ABSTRACT
The "Greatest Generation" helped reshape the world in World War II and created a new American culture in the 1950s and early 1960s, though with little awareness of themselves as a generation. The first objective of the authors' Study of Social Values was to investigate the values and world-views of 18- to 24-year-old "Millennials" as they become adults in the post-Cold-War, globalizing, wired world. The second was to evaluate "componential" theories that hold social-political values to derive from underlying emotional orientations, especially Tomkins' "humanist" versus "normative" ideo-affective postures; Shweder's ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity; and Haidt's five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The findings coalesce into a portrait of a generation of emerging adults who are working to realize their ideals of tolerance and equality in their personal relationships, and who are enthusiastically creating a new culture with powerful new digital devices and realms of cyberspace.
