Value Priorities

Definition

Value priorities are principles that provide people with a way of knowing what they must do and what type of person they must be so that they can live the best way possible, taking into account their environment and personal attributes. Value priorities therefore provide people with a way of knowing what is important and less important to being happy and getting along in their worlds. Because what these principles mean in people's lives develops as a result of experience, they operate like analogies (in an analogy, one thing is compared to another). When people encounter new situations, new people, or new objects, they can use their value principles to see similarity and therefore respond according to those principles. People often are not aware that these principles are operating, but even when they are unaware, these principles provide the basis for judging and responding in everyday life. For example, if people have equality as a very important value priority and they live in an environment in which equality means treating people fairly, then if they believe another person is being treated unfairly they will feel a real need to repair this situation; they may or may not know why they are responding this way.

Value priorities are central to a person's sense of self. People use their value priorities not only as standards for self-evaluation but also as standards for evaluating other people, things, actions, and activities. Because value priorities provide a structure for knowing what is important and less important to living the best way possible, they assist people in making choices. Perhaps the most important feature of value theory—past and present—is the assumption (which is supported by research) that all people, everywhere, have the same values but differ in terms of the relative importance they place on each value. This means that to be accurate, discussion should be about people's value priorities (and not just, e.g., “values”) or should emphasize the existence of relations among value priorities, their value systems.

Important Distinctions

When value priorities are discussed, focus is generally on people's personal value priorities. However, not only do people have a personal value system, but they also have perceptions of others' value systems (these are sometimes referred to as social value systems). Others can be other people, groups, organizations, or institutions, and their value priorities are transmitted implicitly through both overt and covert behavior. It is assumed that perceptions of others' value priorities have the same organization as the personal value system, although there is very little research in this area.

Not only can personal value priorities be distinguished from perceptions of others' value priorities, but they also can be distinguished from what can be referred to as ideological value systems. Because such promotions are often explicitly created to provide a particular image (e.g., for an organization's mission statement), they may not have the same implicit structure as personal value systems in which there are predictable relations among value types. Again, there is very little theory-directed research into ideological value systems.

The concept of value priorities can be distinguished from the concepts of attitude (an evaluation of a specific entity), worldview (a collection of conscious beliefs about how the world is or should be), and ideology (a rhetorical—i.e., language-based—association or set of associations between things, [Page 1010]people, actions or activities and value priorities). Nevertheless, in past research these distinctions are not always clear, and the term value has been used in referring to each of these concepts.

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