                Experimentation is also necessary to test whether imputed implicit values are in fact held and whether an inferred hierarchy of values is really so ordered.  In general, the conceptual model of the value system of an individual or a group, constructed with the aid of any or all of the methods sketched above, can be validated rigorously only by controlled tests of the assistance it gives in making successful predictions.

 

VALUE-ORIENTATIONS

 

                It is convenient to use the term value-orientation for those value notions which are (a) general, (b) organized, and (c) include definitely existential judgments.  A value-orientation is a set of linked propositions embracing both value and existential elements. 

 

                Gregory Bateson has remarked that "the human individual is endlessly simplifying, organizing, and generalizing his own view of his own environment; he constantly imposes on this environment his own constructions and meanings; these constructions and meanings [are] characteristic of one culture, as over against another." ³⁴  There is a "philosophy" behind the way of life of every individual and of every relatively homogeneous group at any given point in their histories.  This gives, with varying degrees of explicitness

or implicitness, some sense of coherence or unity to living both in cognitive and affective dimensions. 

Each personality gives to this "philosophy" an idiosyncratic coloring, and creative individuals will markedly reshape it.  However, the main outlines of the fundamental values, existential assumptions, and basic abstractions have only exceptionally been created out of the stuff of unique biological heredity and peculiar life experience.  The underlying principles arise out of, or are limited by, the givens of biological human

nature and the universalities of social interaction.  The specific formulation is ordinarily a cultural product. In the immediate sense, it is from the life-ways which constitute the designs for living of their community or tribe or region or socioeconomic class or nation or civilization that most individuals derive most of their "mental-feeling outlook." 

 

                ³³ "Cultural Determinants of Personality," in Personality and the Behavior Disorders, edited hy J. Hunt (1944), p- 723. 

 

410 The Theory and Its Application

 

                If we return to the five groups in the Southwest faced with drought, we find a subtle problem. On the one hand, one can argue that the different reactions are based upon "is" rather than "ought" propositions.  It is true that each response is related to each culture's concephon of the workings of the

physical universe.  On the other hand, every conception includes both the conviction that human effort counts and that the course of events can be influenced by supernatural agencies.  The relative weightings so far as action is concerned reflect value judgments concerning appropriateness. 

 

                It should be possible to construct in general terms the views of a given group regarding the structure of the universe, the relations of man to the universe (both natural and supernatural), and the relations of man to man.  These views will represent the group's own definition of the ultimate mean-

ing of human life (including its rationalization of frustration, disappointment, and calamity).  Such a "definition of the life sitna Lion" for the group contains more than normative and aesthetic propositions; it contains also

existential propositions about the nature of "what is."  The relationship between existential and normative propositions may be thought of as two-way: on the one hand, the normative judgments must be based on the group's notion of what in fact exists; on the other hand, the group's conception of the universe (of "what is" and "what is natural or obvious") will presumably be based partly on prior normative orientations and on interests.  What "must be done" is usually closely related to what is believed to be the "nature of things"; however, beliefs about "what is" are often disguised assumptions of "what ought to be."  Moreover, the values of the group, when institutionalized and internalized, have for members of the group a practical kind of existential reality.  The fact that one cannot fly through Harvard Square in an automobile is an existential proposition.  That one cannot go through Harvard Square in an automobile at sixty-five miles per hour is a normative proposition, and one that will be enforced by police action.  To the driver of the car, however, both of these have a great, though perhaps not equal, degree of "reality."  Without~entenng into a discussion of ontology, it may be suggested that both define the "nature of things" for the driver of the car.  With more fundamental norms, it should hold even more consistently that "what is right" is of equal importance with "what is" in defining the context of action.  By institutionalization value is part of the situation. 

 

411 Values and Value-Orientations

 

                This statement of a given group's definition of the meaning of life, a statement comprising both existential and normative postulates, will provide the student with the general value-orientation of the group concerned.  This approach can be applied, for example, to a study of the Mormon system of religious thought.  The theological tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints define human life as a period in which man, through his experience in a mortal environment, advances toward greater mastery over

gross matter.  Learning and experience are the means through which this increasing mastery is developed.  From these basic postulates, it was inferred that Mormon attitudes on a behavioral level would include a high evaluation of education and work. Investigation has amply supported this hypothesis.  Another instance may be seen in the Mormon doctrines that man is not a depraved creature, but rather is of the same race as God and, moreover, was made that he might have joy.  From this view of human nature it may be inferred that Mormons will place considerable emphasis upon the importance of recreation.  Furthermore, from the fact that the basic Mormon view of life is a serious one, it follows that even joy and recreation will be approached as serious matters.  That this is the case can be easily confirmed from the literature on Mormon social organization.³⁵ 

 

                Since value elements and existential premises are almost inextricably blended in the over-all picture of experience that characterizes an individual or a group, it seems well to call this over-all view a "value-orientation," symbolizing the fact that affective.cognitive (value) and strictly cognitive (orientation) elements are blended.  More formally, a value-orientation may be defined as a generalized and organized conception, influencing behavior, of nature, of man's place in it, of man's relation to man, and of the desirable and nondesirable a~ they may relate to man-environment and interhuman relations.  Such value-orientations may be held by individuals or, in the abstract-typical form, by groups. Like values, they vary on the continuum from the explicit to the implicit. 

 

                Florence Kluckhohn has noted that "all societies find a phraseology within a range of possible phraseologies of basic human problems." ³⁶  The present concept is essentially the same, except (a) the term value-orientation (as opposed to simple orientation) calls explicit attention to the union of normative

with existential assumptions; and (b) there is no limitation to "cultural" orientations; value-orientation is equally applicable to individuals and to groups.  This is indeed an area where investigations of thematic principles in personalities and in cultures may usefully come together.  Henry Murray speaks of the "unity thema" and "major and minor themas" of personality.  Anthropologists speak of the "ethos" (i.e., unity thema) and the themes of cultures.  The ideas of structure in the two cases are basically similar, and the overlap in content is considerable. To a greater or lesser extent, such patterns are thought to pervade the totality of a personality or the totality of a culture and, by their unique combination, to give personality or culture

some degree of coherence, imbue it with distinctive character and outlook, and make individuals unique or make the carriers of a culture distinguishable from the representatives of other groups. 

 

                ³⁵ This paragraph, written hy Thomas O'Dea, is taken from an unpuhushed memorandum without essential change.  Appreciation is expressed to Mr. O'Dea for his permission to use this statement, which fits so well with the general argument of this paper.

 

                ³⁶ "Dominant and Suhstitute Profiles of Cultural Orientations: Their Significance for the Analysis of Social Stratification," Social Forces, XXVIII (1950), 376393. 

 

412 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Evaluation, the individual's active behavior in terms of his value-orientations, is a more complex process than that behavior which is dominantly cathection or dominantly cognition.  To paraphrase the General Statement of Part I: The cognitive-cathectic and evaluative orientations are connected by the "effort" of the actor. In accordance with a value standard and/or an expectation (based upon existential propositions), the actor through effort manipulates his own resources, including his body, his voice, et cetera, in order to facilitate the direct or indirect approximation to a certain valued goal object or state. 

 

                Value-orientation is a distinct modal aspect of any total action complex.  The distinctive quality of each culture and the selective trends that characterize it rest fundamentally upon its system of value-orientations.  As Bougle' has pointed out, it is primarily by the transmission of their values that cultures perpetuate themselves.  It should be emphasized that cultural distinctiveness rests not merely - or even mainly - on value content but on the configurational nature of the value system, including emphases.   Cultures differ, for example, in relative emphasis on degree of patterning of expressional, cognitive, and moral values.

