Persons are not just mechanical systems of instinctual animalistic proclivities, but also language-producing, existentially aware creatures, whose experiences and actions are drenched in subjective meaning. To understand a human being as a person is to understand him or her as a rational system that wants, fears, hopes, believes, and in other ways imbues the world with meaning, rather than just a mechanical system that is subject to the same chains of cause and effect as other animals. But contemporary personality psychology (...) has, to a great extent, focused on the behavioral side of personality, while neglecting its meaning side, failing to realize that subjective meanings are part of the very constitution rather than just causes of personality. My overarching purpose with this dissertation is, consequently, to contribute to the establishment of a genuinely non-reductive science of personality that systematically studies the systems of meaning that comprise a person’s worldview in their own right, as sources of meaning in personality. I both establish conceptual and theoretical foundations for the psychology of worldviews and present empirical research on worldviews. The conceptual and theoretical issues are addressed in the introductory chapters and the first paper. I begin by explicating a non-reductive realist philosophy of personality that steers between reductionism and social constructionism, and by suggesting that we need a more coherent understanding of personality and a richer study of it, rather than a radically new methodology. I continue by discussing the limitations of, and conceptual issues with, previous approaches to personality, and by outlining the conceptual foundations for a psychology of worldviews to remediate their weaknesses, demarcating worldview constructs as referring to presuppositions, concepts, and narrative scripts that, by working as the substrata, or background, for intentional thought, feeling, and action, form the most central sources of meaning. I continue by discussing the structure and dynamics of worldviews in terms of the relationship between innate meaning-making mechanisms and the universal features of the existential condition that they address. I conclude the introductory chapters by describing the background of the empirical research and by discussing limitations with the present thesis and directions for future theory and research. I continue, in the first paper, to argue that the study of traits and the study of worldviews form mutually irreducible parts of personality psychology and that worldviews are not inherently less universal in terms of structure, or in other ways less basic, than traits. I conclude this paper by emphasizing the need to address coherence not just in behavior, but also within worldviews and between traits and worldviews, and to complement traditional individual differences research with personalistic methodology. The empirical research is presented in the second and third papers included in this thesis. This research addresses Humanism and Normativism, which are arguably the two broadest and potentially most important worldview constructs in the research literature today, representing whether human beings are thought of as intrinsically valuable and ontologically important or as acquiring value and reality only through the attainment of external norms and ideals . Although originally thought to be opposites, previous research has suggested that they are uncorrelated. In the first empirical paper, I introduce a hierarchical model of their structure, develop scales to measure their facets, and demonstrate through confirmatory factor analysis that they are, contrary to previous wisdom, negatively related in terms of view of human nature, attitude to affect, and interpersonal attitude, but unrelated in terms of epistemology and political values. I present evidence also of discriminant and predictive validity in relation to other worldview variables, life goals, educational field, political and religious orientation, and the Big Five aspects. In the second empirical paper, I use humanism and normativism to explain the broad systems of meaning that potentially underlie, and intersect with, variables from the most important models of the underpinnings of political ideology today, through path modeling. The results suggest that humanism is related to political ideology through preference for equality, as mediated by moral concern with fairness and the avoidance of harm, emotionality, and honesty-humility, and that normativism is related to political ideology through conservative attitudes in general, as mediated by system justification, moral concern with authority, loyalty, and purity, and low openness. Both of the empirical articles provide ample evidence of broad systems of meaning cutting across different aspects of the worldview and of their explanatory power with regards to other psychological phenomena. These studies thereby help to substantiate the viability of the psychology of worldviews. (shrink)

Researchers in all management specialties have discussed and investigated the important role values play in personal and organizational phenomena. However, because research on values has been performed in a wide range of social science disciplines and at different levels of analysis, much of thiswork has been uninformed by other work and is neither well integrated nor systematized, resulting in a great deal of confusion concerning the topic. This article attempts to add order and clarity to this area of research by (...) proposing a framework of values research based on level of analysis and by cataloguing and reviewing the vast theoretical and empirical research in light of this framework. It concludes with a critique of the extant literature and recommendations for further research. (shrink)

