Our values are important because they help us to grow as humans. All decisions we make are a replication of our values and beliefs, and they direct our actions. Our values help us reach specific goals in life. Each endeavour of ours is directed by our values. Values are the core of the human character.
Milton Rokeach (1918 – 1988) was a Polish-American psychologist. He taught at various Universities in America. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Rokeach as the 85th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Rokeach had conducted a well-known experiment in which he observed the interaction between three mentally ill patients at the Ypsilanti State Mental Hospital, Michigan, USA. The hospital is closed since 2006. Rokeach found in his experiment that the three men on whom he investigated personal values, each claimed to be Jesus Christ. Rokeach confronted them with one another’s inconsistent claims while encouraging them to interact personally as a support group. Rokeach also attempted to manipulate other aspects of their misconceptions by inventing messages from imaginary characters. He did not, as he had hoped, provoke any lessening of the patients’ delusions. But, his inventing messages did bring a number of changes in their beliefs, which Rokeach documented.
While initially, the three patients quarrelled over who was holier and reached the point of disagreements in mental and physical forms, eventually each explained away the other two as being patients with a mental disability. By the way, it is interesting to note that the graduate students who worked with Rokeach on the project had been strongly critical of the morality of the project because of the amount of lying and manipulation by Rokeach and the amount of distress experienced by the patients.
As time passed, the men started to humour one another’s delusions. They even became friends, defending each other against other patients. They stopped arguing and talked about routine things and avoided the subject of Jesus entirely. I like to quote this experiment in my lecturing on Organizational Behaviour because when we accept realities, the majority of disillusions vanish allowing us to accept ourselves with our plusses and minuses.
Rokeach added a comment in the final revision of the book that, while the experiment did not cure any of the three Christs, “It did cure me of my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs.”
For most people, their central beliefs about the world and the physical reality around them cannot be questioned and are harder to shake. In the political world, the politicians take advantage of people’s beliefs in their religions; the belief in and worship of superhuman controlling power, especially their God or gods cannot be shaken. Politicians play one religion against the other to rule the society. Values form the basis for the formation, continuity and development of each culture.
We see that even today the ongoing battle between ardent creationists and people defending scientific theories about evolution. Creationist arguments are notoriously erring based on a misinterpretation of evolutionary science and evidence. It is difficult to shake the values of people suffering from delusions that they are someone else; disproving it can be extremely difficult since they will simply reject any external evidence.
In the case of the three patients at the centre of the experiment by Rokeach probably all three were suffering from an extremely strong central delusion that reflected how they viewed reality itself. Identity is at the core of what we believe about ourselves; it is most important how we look at ourselves; how we see ‘our’ world which is based on our strong beliefs. In the business world also a proper understanding of culture is essential for developing and maintaining business relationships, negotiating deals, or conducting sales or marketing campaigns. Businesses and people are getting more and more global, providing much impetus to the popular saying “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
Every individual and every organization is involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our values and beliefs, and they are always directed towards a specific purpose. That purpose is the satisfaction of our individual and collective organizational needs.
Values describe the personal qualities we choose to symbolize to guide our actions; the sort of person we want to be; the manner in which we treat ourselves and others, and our interaction with the world around us. They provide the general guidelines for our conduct. Values in short are that which are good, desirable, or worthwhile. Values are the motive behind purposeful action. Values are essential to ethics. Ethics is concerned with human actions, and the choice of those actions. Ethics evaluate those actions and the values that underlie them. It determines which values should be pursued, and which should not.
There are three types of values:
Character Values
Character values are the universal values that you need to exist as a good human being.
Work Values
Work values are values that help you find what you want in a job and give you job satisfaction.
Personal Values
Personal values are the things that are important to us, the characteristics and behaviours that motivate us and guide our decisions.
In 1973, Rokeach published his book “The Nature of Personal Values” the book occupied the final years of his career. In it, he suggested that a relatively few “terminal human values” are the goals that a person would like to achieve during his or her lifetime. These values vary among different groups of people in different cultures. These values can predict a wide variety of culture. Rokeach’s theory led to a series of experiments in the next decades starting in ’80s.
