Abstract
The term values designates a psychological construct that plays an important role in motivating human actions and interactions with the world throughout individuals’ life trajectories. Values operate at both individual and social group levels, acting as a sort of lens for interpreting the world—affecting one’s perception, thoughts, feelings—and as a powerful motivational force for encouraging specific actions. Diverse theoretical perspectives conceive of values differently, focusing on their different roots and qualities. Due to the immense complexity of the psychological processes implied when we refer to values, the traditional approach of psychology has been too limited with most investigations carried out from a cognitivist quantitative methodology that simply measures the frequencies of particular pre-established values in specific populations. Pre-defined categories of fixed and mutually exclusive values, however, cannot actually explain the highly complex, plural, multifaceted, and intricate quality of human motivation. In this entry, some new venues to study and theoretically conceive of the issue will be explored, opening up possible perspectives to the investigation of the ontogenesis of values and their development in specific sociocultural contexts from a systemic cultural approach in psychology.
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Branco, A.U. (2022). Values. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_121
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90913-0_121
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