Milton Rokeach's seminal book, , published by the New York Free Press in 1973 , stands as a foundational text in social psychology. Before its publication, the scientific investigation of human values was scattered across disciplines like anthropology and sociology, often dismissed by mainstream psychology due to measurement difficulties. Rokeach revolutionized the field by defining values mathematically and empirically. He demonstrated that human values are measurable, organized into clear hierarchies, and deeply tied to our attitudes and daily choices. Defining the Core Concept: What is a Value?
Rokeach argued that values act as standard criteria that guide behavior in various situations, from selecting a job to voting.
The RVS has been instrumental in cross-cultural psychology, allowing researchers to compare value hierarchies across nations. Studies have applied the RVS to investigate value orientations among students in Austria and Ukraine, to analyze the perception of honesty in former Soviet republics, and to link values to social behavior and attitudes in various cultural contexts. This cross-cultural application has consistently shown that while there is a universal structure to human values, the specific priorities (the rankings) vary significantly across cultures.
: These are desirable "end-states of existence"—the ultimate goals a person hopes to achieve in their lifetime (e.g., happiness, world peace, freedom).
The Nature of Human Values offered profound insights into human behavior:
Rokeach was not only a creative experimenter but also an influential synthesizer. A 2002 survey of the field ranked him the 85th most cited psychologist of the twentieth century; at the time of his greatest productivity, he was the 26th most frequently cited psychologist in social science abstracts. The Nature of Human Values appeared in the final decade of his career, serving as both the culmination of his theoretical work and the test manual for the , a measurement instrument that would outlive him by decades.
These represent the ultimate goals or "ends" an individual hopes to achieve during their lifetime.
"The Nature of Human Values" has had a lasting impact on various fields, including psychology, sociology, marketing, and public policy. The book's concepts and measurement tools have been applied in diverse contexts, such as:
He divided them into two types:
with modern alternatives like Schwartz’s value theory.
Preferred modes of behavior or traits to achieve those ends (e.g., Honest, Responsible, Imaginative).
Rokeach defined a value as .
Rokeach’s primary contribution is the distinction between two independent yet interconnected sets of values that form the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS)