Humans have preferences.  They make choices.  By most accounts, preferences and choices are related, and these in turn are connected in one way or another to values.  This topic has a substantial history in disciplines ranging from religion, philosophy and politics to economics, marketing and advertising.  An enormous range of terms and concepts are associated within this domain, e.g., attitude, benefit, desire, duty, ethic, goal, incentive, like, moral, motive, need, obligation, pleasure, utility, want, welfare, worth.  This seminar [Psych 447] will explore the psychological processes involved in value/preference/choice relationships.  Among the questions to be explored are:

What are values?

The dictionary offers, "that property of a thing because of which it is esteemed, desirable, or useful, ..." For psychologists, this hardly answers the question.  Indeed it only raises new and difficult questions of how a thing comes to elicit "esteem" or 'desire," and what is the nature of the processes that translate "properties of a thing" into value-relevant thoughts, feelings and/or behaviors.

What are preferences, and how are they related to values?

The dictionary again informs us that to prefer a thing is to hold it "before or above other persons or things in estimation;" in short, to "like it better."  We all know (more or less) what we like, and what we don't like. But how (why) do we come to like what we like?  If preference (liking) is based on "estimation," then preferences for things must be related to the value of those things (note the "esteemed" part of the definition of value).  But must we be aware of our values in order to know (if "know" is the psychologically correct term) what we like?  Do our values, conscious or unconscious, determine our preferences and choices, or could it be the other way around?

Is there a difference between choice and preference?

To say, "I prefer X," is generally taken to mean that, given the opportunity, I would choose X over other options.  Thus, choice may be seen as the exercise of a preference, the overt act of taking/selecting one thing over another based on a knowing/feeling of liking the chosen thing more than the unchosen.  By this analysis, choice and preference are directly related -- economists would say that our choices "reveal" our preferences.  But do we always choose what we prefer?  By some formal definitions we must.  But our own experience suggests that, in spite of being free to make our own choices, we sometimes do not "get everything we like," and not infrequently what we choose does not turn out to be what we most prefer.  Mismatches between preferences and choices might be due to errors in knowing/feeling what we want (errors in preference), and at other times we could have mistaken (misperceived) the properties of the "things" among which we were choosing ("I did not know that this chocolate was the one filled with coconut, else I would not have chosen it").  Often our choices do not match our preferences because we simply cannot afford it!  Interestingly, persons who choose that which they do not prefer (or abstain from choosing that which they do prefer) are often held in very high esteem (i.e., "valued") by society.

Where do values come from?

Given that people have values, and that values are somehow related to preferences and choices, are these values learned through individual experience, taught by culture/societies or are they inborn, genetically determined?  While our likes and dislikes seem quite personal and "individual," the basic values underlying those likes are quite consistent among members of the same culture and perhaps even among all members of the species.  The relative contributions of "nature" vs "nurture" is a continuing theme in psychology.  This theme has acquired renewed salience with the rise (perhaps resurrection would be more apt) of the Darwinian, evolution-based paradigm, and the extension of this paradigm to theories of the highest levels of human cognitive processes, including our highest values.

Are some values better than others?

Is it more important to be honest or to be considerate of the feelings of others?  is freedom more important than equality of opportunity?  Are your values better than mine?  ARe your (my) values the right ones -- the values that you (I) should have?  How shall we determine which are the right values? While it is not entirely clear what values are, it is even less clear which values are better/more important than others.  This ambiguity has not, however, deterred humans from annihilating hosts of plant and animal species, and no small number of con-specifics based on the conviction that some values are better than others.

How can values (and thus preferences and choices) be changed?

From clerics to politicians to marketers to parents to teachers to spouses, there is great interesting in influencing values (especially yours).  Indeed the popularity of 'self-help" programs suggests that many individuals are intensely interested in changing their own values (or at least their choices).  Millions of dollars are spent on advertising campaigns to influence your choices or products, companies and candidates, on "education" programs to shift your support to one social cause or another, and on a staggering variety of self-improvement schemes ranging from diets to exercise regimes to religious (or semi-religious) cults promising spiritual actualization.  Many of these are successful to greater or lesser extents, but none work all of the time for everyone.  Either way, there is little in the way of psychological science and theory that explains why value change efforts work (or not) or what it is about any specific program that makes it successful (or not).  How to change values is an enormously important practical problem (perhaps the most important social problem), and it has proven one of the most challenging problems for psychological science.

Terry C. Daniel, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
University of Arizona
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