For this week’s discussion, we question ‘”what values are” and how “Personal Values” are developed within each individual. To me, values are a person’s principles or standards of behavior. It is one’s judgment of what is important in life. It is also the important and lasting beliefs/ideals shared by members of a culture about what is good or bad and desirable or undesirable. Values have major influence on a person’s behavior and attitude and serves as broad guidelines in all situations.
In H. Lewis’ “A question of Values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives”, he states a theory that “individual human beings are programmed into their values…by social pressures” (pg. 8, Lewis).
I agree with this statement because we start forming values in our childhood. First we learn to appreciate things that fulfill our basic needs, but we value especially those people that provide them to us. Their behavior towards us then becomes the main reference of what is valuable. Thus, our character and personality are molded/programmed through the attitudes and behavior of the people who raise us. We learn to value the substance of everything they say and do, and what they don’t say and don’t do. This strengthens our overall formation of values. By the times we become young students in school, we start feeling social pressures and the pressure of values that are different from ours, as we relate with other people. This then tests our values taught by our parents, as we start to question whether or not the values we learned are values we want to keep or not.
Through more life experiences, we then develop “basic ways we come to ‘know’ something” (pg. 9, Lewis). The ways we do this are through:
“
- Sense Experience – gaining direct knowledge through our own five senses
- Deductive Logic – subjecting beliefs to a variety of tests that underlie deductive reasoning
- Emotion – feeling that something isn’t right
- Intuition – the unconscious but nevertheless most powerful part of our higher mental processing capability. “
And with this basic model, we then create and develop our own values.
-Related text: Lewis, H. (1990). A Question of values: Six Ways We Make the Personal Choices That Shape Our Lives. Axios Press.
Hi, dexterh, thank you for sharing your idea with us, I totally agree you mentioned that values are a person’s principles or standards of behavior. I consider each person have different value. When people begin communicate, their value will affect others. People try to modify their personal value while listen for someone. They have their own Judgment that follow someone’s value or not. In your second paragraph, you mentioned that people forming values in their childhood and begin to question the value taught by parents while they are in school. I guess I can understand what you said, I consider family is the first teacher for the children that modeling their value. However, I think people’s value are also changing with what they saw and what they feel rather than just only social pressures. Social pressure is a kind of factor that make people rethink their value. But except social pressure, people’s personal feeling is other important factor affect people’s modeling their value. Imagine when a young child sit in front of a TV watch some cartoon, they might inherit some value by the characters in the TV.