 

TOWARD A CLASSIFICATION OF VALUES AND VALUE-ORIENTATIONS

 

                L..J. Henderson, the well-known biochemist, used to remark that in science any classification is better than no classification - even though, as Whitehead says, a classification is only a half-way house.   Much of the confusion in discussion about values undoubtedly arises from the fact that one speaker has

the general category in mind, another a particular limited type of value, still another a different specific type. We have not discovered any comprehensive classification of values.  Golightly has distinguished essential and operational values; ³⁷ C. I. Lewis intrinsic, extrinsic, inherent, and instrumental values.  The Cornell group speaks of asserted and Operating values.  Perry has discriminated values according to modalities of interest: positive-negative, progressive-recurrent, potential.actual, and so on.  There are various content classifications such as: hedonic, aesthetic, religious, economic, ethical, and logical.  The best known of the content groupings is Spranger's (used in the Ailport-Vernon test of values) : theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. The objection to these content classifications is that they are culturebound.  Ralph White has distinguished one hundred "general values" and twenty-five "political values," all with special references to Western culture.

 

                ³⁷ C. Golightly, "Social Science and Normative Ethics," Journal of Philosophy, XLIV (1948), 505-516. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 413

 

                It seems useful to make a tentative analysis of values in terms of "dimensions," as suggested in an unpublished memorandum by Professor John W. M. Whiting.  The word dimension has here the fundamental meaning it has in mathematics, as defined in Webster's Dictionary: "The degree of manifold-

ness of a magnitude or aggregate as fixed by the number of co5rdinates necessary and sufficient to distinguish any one of its elements from all others."  Certain of these dimensions (modality and content) have already been discussed above and will be listed here only for completeness of the grouping

thus far arrived at. 

 

                Dimension of modality: Positive and negative values. 

 

                Dimension of content: Aesthetic,³⁵ cognitive, and moral values.³⁹ 

 

                Dimension of intent. The values relating to an approved or preferred style or manner in which an act is to be carried out or an object made can be termed mode values.  These are similar to what have sometimes been called "expressive values." Instrumental values are those which actors and groups

conceive as means to further ends.  Goal values are "the aims and virtues which societies and individuals make for themselves."   The distinction between these two types is comparable to that made by some authors between "operational" and "intrinsic" or "ultimate" values. The distinction between instrumental

and goal values, however, is a slippery one, depending in part, as has been pointed out, on time perspective.  It is also essential to discriminate explicitly and consistently between the viewpoints of actor and of observer.  The relationship between instrumental and goal values is clearly one of complete

interdependence, not of mere sequence.  The utilization of certain means will, under specified conditions, inevitably defeat the ends sought. 

 

                Finally, it should be noted that the means-end dichotomy is not as clear-cut in the category systems of all cultures as it is in Western culture.  It may well be that by elevating this contrast into a general scheme we shall get comparative analyses of value systems that differ considerably from analyses based upon conceptualizations more congenial to the thinking characteristic of some non-Western cultures. 

 

                Dimension of generality.  Some values are specific to certain situations or to certain content areas. Navaho Indians, for example, should not have ceremonials at the time of an eclipse of the moon. 

A particular type of the specific value is the role value - values appropriate only in certain roles. 

Navaho ceremonial practitioners ought not to have sexual relations with any person they have sung over. Other values are thematic - applying to a wide variety of situations and to diverse areas of culture content.  Such a (negative) value in Navaho culture is fear of closure.  The coils of a pot or basket must never be brought end to end.  A "spirit outlet" is always left in any design on silver or in a rug or sandpainting. 

A ceremonialist never teaches an apprentice quite the whole of his knowledge.  A husband and wife or two intimate friends must invariably take care to "hold something back."  

 

                ³⁸ "Expressional" may he preferable to "aesthetic." 

 

                ³⁹ That the process of valuation is in crucial respects the same is indicated by the practice of speaking of "good" and "had" ideas, pictures, music, and the like. 

 

414 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Dimension of intensity. The strength of value may be determined by observing the sanctions applied internally and externally and by measuring the degree of striving toward attaining or maintaining states, objects, or events.  Repetition of behaviors judged to have been influenced by values is another

measure of intensity. The method of paired comparisons is particularly applicable in determining the strength of a value.  This does not necessarily imply a linear hierarchy. Some value systems tend to be circular, as McCulloch has suggested.  Perhaps therefore, on semantic grounds, this dimension ought to be termed "incidence" rather than "intensity." 

 

                All cultures have their categorical values, their "musts" and "must nots," violations of which are attended by severe sanctions.  Respect for the property of others is such a value in Western society.  "Achievement," however, is a preferential value (though a strong one) in American culture.  Those who

"achieve" are rewarded materially and in prestige terms.  There are convenient cultural rationalizations for those who fail to achieve, though all are urged to do so. In many cultures, though not in all, there are utopian values which influence the direction of behavior but which are considered beyond immediate attainment.  Literal conformity to the conceptions of the desirable set forth in the Sermon on the Mount evokes amazement or suspicion of queerness, and nonconformity is unpunished. These are genuine values but of a

different order from that of regard for human life (categorical value) or achievement (preferential value) in our culture.  Of course, the utopian values of one historical epoch sometimes become the preferential or even categorical values of a later period. 

 

                Utopian values may also be regarded as a subclass of what may be termed hypothetical values - that is, values to which some "lip service" is given but whose influence upon action is relatively slight. 

The other subclass of hypothetical values are traditionalistic values.  These are values of historic asso-

ciations in the culture but which have lost most of their operative force because of changes in other aspects of the culture or in situation.  One may instance the time-bound values relating to the aristocracy in contemporary England.  In many formal and verbal respects the medieval conceptions are still manifested, but the value strength is primarily a historic residue.  These values might also be called passive or ritualistic values; the feeling for content is largely gone; only the form persists. 

 

                Finally - and this extends into the realm of the organization of values - one can contrast central and peripheral values according to the number and variety of behaviors influenced and the extent to which a group or individual would be markedly different if the value disappeared. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 415

 

                In estimating the intensity of values and the conformity to them, one must be careful not to confuse variation with deviation.  Most cultures have patterned choice ranges for those in different age, sex, class, occupational, and other groups.  Personal values are ordinarily variants of group values, but the permitted range is often large - insofar as both intensity and sheer selection of values is concerned. Every culture permits, and must permit, a sizable range of alternatives.

 

                From this point of view a meaningful classification along the dimension of intensity is suggested by recent work of Florence Kluckhohn.  She suggests that all culture patterns may be grouped as dominant, variant, or deviant.  This corresponds roughly to our statement that values deal with prescriptions, permissions, and prohibitions.  Dominant values are those held by a majority of a group or by the most powerful elite.  Conformance to dominant values brings the highest approval and reward.  Adherence to variant values brings low-level approval, or at any rate, toleration rather than punishment.  Deviant values, whether idiosyncratic or characteristic of a segmental or distributive minority, are disallowed by sanctions.⁴⁰ 

 

                Dimension of explicitness. This is, of course, a continuum without sharp breaks.  In general, an explicit value is one which is stated verbally by actors, whereas an implicit value is one which is inferred by observers from recurrent trends in behavior, including verbal behavior.  But a group value may be ordinarily implicit and yet have been stated one or more times by one or more individuals.  An implicit value is a tacit conception which is inferred to underlie a behavioral sequence because the given train of events is interpretable only if this tacit conception is assumed to be one of the factors determining selective behavior.  Such behavior sequences must involve acts in which "choice" is possible within the physical and biological dimensions of the environing situation and in which the "choices" made are not random but patterned. 