The study of social values has its origins in the study of both cross cultural and within cultural differences in latent or manifest definitions of the right social order to achieve the good life. To this extent, the social scientific literature is replete with references to them. Yet, researchers either use the term values Social values are often used interchangeably with that of attitudes or treated as a post-hoc explanatory concept. When values are the focal research point, such endeavours predominantly (...) depart from universal and reductionist understandings of their functions, meanings and structures. Through tracing the roots of key theoretical and empirical investigations in values, originating in the work of Charles Morris, Gordon Allport, Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, Milton Rokeach and Shalom Schwartz, we reveal the common as well as the different tenets underpinning their work. It will be shown that these accounts have lost sight of the importance of plurality and context. We claim that a renewed program of research in values is needed, which should be characterised by methodological pluralism in order to investigate a) value plurality, b) value specificity and c) values as properties and as processes. (shrink)

The term value may be defined as a principle or ideal of intrinsic worth or desirability. Values and attitudes relate a property of an external object (intrinsic worth) with an internal process (feeling). People impute worth or value onto objects, principles or ideals. The values are preferences, criteria or choices of personal or group conduct. They are general principles that guide an individual's decisions. These principles have an inherent organization and a rational basis to impart worth to objects and other (...) individuals. As society and culture are not static, there can be many changes in a society in the course of a decade. Changes in societal values are usually gradual when viewed from a distance, and are at both individual and group levels. Individuals have values which they express both in terms of stated beliefs and actions. The present article is an attempt to understand the impact of profession, represented by teachers of higher education and medical doctors, and dietary habits, categorized as vegetarians and non–vegetarians, on the perception of existing values and expectation of ought to be values in the society. (shrink)

Interest in subjective values and decision responses are investigated empirically, including statistically testing the predictive relationships between subjective values, other independent variables such as level and area of executive responsibility, and decision responses.

The notion of value neutrality has been a contentious issue within the human and social sciences for some time. In this paper, some of the philosophical and scientific bases for the confusion surrounding the fact-value dichotomy are covered and the discrepancy between how psychology studies values and expresses them is noted. The sense of value neutrality is clarified historically and the clarified meaning of the term applied to some qualitative data demonstrating in what sense values may be expressed in psychology. (...) The position is upheld that psychology as a human science intentionally should not be absolutely value free in the sense that human reality has to be studied in a non-reductionistic manner and thus methods of study must be respectful of the full ethical sense of humanness. This is simply meeting the phenomenological requirement of “fidelity to the phenomenon”. However, psychology can be value free in the historical sense of the term properly understood because it refers to the fact that the personal values of the scientists ought not to be conflated with scientific findings. The discussion of values takes place primarily within the context of science, where the problem of value neutrality emerged, but it is acknowledged that non-scientific approaches to value have merit and can also be compelling. (shrink)

Bu araştırmanın amacı bilim ve sanat merkezlerinde görev yapan yönetici ve öğretmenlerin değer tercihlerinin farklı değişkenler açısından incelenmesidir. Araştırmada model olarak ilişkisel tarama modeli kullanılmıştır. Veri toplama aracı olarak Schwartz Değerler Ölçeği ve kişisel bilgiler formu kullanılmıştır. Schwartz Değerler Ölçeği, Schwartz tarafından 1992 yılında geliştirilmiş, Kuşdil ve Kağıtçıbaşı tarafından Türkçe’ye uyarlaması yapılmıştır. Araştırmanın evrenini tüm BİLSEM eğitimcileri, örneklemini ise basit seçkisiz örnekleme yöntemi ile seçilen 433 öğretmen ve 105 yönetici oluşturmaktadır. Verilerin analizi SPSS paket programı 23. versiyonu ile yapılmıştır. Araştırmanın (...) bulgularına göre ölçekte yer alan alt boyutların ortalama puanlarının çeşitli değişkenlere göre farklılaşması araştırılmıştır. BİLSEM kadın ve erkek eğitimcilerin ortalama puanları arasında ”cinsiyet” değişkenine göre geleneksellik alt boyutunda; “görev” değişkenine göre güç, öz yönelim, evrensellik ve geleneksellik alt boyutlarında; “mesleki kıdem yılı” değişkenine göre hazcılık alt boyutunda; “mezuniyet derecesi” değişkenine göre hazcılık ve geleneksellik alt boyutlarında farklılık ortaya çıkmıştır. Yaş değişkenine göre eğitimcilerin değer tercihlerinde bütün alt boyutlarda farklılık görülmemiştir Araştırmanın bulguları tartışma ve sonuç bölümünde yorumlanmıştır. (shrink)