The Personal Meaning of Values in a Rapidly Changing Society

Abstract

Abstract A self-confrontation method is presented as a procedure to investigate personal and subjective interpretations of general values. Fifty-three psychology students from the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland were asked to interpret their personal experience of Spranger's values. Social, religious, and theoretical values had a stronger capacity to evoke personal valuations than did political, economic, and aesthetic values. Positive valuations were mainly connected with aesthetic, theoretical, social, and religious values, whereas many negative valuations concerned economic and, most strikingly, political areas. As hypothesized, political and theoretical values had higher levels of self-enhancement than of contact and union. Aesthetic, religious, and social values, on the other hand, typically evoked a coincidence of self-enhancement and contact and union.