Such choices are presumed to be based upon unstated "ought" or "desirability" categories.  The observer needs the concept of implicit value to give an organized interpretation of behavior, in particular to explain the continuity between symbolic elements of observed behavior.  The Televant patterning is, of course, only that attributable to abstract standards of the aesthetically or morally desirable.  The selection of steel rather than copper to build a bridge is primarily a decision based upon scientific or utilitarian grounds, not upon value

grounds.  However, the changing lengths of women's skirts in the same climate and where materials are about as available one year as the next reflect certain implicit values. 

 

                ⁴⁰ The possibilities of this threefold classification for analysis of socio cultural process are far more intriguing and complex than can he indicated here. They will be developed in subsequent puMications of F. Kluckhohn. 

 

416 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Dimension of extent. The spread of a value may range from a single individual to the whole of humanity.  An idiosyncratic value is one held by only one person in the group under consideration. This is, of course, one of the ways in which new group values evolve.  New values come into being as a result of individual variability and new situations, though it should be added that new values are invariably created against a background of pree~xisting values.   A personal value is the private form of a group value or a universal value.⁴¹  It is not entirely unique to one personality hut has its own special shadings, emphases, and interpretations.  Just as a social system may be said to have functional prerequisites, so any adult individual with a functioning consciousness is confronted by problems of meaning and integration. 

 

                Each people, it is true, has a distinctive set of values.  However, no two individuals within the same society share identical values.  Each individual adds a little here, subtracts a little there, makes this emphasis a bit stronger than most of his neighbors and makes that emphasis a little less strong. 

More-over, every culture has to make some provision, however limited, for the variety of human temperaments that is the consequence of biological variability. Indeed, the group value system is an abstraction, a statement of central tendencies in a range of concrete variation.  The abstraction is meaningful and useful, but one must never lose sight of the fact that it is an abstraction at a high level. 

 

                The convergence between personal values and group values will be found to vary; it will be greater on the part of representative or conforming individuals in relatively homogeneous cultures or subcultures. A value may be defined in psychological terms as that aspect of motivation which is determined by codes or standards as opposed to immediate situation.  If the standards are those carefully abstracted to represent modalities more or less characteristic of some social unit, the value may be spoken of as a group value. 

If the reference is to the private form of a code that influences motivation in an individual, one speaks of a personal value.  Gordon AlIport has said that "shared value" constitutes a contradiction in terms.  This is doubtless true at the very concrete level.  But analytically, it is possible and useful to describe the central tendencies abstractly and to impute them to the group rather than the individual.⁴²

 

                ⁴¹ Clearly, personal values do not consist merely in conceptions of "what I ought to do."  They include equally con~eptions of what women ought to do, of what fathers ought to do, of what others who hear a specified relation to "me" ought to do to me under certain conditions. 

 

                ⁴² While values are by no means completely culturally relative, positive and negative affect, except in situations of extreme physiological need, can hardly be understood apart from group standards. In general, Geiger is right in saying "Man finds his happiness in the activities the mores celebrate." Moreover, he continues, the transmutation of pleasure into value must he carried out by a group even though, in some instances, the group is expressing a universal rather than a culturally limited value. "Hedonic tones (not some substantialized Laetitia) are immediate experiences which have to be taken into account.  They are not automatically values. Values, like truth, are names given to processes, to happenings, to choices men make" (Value, pp. 32~329). 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 417

 

                Personal and idiosyncratic values, Parsons and Shils suggest, tend to be organized primarily around the individual's motivational problems, such as control of aggression, restrictions on gratification, self-permissiveness.  Group values, on the other hand, are mainly organized around the problems of selec-

tion between types of normative patterns governing interpersonal relations, exploitation of the environment, and attitudes and behavior toward the supernatural.  This is an arresting formulation, but it may be overschematic.  Personal values would also seem to be organized about problems of interpersonal

relations, attitudes toward the supernatural, and the like.  There is a personal selection of limited cultural possibilities, which are, in turn, a selection from a limited number of universal possibilities. 

 

                A group value is distinctive of some plurality of individuals, whether this be a family, clique, association, tribe, nation, or civilization.  Group values consist in socially sanctioned ends and socially approved modes and means.  They are values which define the common elements in the situations in which

the actors repeatedly find themselves, and they must make some kind of functional sense in terms of a group's special history, present social structure, and environmental situation. 

 

                The term group value is selected rather than cultural value for two reasons.  First, the group may, at most, have only a subculture or be distinguished from a larger entity by only a few cultural properties.⁴⁸  Second, universal values are also cultural values in the sense that they are socially learned and transmitted. 

 

                Most of the values described in anthropological and sociological literature are purely cultural. Indeed they, like the phenomena of linguistics, are culture at its purest, because they involve the maximum element of convention, of arbitrary selection and emphasis.  However, it seems increasingly clear and

increasingly important that some values, perhaps entirely of a broad and general sort, transcend cultural differences, if one extricates the conceptual core from the superficial cultural trimmings.  These universal values ⁴⁴ have not yet been examined by social scientists in the same detailed way in which the gamut of cultural variability has been explored. We too often forget the extent of consensus concerning the satisfactions for individuals which any good social order ought to make possible or provide.  Careful study of the public utterances of Robert Taft and Joseph Stalin will show that many of the things that they say they ultimately want for people are identical.  As Lundberg has reminded us:

 

                ⁴³ For a discussion of the values of some subsystems of our society, see David Aberle, "Shared Values in Complex Societies," American Sociological Review, XV (1950), 495-

502.

                ⁴⁴ Their universality is, of course, from the observer's point of view.  The meaning of such universal values to the individual cultural carriers in each distant culture will vary in detail and must be determined in cultural context and in part - at least at present by Verstehung. 

 

418 The Theory and rt5 Application

 

                There is general agreement by the masses of men on the large and broad goals of life as evidenced by man's behavior.  Everywhere he tries to keep alive as best he knows how, he tries to enjoy association with his fellow creatures, and he tries to achieve communion with them and with his universe, including his own imaginative creations.  The sharp differences of opinion arise about the means, the costs, and the consequences of different possible courses of action.⁴⁵ 

 

                Contrary to the statements of Ruth Benedict and other exponents of extreme cultural relativity, standards and values are not completely relative to the cultures from which they derive.⁴⁶  Some values are as much givens in human life as the fact that bodies of certain densities fall under specified conditions.  These are founded, in part, upon the fundamental biological similarities of all human beings.  They arise also out of the circumstance that human existence is invariably a social existence.  No society has ever approved suffering as a good thing in itself.  As a means to an end (purification or self.discipline), yes; as punishment - as a means to the ends of society, yess.  But for itself - no.  No culture fails to put a negative valuation upon killing, indiscriminate lying, and stealing within the in-group.  There are important variations, to be sure, in the conception of the extent of the in-group and in the limits of toleration of lying and stealing under certain conditions.  But the core notion of the desirable and nondesirable is constant across all cultures.  Nor need we dispute the universality of the conception that rape or any achievement of sexuality by violent means is disapproved.⁴⁷ This is a fact of observation as much as the fact that different materials have different specific gravities. 

 

                Conceptions of "the mentally normal" have common elements - as well as some disparate ones - throughout all known cultures.  The "normal" individual must have a certain measure of control over his impulse life.  The person who threatens the lives of his neighbors without socially approved justification is always and everywhere treated either as insane or as a criminal.  This is perhaps oMy a subeategory of a wider universal conception of the normal: no one is fit for social life unless his behavior is predictable

within certain limits by his fellows. In all societies the individual whose actions are completely unpredictable is necessarily incarcerated (in jail or asylum) or executed. 

