the most important values and virtues for humans?”
– There is variability across history, cultures, and intellectual tradition in terms of what values and virtues are worth striving for, but convergence can be found in the usually hierarchical listing and organizing of values and virtues;
– Plato stated that the good is the foundation of all values and derived the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, self-restraint, and justice;
– Aristotle significantly shaped the notion of a virtue and assumed that virtues are moral qualities attributable to individual reasoning behavior, formulating a list of virtues including the original four cardinal virtues and a number of other virtues;
– Aquinas added three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) to the original four cardinal virtues, resulting in a categorization very similar to Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) understanding of six core virtues; and
– Bretano developed a classical theory of intrinsic value and founded the rational basis for judgments of subjective feeling on values.
Interestingly, many of the central ideas of these philosophical thinkers later reappeared and contributed to psychological approaches towards values and virtues. Therefore, it is essential to consider the historic perspective on value and virtues, when interpreting current and future research findings. Subsequently, in the description of the theories on universal values and virtues below, the two concepts are discussed in separate chapters.
3.2 Universal values: Definitions and theories
Scholl-Schaaf (1975) defined three types of values: (a) value defined as a guiding principle, (b) value as a norm, and (c) value as a goal. The first definition, value as a guiding principle, is the basis of this research; however, all three definitions are given consideration. A value refers to the individual importance and relevance of a particular subject: “It is of great value to me,” meaning “It is of importance to me and I will stand up for it.”
According to Bilsky (2005), the attempt to agree on a unified definition of values has been unsuccessful. This implies that comparing and interpreting research results has its limitation in terms of precision and reproducibility, ←54 | 55→unless a particular value has a common lexical definition. Nevertheless, there are predominant factors of commonality when reference is made to values. Hitlin and Piliavin (2004, p. 362) described the domain of values as an “internal moral compass.” A more general definition of value is given by the lexicon of Dorsch (2016, 18th edition, p. 1790):
With reference to individual values by Kluckhohn (1951), values are defined as explicit or implicit conceptions of the desirable, both in the context of an individual and a group, impacting the choice between available types, means and goals of actions. This often criticized conceptual formulation (Graumann & Willig, 1983) has not been substituted in literature through a more agreeable definition (Rohan, 2000).
In alignment with the definition above, there is consensus within research, that in the context of values “there is a relatively limited number of concepts or descriptions, which correspond to desirable behaviors or goals (or mental states)” (Bilsky, 2005, p. 300). Moreover, it is assumed that values are valid across situations, imposing guidance towards choice and appraisal of behaviors and circumstances. In line with this understanding, Rokeach (1973b, p. 5) defined values as “enduring beliefs that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.” He was interested in a full set of values as “guiding principles” (p. 358) to describe an individual view, and implemented two distinct lists of 18 instrumental values (describing modes of conduct as forms of behavior) and 18 terminal values (describing end-states of existence as lifetime goals). Similarly, Schwartz (1992, 1994, 1999) focused on the motivational power of values and defined them as desirable goals that vary in importance across situations and that guide the way social actors (e.g., individual persons such as military leaders) choose actions and evaluate people and events. He derived his definition of values from the understanding of Rokeach and conceived values likewise as “cognitive representations of desirable, abstract, trans-situational goals that serve as guiding principles in people’s lives” (cited according to Corr and Matthews, 2009, p. 593). Unlike Hofstede (1980) or Schwartz (1994, 1999) who were interested in values as they manifested themselves at a sociocultural level, Rokeach studied values as interindividual differences. As an overview, Schwartz and Bilsky (1987) concluded on five formal features of values, which are usually addressed in definitions: “According to the literature, values are (i) concepts or beliefs, (ii) about desirable end states or behaviors, (iii) that transcend specific situations, (iv) guide selection or evaluation of behavior and events, and (v) are ordered by relative importance” (p. 551).
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The above definitions of values illustrate that the application of the concept of values implies individual, social, and organizational aspects. In situations where individual values take preference, the corresponding research is assigned to personality psychology, while research on social values align with social psychology. In concrete, personality psychology concentrates on:
– measuring personal values as interindividual differences;
– distinguishing a set of core values, to categorize them and to investigate their structure; and
– reaching a conclusion as to how values relate to basic traits of personality (Bilsky, 2005).
Considering the publications on values of the last decades, one recognizes that the expanding interest in psychological value research correlates with the increase in social psychological research. Within the context of personality-psychology, the actual efforts in research were diminishing. An analysis of the research activities on ISI Web of Science (December 5, 2017) showed 8,433 records on values within the psychological field. More than half of these manuscripts have reference to social psychology and among the ten most cited (ISI Web of Science, “citation report values,” 2017) are six articles which address the scope of social psychology. In accordance with Bilsky (2005), the constraint is with research, which aim at a theoretical-based integration of available research data. As proposed by Bilsky and Schwartz (1994), as well as by Roccas, Sagiv, Schwartz, and Knafo (2002), the future demands a substantial degree of coordinated research. This is confirmed by De Raad and Van Oudenhoven (2008), who declared: “The study of values had an almost equally long history as that of traits, but catalogues of values that claim full and integrated coverage of the field are hard to find” (p. 82).
The present thesis had a personality psychological focus and studies values as they pertain to individual military persons. Its aim is to make an integrative contribution to the existing approaches to values, establishing a catalog of values with specific reference to military psychology. In alignment with previous studies on interpersonal differences in values, in the present thesis a value was understood to be “a relatively enduring characteristic of individuals that reflect what is important to them and that guides them in their behaviors and decisions” (De Raad & Van Oudenhoven, 2008, p. 85–86).
3.2.1 Two main strains of value research
The following section reviews the progress in psychological research on values, including the appropriate theoretical background and understanding. ←56 | 57→The psychological systems of values are focused on the question of how many universal values can be distinguished. This particular subject has been investigated within two domains of research, with little connection to each other, referring back to (1) Spranger (1928) as well as Vernon and Allport (1931), and to (2) Rokeach (1973b) and Schwartz (1992, 1999). It is worth mentioning that the empirical value research played a lesser role
