Personal Value

(noun)

Personal Values provide an internal reference for what is good, beneficial, important, useful, beautiful, desirable, constructive, etc. Values generate behaviour and help solve common human problems for survival by comparative rankings of value, the results of which provide answers to questions of why people do what they do and in what order they choose to do them.

Related Terms

Examples of Personal Value in the following topics:

  • Political Values

    • Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding how, why and to what degree people value things, whether the thing is a person, idea, object, or anything else.
    • A personal or cultural value is an extremely absolute or relative ethical value, the assumption of which can be the basis for ethical action.
    • As such, values reflect a person's sense of right and wrong or what "ought" to be.
    • Personal Values in this way exist in relation to cultural values, either in agreement with or divergent from prevailing norms.
    • Members take part in a culture even if each member's personal values do not entirely agree with some of the normative values sanctioned in the culture.

  • Introduction to Human Association

    • One way to try to predict how another person will react to a given action on our part is to imagine how we would act if we were in that other person's shoes, given his or her values and circumstances.
    • Note that the complexity of such a calculation may soon become unmanageable, since the other person in turn could be taking into account how we will react to his or her reaction!
    • Associations as we will be defining them here arise when the satisfaction of one person is changed by the action of another person.

  • Major Life and Political Events

    • Political socialization takes place throughout the life cycle, but major life or political events can also impact political values.
    • Political socialization takes place throughout the course of a person's life.
    • However, certain major life and political events can interrupt the normal progression of political socialization, causing a person to change his or her opinion and accept other political values and ideologies.
    • Initially, studies indicated that the most important factor in forming political values was the life cycle.
    • That is, a person's attachment to a specific political ideology naturally grew stronger over time, as weak socialization became strong and strong socialization became stronger.

  • The Candidates

    • A partisan dealignment may be occurring today, as more people are identifying as independents and more voters choose based on personal traits of candidates, such as honesty.
    • Mass media can contribute to partisan dealignment by focusing attention on candidates' personalities and scandals, which are short-term factors that can influence vote choice.
    • Candidate images consists of the background, experiences, and personal qualities of people running for elected office.
    • Oftentimes, voters will make decisions about who to vote for based on their perception of a specific candidate's personality, leadership traits, or family values.

  • Results of the 1946 Act

    • Section 308 states that, "any person who shall engage himself for pay, or for any consideration, for the purpose of attempting to influence the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress of the United States shall, before doing anything in furtherance of such object, register with the Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of the Senate and shall give to those officers in writing and under oath, his name and business address, the name and address of the person by whom he is employed, and in whose interest he appears or works, the duration of such employment, how much he is paid and is to receive, by whom he is paid or is to be paid, how much he is to be paid for expenses, and what expenses are to be included. "
    • "The Provisions of this act apply to any person (except a political committee as defined in the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, and duly organized State or local committees of a political party), who by himself, or through any agent or employee or other persons in any manner whatsoever, directly or indirectly, solicits, collects, or receives money or any other thing of value to be used principally to aid, or which the principal purpose of which person is to aid, in the accomplishment of influencing, directly or indirectly, the passage or defeat of any legislation by the Congress of the United States. "

  • Associations

    • Our definition of associations is as follows: An association exists when one person's satisfaction is being changed by the actions of another person.
    • The two persons are then said to be associated.
    • Satisfaction is always a positive number, and since the diagram assumes (correctly) that the individual's satisfaction could be lower, its current value must be greater than 0.
    • As noted above, there are many people with whom a given person, Jones, might be associated.
    • Absolute satisfaction after all will be a composite representing the net effects of actions by the many different persons with whom one is associated, by the person himself, and of events in the natural environment.

  • From Political Values to Ideology

    • Values represent a society's shared convictions about what is just and good.
    • Democratic political values are among the cornerstones of the American creed.
    • Capitalist economic values are also a part of American values.
    • The emphasis on the lone, powerful person implies a distrust of collective action and of power structures such as big government, big business, or big labor.
    • While there are various components to fundamental American political values, not all Americans agree on which exactly the most important values should be .

  • Individualism

    • Individualism is a philosophy that stresses the value and rights of the individual vis-a-vis society and government.
    • Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government.
    • Individualism, sometimes closely associated with certain variants of anarchism or liberalism, typically takes it for granted that individuals know best and that public authority or society has no right to interfere in a person's decision-making process, unless a very compelling need to do so arises (and maybe not even in those circumstances).
    • This type of argument can occur in policy debates regarding regulation of industries, as well as in relation to personal choice of lifestyle.

  • Social Power

    • Social power is our ability to get another person to act as we desire.
    • We may try to convince them that they will like the consequences of the action we have prescribed or to convince them to change their values so that consequences already expected will be attractive.
    • The power of the purse, conversely, comes from our ability to refrain from doing something that another person would like us to do.
    • On the diagram, such an action increases the other person's satisfaction from point 0 to point M.
    • It should be noted that it is not meaningful to say that social power causes the actions taken by another person.

  • Political Leaders and Opinion Makers

    • Typically, opinion leadership is viewed as a monomorphic, domain-specific measure of individual differences, that is, a person that is an opinion leader in one field may be a follower in another field .
    • The technician has access to far more information on this topic than the average consumer and has the requisite background to understand the information, though the same person might be a follower at another field (for example sports) and ask others for advice.
    • Variants of polymorphic opinion leadership include market mavenism, personality strength and generalized opinion leadership.