 

⁴⁵ Can Science Save Us? (1947), p.99. 

 

                ⁴⁶ Dewey also speaks of values as "definitely and completely sociocultural."  For an empirical argument by a philosopher who shares the position of this paper, see F. C. Sharp, Good Will and Ill Will (1950), esp. p. 164. 

 

                ⁴⁷ The occasional instance of ceremonial rape or of ius primae noctis is precisely the exception that proves the rule. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 419

 

Reciprocity is another value essential in all societies.  Moreover, the fact that truth and beauty (however differently defined and expressed in detail) are universal, transcendental values is one of the givens of human life - equally with birth and death.  The very fact that all cultures have had their

categorical imperatives that went beyond mere survival and immediate pleasure is one of vast significance.  To the extent that such categorical imperatives are universal in distribution and identical or highly similar in content, they afford the basis for agreement among the peoples of the world.⁴⁸  

 

                The word universal is preferable to absolute because whether or not a value is universal can be determined empirically.  Some values may indeed be absolute because of the unchanging nature of man or the inevitable conditions of human life. On the other hand, such an adjective is dangerous because culture transcends nature in at least some respects and because propositions about values are subject to revision like all scientific judgments.  New knowledge or radically changed circumstances of man's existence may alter universal values.  At best, one might be justified in speaking of "conditional absolutes" or "moving absolutes" (in time). 

 

                To speak of "conditional absolutes" does not constitute that naive identification of the "is" with the "ought" which has occasioned justified condemnation of certain work in social science.  The suggestion here is rather that if, in spite of their tremendous variations in other respects, all cultures have converged on a few broad universals this fact is deeply meaningful.  The question is at least raised whether - given the relatively unchanging biological nature of man and certain inevitables of life in a group - societies which tailed to make these ttenets part of their cultures simply did not survive.  In other words, the existence of these universals reflects a series of categorical "oughts" only in the sense that these are necessary conditions - given by

nature, invented by man only in their specific formulations - of adjustments and survival always and everywhere. 

 

                There are probably some personal values or value-orientations which tend toward universality in their distribution.  At least we may say that in all or almost all societies of any size one can find one or more individuals having a bent for one of what Charles Morris has called Apollonian, Dionysian, Promethean, Buddhistic, and other "'paths of life."  To avoid confusion, these values corresponding to certian constitutional temperaments widely distributed over the world may be termed temperamental values. 

 

                Dimension of organization.  The question of the extent to which personal or cultural values are hierarchically organized is a difficult one which can be finally settled only by vast empirical research.  Certainly there is almost always a hierarchical notion to thinking about values: "more beautiful than,"

''better ~ ''more appropriate than."  One essential quality of value is that of behaving discriminatingly; this inevitably means discriminating between values as well as "objective" situations.  To speak of values is simply to say that behavior is neither random nor solely instinctual or reflexive.  Values determine trends toward consistency in behavior, whether on the individual or the group level.  Without a hierarchy of values life becomes a sequence of reactions to stimuli that are related only in physical or biological terms. However, there is more to the organization of values than hierarchy.  One value is tied to another logically and meaningfully, and it is this systematic and connected quality of values that makes them both interesting and difficult to deal with. At any rate, values do appear to occur in clusters rather than alone. 

 

                ⁴⁸ A number of psychoanalysts have been developing the psychological bases of a universal morality.  See, for example, R. E. Money-Kyrle, "Towards a Common Aim," fiTitish Journal of Medical Psychology, XX (1944). 105-118. 

 

420 The Theory and Its Application

 

                There also seem to be priority values.  For the most part, the more general a value the higher its priority, because it contributes more to the coherent organization and functioning of the total system, whether a personality ⁴⁹ or a culture.  However, lacking extensive research, one must be cautious about

invoking the image of a pyramid of values, a neat and systematic hierarchy.  The extent to which an individual or a group has an affectively congruent or logically consistent "value policy" is a special problem for investigation. 

 

                This issue must not be prejudged on the basis of any one formal system of logic (such as the Aristotelian), or else exaggerated notions concerning the degree of harmony or of conflict within the system tend to arise.  The elements of a value system have symbolic and historic connections in addition to their internal logical relations.  One aspect of this problem is the manner in which the system distinguishes and emphasizes general versus specific values and handles conflicts between them. (We suspect that great internal differentiation can be both an opportunity for value conflict and a mode of resolving it.) 

The elaboration of the logic of the heart and of the head, and their mutual relation, probably varies from culture to culture.  Consideration of this issue, theoretically and empirically, is imperative for a systematic

analysis of value systems and their functioning. 

 

                Tentatively, we may distinguish isolated values (those which neither conflict nor demonstrably support other values) and integrated values (those which can be shown to be part of an interlocking - or possibly pyramiding - network.) 

 

                Group values seem to be organized into dominant and substitute profiles, as Florence Kluckhohn has pointed out for her "orientations."⁵⁰  This is one aspect of the range of variation tolerated in all cultures - on some matters.  Another useful way of thinking about the organization of values is presented in the chapter on "Systems of Value-Orientation" in Part II of this book. 

 

                ⁴⁹ Crucial for the formation of personality and its organization are those priority values of the group which prescribe the ideal kind of personality (by sex and role) to which allegiauce shall be given. 

 

                ⁵⁰ "Dominant and Suhstitute Profiles of Cultural Orientations," Social Forces, XXVIII (1950), 376-393. 

 

421

 

                It should be noted - alike in the F. Kluckhohn, Parsons and Shils, and the present conceptual schemes - that these are all analyses from an observer's point of view and with a minimum of content. 'Valid analyses of this type can be based upon only the fullest kind of descriptions of cultures.  The "feel of the culture" obtained from careful reading of classical ethnographies must not be sacrificed to overschematic and premature abstraction.  The alternatives posed in pairs or triplets or in fourfold boxes are useful

for comparative purposes,⁵¹ but one cannot dispense with detailed description of events as actually observed or of value systems as they appear to culture carriers.

 

DIFFERENTIATION FROM RELATED CONCEPTS

 

                In Anthropology. In the only complete, explicit definition of value I have discovered in anthropological literature, Ralph Linton says: " A value may be defined as any element, common to a series of situations, which is capable of evoking a covert response in the individual.  An attitude may be defined as

the covert response evoked by such an element." ⁵²  Why the responses are limited to the "covert" is not specified.  This definition is unsatisfactory also because it does not, apart from "common to a series of situations," differentiate value from any concept other than attitude. 

 

                In general, anthropologists use "value" vaguely, often as more or less synonymous with "strongly held belief," "moral code," "culturally defined aspirations," or even "sanctions."  There is also a tendency, when one is talking about culture in general and at a high level of abstraction, to merge values and culture. It is true that the culture carrier who is thoroughly identified with his culture "values" all or most aspects of the culture in the sense that he is not affectively neutral to them.  On the other hand, any culture consists only in part of conceptions of the desirable (and the nondesirable, for there are also negative values).  It also includes the purely substantive and non-normative aspect of folklore, literature, and music; it includes tech-

nological and other skills. 

