ABSTRACT
My interest in the study of values goes back for many years but it was especially stimulated by Milton Rokeach's Presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) in the late 1960s (Rokeach, 1968), and by the subsequent publication of his book The Nature of Human Values (Rokeach, 1973) in which he presented his ideas about values and his research findings. I found Rokeach's contributions both challenging and insightful. He argued that, although the study of values was a central concern of the social sciences, it had been neglected by social psychologists when compared with the amount of attention they had given to the study of attitudes and attitude change. He provided a careful conceptual analysis of the nature of values and distinguished values from related concepts such as attitudes, needs, and norms. He developed a measurement procedure, the Value Survey, that could be applied to a range of interesting problems. He showed how different political ideologies could be related to the relative importance of values concerned with freedom and equality. And he presented a theory of cognitive and behavioral change that gave a prominent role to those kinds of contradictions that involved discrepancies between values that were central to self-conceptions and other types of beliefs that were less central to self-maintenance and self-enhancement.
