Value Pluralism Model

Definition

What happens when two or more values come into conflict? What will determine the level of conflict a person experiences, and how will the person go about resolving it? The value pluralism model (VPM) addresses these questions. The VPM, in its original form, consists of three interrelated sets of propositions:

• 1.
  Underlying all belief systems are core or terminal values that specify what the ultimate goals of life should be (e.g., economic efficiency, social equality, individual freedom). Different values may point to different and often contradictory goals.
• 2.
  People find value conflicts challenging for at least three reasons. First, people confronted with conflicting values find it cognitively difficult to make apples-and-oranges comparisons between them (e.g., How much of my economic prosperity am I willing to give up to help promote social equality?). Second, value conflict is emotionally painful. Most people faced with a situation in which they must sacrifice one important value for another experience dissonance. The more important the value, the more painful the dissonance will be. Third, trade-offs between core values can be politically embarrassing: If one chooses one value over the other, one may feel he or she is letting down those who feel they have received the short end of the trade-off stick.
• 3.
  Given these formidable obstacles, explicit reasoning about trade-offs between core values is stressful. In the short term, the motivation to reduce cognitive discrepancy stems from the need to reduce negative emotion, but in the long term, the motivation stems from the requirement for effective action. Whenever feasible, people should prefer modes of resolving conflict that are simple and require minimal effort. However, how much mental effort is required to resolve the dissonance will depend on the magnitude of the dissonance. Specifically, when a person is confronted with a situation that requires choosing between two values held with unequal strength, he or she will experience low dissonance. This occurs when a person believes more strongly in the importance of value A over value B. Under these circumstances, the model hypothesizes that people will rely on the simple cognitive solution of denying or downplaying the weaker value and exaggerating or bolstering the stronger value. This process will suffice to resolve the dissonant reaction. In contrast, when dissonance is high, the simple solutions of bolstering and denial no longer offer plausible solutions. This occurs when the person not only perceives the conflicting values as important but also perceives them to be equally important. Under such circumstances, the person must turn to more effort-demanding strategies, such as differentiation (weighing the merits of each value) and integration (developing rules for [Page 1008]trading off values). These are the two components of integrative complexity.

Extending the Model

It often proves difficult, however, to motivate integratively complex processing even when important values clearly come into conflict. According to the revised VPM, two classes of variables must also be taken into account to determine whether people will indeed respond in integratively complex ways to highvalue conflict situations. First, the social content of the colliding values has important implications for which conflicts people are likely to view as legitimate. Specifically, people are likely to accept trade-offs between secular values, such as money, time, and convenience, much more readily than they are willing to accept what are considered taboo trade-offs, such as those between secular values and sacred values (e.g., life, liberty, and justice). For example, although attaching monetary value to the services provided by an employee may be cognitively demanding, it is not normatively unacceptable. In contrast, attaching monetary value to human life is. Confronted with the need to conduct such forbidden trade-offs, decision makers are likely to rely on massive impression-management efforts to conceal, obfuscate, or redefine what they are doing to protect themselves from the harsh judgment of observers.

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