 

                An earlier, unpublished definition of value by the present writer was as follows: " A selective orientation toward experience, characteristic of an individual and/or of a group, which influences the choice between possible alternatives in behavior."  This is unsatisfactory because, among other reasons,

it failed to set values apart from the totality of culture. " Selective orientation toward experience characteristic of a group" would almost serve as a definition of culture.  The essence of culture is its selectivity, its arbitrariness from the point of view of action alternatives equally open in the "objective" world and equally adequate in terms of the satisfaction of strictly biological or other survival needs.  So far culture and value are very much alike.  All cultural behavior, like valuative behavior, involves an inhibition of the randomness of trial-and-error response. In cross-cultural comparisons, at least, any bit of cultural behavior is selective or preferential behavior.  For instance, Americans in England usually continue to handle their knives and forks in the American, not the English, manner.  Chinese women in this country often prefer dresses of Chinese type to those which they buy in our stores.  One can think of countless other examples of culturally determined behavior which involves felt preferences but not conceptions of the desirable as these have been defined above.  Value is more than mere preference; it is limited to those types of preferential behavior based upon conceptions of the desirable. 

 

                ⁵¹ Also, to be sure, for internal dynamic analysis and in planning specifically pointed fieldwork. 

 

                ⁵² The Cultural Background of Personality (New York, 1945), pp.111-112. 

 

422 The Theory and Its Application

 

                The relation of values to culture patterns, cultural premises, configurations, Opler's "themes," ⁵³ Herskovits' "focus," ⁵⁴ and to similar conceptions deserves comment.  It should be noted,  first of all, that these conceptions refer solely to structural aspects of sociocultural systems, whereas values refer alike to individuals, to cultures, and to panhuman phenomena which cut across all existing cultures.  In the second place, many "themes" are in the almost purely cognitive realm, defining existential propositions only. 

Values do include those sanctioned or regulatory patterns prescribing culturally approved ways of doing things and culturally established goals; they also include the implicit cultural premises ("configurations") governing ends and means and the relation between them, insofar as conceptions of the desirable are involved.  All cultures, however, include patterns and themes which are not felt by most culture carriers as justifiable.  Prostitution, for example, is in certain cultures a recognized behavioral pattern but is not a

value.  The "success" theme in American culture is today questioned in value terms by many Americans. 

 

There is unquestionably an overlap in these conceptions.  But values constitute a more general category of the theory of action, themes and premises a more limited one.  Some cultural premises, as we have said, are certainly values; others are almost exclusively cognitive or existential.  The direction of the enquiry is different in any case.  Themes, cultural premises, and the rest are structural concepts, primarily intended to map the culture in cognitive terms for the outsider, to help depict the culture as a system.  Values always look to action, in particular to the selections made by individual actors between different paths, each "objectively" open. 

 

⁵³ A postulate or position, declared or implied, and usually controlling behavior or stimulating activity, which is tacitly approved or openly promoted in a society" ("Themes as Dynamic Forces in Culture," American Journal 0/ Sociology, LI [1945], 19~205).  This is very dose to our definition of "c~tural value." 

 

                ⁵⁴ "Cultural focus designates the tendency of every culture to exhibit greater complexity, greater variation in the institutions of some of its aspects than in others.  So striking is this tendency to develop certain phases of life, while others remain in the background, so to speak, that in the shorthand of the disciplines that study human societies these focal aspects are often used to characterize whole cultures" (Man and His Works [1948], p.542).  He elsewhere comments, "A people's dominant concern may he thought of as the focus of their culture: that area of activity or belief where the greatest awareness of form exists, the most discussion of values is heard, the widest difference in structure is to be discerned" ("The Processes of Cultural Change," in The Science of Man in the World Crisis, edited by Ralph Linton [19451, pp. 164165).  

 

Values and Value-Orientations 423

 

                In Sociology.  Sociology has consistently been more explicitly concerned 'vith values than either anthropology or psychology.  Hence it has developed related but distinct concepts to a much lesser extent. Durkheim, Weber, Sumner, and other classical sociologists all have treated the problems of value.  Durkheim showed both that society was a moral phenomenon and that morality was a social phenomenon. He tended to maintain a positivistic ethic but also to deny the individual's independence in taking a position on values.⁵⁵  In general, he failed to segregate the value element in the concrete social structure. 

Sumner's concept of the mores overlaps with the notion of value as defined in this paper, but it is so little used today as a strictly technical term that a careful differentiation seems unnecessary. 

 

                Brief mention should be made of some of the more important recent sociological literature dealing with values.  In The Polish Peasant, Thomas and Znaniecki propound their famous definition: "By a social value we understand any datum having an empirical content accessible to the members of some social group and a meaning with regard to which it is or may be an object of activity." This they contrast with attitude: ". . . a process of individual consciousness which determines real or possible activity of the

individual in the social world."  The contributions of Parsons, Mannheim, and Bougl6 to the study of values are well known.  Radhakanal Mukerjee has recently published The Social Structure of Values (~949), "a systematic attempt to present sociology from the viewpoint of valuation as the primum mobile in the social universe, the nexus of all human relations, groups, and institutions."  Howard Becker has recently published Through Values to Social Interpretation. 

 

                In Psychology.  Although there are a few famous examples to the contrary (notably the Allport-Vernon test and Wolfgang Kbhler's The Place of Value in a World of Facts), psychologists have dealt with values - under this name - much less frequently than sociologists.  There are, however, certain important psychological concepts, such as attitude, which cover some of the same territory and hence must be distinguished. 

 

                If one follows Allport's classic definition of attitude - "a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is related" - the principle differences from value are:

(a) exclusive referability to the individual, and (b) absence of imputation of the "desirable."  There would be a certain convenience if Woodruff's definition of attitudes as "momentary and temporary states of rediness to act" were accepted, for then values and attitudes would be contrasted in the time dimension and the influence of values on attitudes could be more readily explored.⁵⁶ 

 

                ⁵⁵ See Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, esp. pp.391 ff. 

 

424 The Theory and Its Application 

 

                If one approaches the explanation of behavior in a psychological framework, it is easy to confuse value with motivation and related concepts.  David Aberle, in an unpublished memorandum, has wisely commented on my earlier "selective orientation" definition of value:

 

                Whatever we mean by a value, the area of values is apparently difficult to circumscribe. The examples ordinarily used have a tendency to fall into one or another area that is already being successfully exploited under some other head.  Descriptions of the values of an individual shade off into, or are

readily absorbed by, such notions as motivations, conscious and unconscious goals, goal-orientations; meanings, and the like.  If we accept Kluckhohn's tentative definition, expedient behavior, "unconsciously self~destructive behavior," flight from the field, or collapse in the face of an overwhelming attack of anxiety are all instances of choices between alternative possibilities influenced by a selective orientation.  Some of these behaviors we would, in ordinary parlance, wish to consider as value-influenced, and some we would

consider more conveniently handled by other concepts, such as motivation. 

 

                The following definition by John W. M. Whiting, Eleanor llollenberg, and William Lambert is also in a psychological frame of reference: "A value is the relationship between an individual or group and an event (i.e., any class of objects, actions or interactions) such that the individual or group strives to achieve, maintain or avoid that event."  They go on to say that a value may be measured by "(a) an appraising statement, e.g., statements of choice or preference (questions of validity and reliability of both verbal report and behavioral observation must be taken into account), made by an informant; (b) an inference by an observer from the overt actions of the individual or group which imply choice or preference with respect to the event."  Their memorandum continues:

 

                It will be noted that this definition is similar to the Kluckhohn-Vogt definition of value insofar as striving to achieve, maintain or avoid an event is equivalent to preference, choice and selection. 

The definitions differ in that the Kluckhohn-Vogt definition makes value substantively either a statement

(explicit value) or a tactt premise" (implicit value), whereas the present definition reserves statements and tacit premises for operations of determining and measuring values.  It will be noted that the substantive definition of the present statement is a relationship between an individual or group and an event. 

 

                With respect to the specifications for measurement, the present definition includes the method of paired comparisons under conditions of equal availability of events as specified by Kluckhohn and Vogt, but does not limit itself to that method alone.  For example, it would permit us to use the ratings of judges with respect to appraising statements of informants without carrying out the operation of paired comparison.

 

                ,' A. D. Woodruff, "Students' Verhalized Values," Religious Education, Septemher 1943, pp.321-324.  For an illuminating discussion of attitude and sentiment, see H. A. Murray and C. D. Morgan, A Clinical Study of Sentiments (Genetic Psychology Monogr~phs, Vol.32, 1945), pp.6-7, 2~34. On belief and attitude, see Stevenson, esp. p. ii. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 425

 

                It may, however, be useful for some purposes to have an alternative definition of value in psychological terms: value may be defined as that aspect of motivation which is referable to standards, personal or cultural, that do not arise solely out of immediate tensions or immediate situation.  Motives, con-

scious or unconscious, provide instigation.  The value component in motivation is a factor both in the instigation to action and in setting the direction of the act.  The value element may be present alike in the tension of the actor and in the selection of a path of behavior. Selection, of course, is not merely a function of motives (including their value elements) but also of the habit strengths of the various alternatives.  A given value may have a strength that is relatively independent of any particular motive, though it remains in some

sense a function of the total motivational system.  For example, a given value may be simultaneously reinforced by motives for achievement, social approval, security, and the like. 

 

                Finally, we must return briefly to the subject of cathexis.  Murray and Morgan have defined cathexis as "the more or less enduring power of an entity to evoke relatively intense and frequent reactions, positive or negative, in a person." They also make a very useful clarification:

 

                The concept of cathexis and the concept of sentiment are merely two different ways of describing the same phenomenon; the first points to the persisting power of the object to stimulate the subject, whereas the second points to the disposition of the subject to be stimulated by the object..  Cathexis is the more useful term when attention is to be focused on the object and its attributes, the nature of its appeal or its repellence, especially when the object has demand-value or aversion-value for a great number of people.⁵⁷ 

 

                Values and needs.⁵⁸  Dorothy Lee has recently called for "a re-examination of the premise which so many of us implicitly hold that culture is a group of patterned means for the satisfaction of a list of human needs."  It will be worth while to quote at length from her argument:

 

                The concept of an inventory of basic needs rose to fill the vacuum created when the behaviorists banished the old list of instincts. - - Anthropologists borrowed the principle from psychology, without first testing it against ethnographic material, so that often, when the psychologist uses anthropological

material, he gets his own back again in new form and receives no new insights.  There are two assumptions involved here: (1) the premise that action occurs in answer to a need or a lack; and (2) the premise that there is a list. In recent years, anthropologists, influenced by the new psychology, have often substituted drives or impulses or adjustive responses for the old term needs, but the concept of the list remains with us.  We hold this side by side with the conflicting conception of culture as a totality, of personality as organ-

ismic, as well as with adherence to psychosomatic principles.  We deplore the presentation of culture as a list of traits, yet we are ready to define culture as an answer to a list of needs. 

 

⁵⁷ Murray and Morgan, pp.22; 11. 

 

⁵⁸ See also "Needs and the Organization of Behavior" in Chapter I, Part I. 

 

426 The Theory and Its Application

 

                This definition of culture has proved a strain on us.  When we found that the original list of basic needs or drives was inadequate, we, like the psychologists, tried to solve the difficulty by adding on a list of social and psychic needs; and, from here on, I use the term need in a broad sense, to cover the stimulus~response phrasing of behavior.  When the list proved faulty, all we had to do was to add to the list.  We have now such needs as that for novelty, for escape from reality, for security, for emotional response. We have primary needs, or drives, and secondary needs, and we have secondary needs playing the role of primary needs.  The endless process of adding and correcting is not an adequate improvement; neither does the occasional substitution of a "totality of needs" for a "list of needs" get at the root of the trouble. 

Where so much elaboration and revision is necessary, I suspect that the original unit itself must be at fault; we must have a radical change. 

 

                If needs are inborn and discrete, we should find them as such in the earliest situations of an individual's life.  Yet take the Tikopia or the Kwoma infant, held and suckled without demand in the mother's encircling arms.  He knows no food apart from society, has no need for emotional response since his society is emotionally continuous with himself; he certainly feels no need for security. He participates in a total situation.  Even in our own culture, the rare happy child has no need for emotional response or approval or

security or escape from reality or novelty.  If we say that the reason that he has no need for these things is that he does have them already, we would be begging the question. I believe, rather, that these terms or notions are irrelevant when satisfaction is viewed in terms of positive present value, and value itself as inherent in a total situation. 

 

                On the other hand, it is possible to see needs as arising out of the basic value of a culture.  In our own culture, the value of individualism is axiomatically assumed. How else would it be possible for us to pluck twenty infants, newly severed from complete unity with their mothers, out of all social and emotional context, and classify them as twenty atoms on the basis of a similarity of age?  On this assumption of individualism, a mother has need for individual self-expression.  She has to have time for and by herself;

and since she values individualism, the mother in our culture usually does have this need for private life. 

We must also believe that a newborn infant must become individuated, must be taught physical and emotional self-dependence; we assume, in fact, that he has a separate identity which he must be helped to recognize.  We believe that he has distinct rights, and sociologists urge us to reconcile the needs of the child to those of the adults in the family, on the assumption, of course, that needs and ends are individual, not social.  Now, in maintaining our individual integrity and passing on our value of individualism to the infant, we create needs for food, for security, for emotional response, phrasing these as distinct and separate. 

We force the infant to go hungry, and we see suckling as merely a matter of nutrition, so that we can then feel free to substitute a bottle for breast and a mechanical bottleholder for the mother's arms; thus we ensure privacy for the mother and teach the child self-dependence.  We create needs in the infant by withholding

affection and then presenting it as a series of approvals for an inventory of achievements or attributes. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations        427

 

On the assumption that there is no emotional continuum, we withdraw ourselves, thus forcing the child to strive for emotional response and security.  And thus, through habituation and teaching, the mother reproduces in the child her own needs, in this case the need for privacy which inevitably brings with it related needs.  Now the child grows up needing time to himself, a room of his own, freedom of choice, freedom to

plan his own life.  He will brook no interference and no encroachment.  He will spend his wealth installing private bathrooms in his house, buying a private car, a private yacht, private woods and a private beach, which he will then people with his privately chosen society.  The need for privacy is an imperative one in our society, recognized by official bodies such as state welfare groups and the department of labor.  And it is part of a system which stems from and expresses our basic value. 

 

                In other cultures, we find other systems, maintaining other values.  The Arapesh, with their value of socialism, created a wide gap between ownership and possession, which they could then bridge with a multitude of human  relations. They plant their trees in someone else's hamlet, they rear pigs owned by someone else, they eat yams planted by someone else.  The Ontong-Javanese, for whom also the good is social, value the sharing of the details of everyday living.  They have created a system, very confusing to an American student, whereby a man ss a member of at least three ownership groups, determined along different principles, which are engaged cooperatively in productive activities; and of two large households, one determined along matrilineal lines, one along patrilineal lines.  Thus, an Ontong-Javanese man spends part of the year with his wife's sisters and their families, sharing with them the intimate details of daily life, and the rest of the year on an outlying island, with his brothers and their families.  The poor man is the man who has no share in an outlying island, who must eat and sleep only in a household composed of his immediate family and his mother's kin, when unmarried; and who must spend the whole year with his wife's kin, when married.  He has the same amount and kind of food to eat as his wealthy neighbors, but not as many coconuts to give away; he has shelter as adequate as that of the wealthy, but not as much of the shared living which is the Ontong-Javanese good. 

 

                In speaking of these other cultures, I have not used the term need. I could have said, for example, that the Ontong-Javanese needs a large house, to include many maternally related families.  But I think this would have been merely an exercise in analysis.  On the other hand, when I spoke of our own culture, I was forced to do it in terms of needs, since I have been trained to categorize my own experience in these terms.  But even here, these are not basic needs, but rather part of a system expressing our basic value; and were

we able to break away from our substantive or formal basis of categorizing, I think we should find these to be aspects or stresses or functions, without independent existence.  Culture is not, I think, "a response to the total needs of a society"; but rather a system which stems from and expresses something bad, the basic values of the society.⁵⁹ 

 

⁵⁹ '"Are Basic Needs Ultimate?" Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, XLIII (1948), 43, 391-395. 

 

428 The Theory and Its Application

 

                The Cornell group express themselves along similar lines:

 

                Although values have this affective dimension, they are not identical with particular segmental "needs" of the organism; specific physiological deprivations and gratifications may be relevant to a great many values, but do not themselves constitute value-phenomena. . . To put it another way, "value"

can only become actualized in the context of "need" but it is not thereby identified with need. (Some members of our group maintain that value might profitably be considered as "that which continues to be desired" after imperious segmental deprivations have been removed.) 

 

                At the level of highly generalized categories or dimensions of need, e.g., "security," "belonginguess," etc., the same need may be met by widely different patterns of value; conversely, a generalized "value," e.g. religious salvation, patriotism, etc., may be the nexus of many specific needs.

 

                Mrs. Lee shows a clear recognition of the necessity for conceptualizing the alternatives in behavior and puts a shrewd finger upon some real flaws in contemporary anthropological and psychological thinking. It is certainly true, for example, that how a language is learned is one thing and what difference it makes after learning is another.  But while she rightly insists upon the importance of symbolic transmission by a culture (Sorokin's logico. meaningful) the situations which create needs (Sorokin's causal-functional)

are equally significant. 

 

                Since a value is a complex proposition involving cognition, approval, selection, and affect, then the relationship between a value system and a need or goal system is necessarily complex.  Values both rise from and create needs.  A value serves several needs partially, inhibits others partially, half meets and half block still others. 

 

                Some needs arise from a group's desire for survival as a group.  The need for integration is a requirement of the social system but is culturally transmitted and the specific means of meeting the need is culturally styled.  Most peoples, for example, wear clothing not because of the rigors of the environment but to preserve group integration and, in some instances, to provide channels for the self-expression of individuals. 

 

                Other needs are culturally created without reference to underlying conditions of social life but are conditioned and limited by other aspects of the culture, including its relative over-all complexity.  Why does an upper-middle class New York woman set a table for a formal dinner party in a certain way, with flowers, fruit, special glasses, linens, and the like?  She certainly feels a "need" to do so.  But this fact requires a complicated explication.  There must be a reference to the value system of upper-middle-class New Yorkers in 1950.  This value system must have been internalized (a psychological rather than a cultural process).  The total pattern is possible only given certain goods and services obtainable in a metropolitan area. 

If she belonged to another culture or if this culture were at a different time point, her "need" would be different in its specific manifestations, though the "deeper" need to conform and to maintain or elevate status might still be there.  Her specific needs are both created and made possible of fulfillment by the culture in general.  It is probable that in complex, literate societies the "secondary needs" are alike more burdensome and more inescapable.  Also, her own presentation still contains too much of the older rampant cultural

relativism.  Most of the dilemmas she presents can be transcended in terms of the conceptual scheme presented earlier in this volume. 

 

Values and Value-Orientations 429

 

                There is undoubtedly a close relation between needs and values, but it is important to note that the needs satisfied by orienting behavior in terms of a value is of an importantly different sort from that obtained from eating a good meal. As Dorothy Lee has observed:

 

                There is no such contrast of passive absorption of values and rational choice of action: . . - the basis of choice is neither the passive inability to step out of one's ingrained social role, nor the calculating desire to avoid displeasing one's social contemporaries.  It seems to me that from infancy each social being derives an active satisfaction from participating in the values of his society, and that this satisfaction lies at the basis both of acquiring social values and of acting according to them, choosing a course of action.⁶⁰ 

 

There is also the caution expressed by Maslow:

 

                Interests are determined by the gratification and frustration of needs.  The current fashion is to treat attitudes, tastes, interests and indeed values of any kind as if they had no determinant other than associative learning, i.e. as if they were determined wholly by arbitrary extra-organismic forces.  It is neces-

sary to invoke also intrinsic requiredness.⁶¹ 

 

                He goes on to point out that for the food-starved or water-starved person only food or water will ultimately serve. In other words, some choices do not involve value elements but solely need elements. 

 

                Values and goals.  The concept value cuts across goals, drives, conditions, relative to an action sequence.  Value looks not toward the sequential process but toward a component in all aspects of an action.  The Cornell group again makes a clarifying statement: "Values are not the concrete goals of behavior, but rather are aspects of these goals.  Values appear as the criteria against which goals are chosen, and as the implications which these goals have in the situation." 

 

                In brief, a goal represents a cathected objective with value elements interpreted as they apply in this concrete situation. 

 

                ⁶⁰ Comment on Margaret Mead, "The Comparative Study of Culture," in Science, Philosophy and Religion, 2nd Symposium (1942), p.77. 

 

                ⁶¹ “Some Theoretical Consequences of Basic Need-Gratification," Journal of Personali~, XVI (1948), 402-416. 

 

430 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Values, drives, and learning.  Values are presumably a learned element in behavior. They can well be regarded as components in need-dispositions ("acquired drives").  Most acquired or derived drives are dependent upon group values which the individual has somehow interiorized as part of himself.  If he does not orient a high proportion of his behavior with at least some regard to these conceptions of the desirable, he neither respects himself nor is respected by others.  Hull has remarked:

 

                Within the last twenty years the more important basic molar laws whereby organisms come to value, i.e. strive for, certain objects have gradually become fairly clear. In general, any act which is performed shortly before the reduction of a primary need, like that concerned with food, water, pain, optimal

temperature, or sex, will be conditioned in such a way that when the organism is again in that situation or one resembling it, and suffers from that need or one resembling it, that act will tend to be evoked. 

This seems to be the basic molar law of conditioning or learning.

 

Reward and punishment as operative in the learning of values and in determining value strength must be accepted.  However, it is necessary to avoid any simpliste reduction to primary drives or to a hedonic or utilitarian calculus.⁶²  The essential thing about values is their referability to standards more perduring than immediate or completely "selfish" or autistic motivations.  One of the severest limitations of the classical theory of learning is its neglect of attachments and attitudes in favor of reward and punishments. 

 

                Values, utility, and consequences. Value should be distinguished from utility because of the arbitrariness and psychoTogical character of value.  Utility normally refers to a strictly rational calculus, often from the vantage point of the observer.  Utility, in the direct and contemporaneous sense, is by no means always present in value judgments, in part because the aesthetic dimension is dominant in many value judgments. 

 

                In the long run "judgments of practice" in terms of consequences – or what are conceived as consequences - are doubtless one of the determinants of the survival strength of various values and influence their intensity at given time points. However, a value-choice is more often than not made in

terms of psychologically felt compatibility, rather than by a primarily rational evaluation of probable consequences.  The observer must be highly self-conscious of time perspective and generally wary about drawing inferences about what is advantageous or disadvantageous, beneficial or harmful in estimating

the relation between values and consequences.  Dewey is right in insisting that values are specially ri~levant to tensions and conflicting impulses.  Values make their influence felt after desiring has occurred and when there is cognition and/or feeling about desirability. But he is only partly right in saying that the value "good" is fixed to whatever will solve the problem situation, if this be interpreted to mean the immediate or short-term problem situation.⁶³ 

 

                ⁶² Learning theory has also tended to overlook the "intrinsic appropriateness" of the

Gestaltists. Cf. W. Koehier. 

 

                ⁶³ Radcliffe-Brown has pointed out that some of his critics mistakenly thought that by "social value" he meant "utHity" (Taboo [1939), p. 47).  In the climate of British- American thought during the past century and a half "value" tends too insistently to imply "utility."

 

431

 

                Values and functions.  Function is always relative to a given basis of references. In the case of values, the reference is to an action system – society or a subsystem thereof, or personality or a subsystem thereof.  There is invariably a "moral" (i.e., total system) reference, whether the function be social or psychological.  Hence the functions of values are largely, though not exclusively, at the latent or implicit level.  A passage in Eliseo Vivas' recent book points out very effectively the danger in naive functional or tension-reduction formulas:

 

                The self, or the integration of effective constellations which for the interest theory define it . . is only one, and an indeterminate, element in the achievement of the moral economy.  Disruption of the economy does not result merely from frustration of surface interests or from manifest conflicts but from the manner - about which we are as yet almost entirely in the dark - in which the hidden factors of the self enter into the selection of values through the inhibition or encouragement of interests.  The value of life as lived, which is distinct from the values acknowledged by the person or even those he espouses, seems to a very small extent to depend on cognitive preferences dictated by which Santayana and Perry call "reason." And even

less does it seem to depend on whether a large or small number of interests decided on by the four notions of Perry are satisfied or not.  The preferences operate below, as well as above, consciousness, and denial of interests is no less necessary than satisfactions to secure the tensions and tone without which life as it is lived loses its value. . . Tension and sometimes the anxiety generated by a conflict may be the essential factors in producing the tone and value.⁶⁴ 

 

                Values and sanctions.  If conduct is to conform, even approximately, to standards, there must - for most of the behavior of most people - be sanctions, organized or diffuse.  It may be guessed that the more organized and direct sanctions reinforce either group values that are newer in the culture or subculture or those which restrain imperious biological impulses, the free exercise of which endangers the security of individuals and the stability of society. Values of both of these types must he called constantly to the con-

scious attention, backed by the threat of direct and organized sanction on the part of at least some members of the group in which action takes place.  The sanctions for implicit group values are either extremely diffuse or are mediated by the sanctions attached to explicit values subsumed under a more thematic implicit value. 

 

                ⁶⁴ The Moral Life and the Ethical Life (1950), p.59. Vivas also in this bouk introduces the useful distinction between "espoused" and "recognized" values.  Had this important hook been available before the present chapter was put in "final form," many aspects of the chapter's content and organization would probably have been significantly different. 

 

432 The Theory and Its Application

 

                Of course, anticipation of sanction is not precisely identical with asking, "What ought I to do?"  Nevertheless sanctions and values are linked in the concrete motivational system of each individual actor.  Also, they are involved in the determinism of selection: external as well as internal consequences follow upon choice. Sanctions and values are inextricably linked.  It is from group values that rules are derived and sanctions justified.  Why must one drive on the right side of the street and be punished for failing to do so? 

Because our culture puts a high value upon human life. 

 

                We do not yet understand very much about the steps through which a mere preference (on the part of an individual or a group) becomes a value (internally felt "oughtness") and then - in the case of literate societies - embodied as a law with formal sanctions. 

 

                Values and ideals.  It appears to be in the nature of the human animal to strive after ideals as well as mere existence.  To this extent, the realm of ideals and values is almost co-extensive.  However, the concept of the ideal does not imply the property of "choice" or selection which is a differentia of value. 

Moreover, in popular speech at least, the "ideal" carries a connotation of the unattainable as opposed to the desirable-and-possible.  In addition to the quasi-mystical connotation, there are metaphysical overtones from Plato and elsewhere which make the term dubious as a scientific concept.  One might say that an ideal is an especially valued goal of an individual or a group.  Thomas O'Dea suggests defining an ideal as "a constructed embodiment of values in a hypothetically concrete situation"; he gives as examples the

scholar-gentleman in Confucian China, the independence of India, the building of Zion. 

 

                Values and beliefs.  Values differ from ideas and beliefs by the feeling which attaches to values and by the commitment to action in situations involving possible alternatives.  If you are committed to act on a belief, then there is a value element involved.  The following crude schematization is suggestive: (1) This is real or possible (belief) 65 (2) this concerns me or us (interest) ; (3) this is good for me or us, this is better than something else that is possible (value).  Belief refers primarily to the categories, "true" and "false"; "correct" and "incorrect."  Value refers primarily to "good" and "bad"; "right" and "wrong." 

 

                Values and ideology.  The term ideology is currently used in a number of somewhat distinct, though partially overlapping, senses.  It always refers to a system of ideas, but the system is sometimes construed to be based on the special interests of some segmental or distributive minority within the society,

sometimes upon a supernatural revelation, sometimes upon any nonempirical, nonscientific norm.⁶⁶   

In general, ideology has today a somewhat pejorative sense which does not attach to value.  Ideology is also distinguished by explicitness, by systemic quality, and by overt emphasis on cognition (though there is clearly also an implication of commitment to these ideas).  It might legitimately be argued that ideologies determine the choice between alternative paths of action, which are equally compatible with the underlying values. 

 

                ⁶⁵ In popular usage with respect to religion, belief is sometimes "the desirable" in the sense of the supernaturally commanded or appruved. 

 

                ⁶⁶ Lasswell and Kaplan (Power and Society [1950], p- 123) have recently given this definition: "The ideology is the political myth functioning to preserve the social structure; the utopia, to supplant it."  The Communist definition of ideology is, "The integrated total of 'scientifically' established ideas." Cf. K. A. Wittfogel, "How to Checkmate Stalin in Asia," Commentary (1950) pp.334341.

 

Values and Value-Orientations 433

 

                Nothing could be more evident than the fact that we have dealt with many topics inadequately and have failed to touch at all upon others.  The source of values and the sources of sanctions for values have interesting aspects, both historical and functional.  We have not even approached the problems of what kinds of value systems are correlated with various levels of technological and social development; of the compatibility and incompatibility of various values.  How values are learned, accepted, and diffused deserves a long monographic study. Murray and Morgan have well said:

 

                Since there is only one acceptable method of testing the value of anything and that is by experience, there will never be a sound basis for a philosophy of life until the experiences of a vast number of different types of men and women have been accurately reported, assembled, and formulated in general

terms.  As things stand now only those who can write well enough to have their works published are in a position to make their experiences available to others.  Since writers are not a representative sample of the population, it is necessary that records of experience be obtained from other classes of people.⁶⁷ 

 

The assertion that "what is right is what is right for man's nature" needs a careful reexamination in the light of existing anthropological, psychological, and sociological evidence.  The above listing enumerates only a small part of the unfinished business in the field of values.

 

                ⁶⁷ Murray and Morgan, p.8.