Human Values Systems, Part 3 - 4

Ok, from the preceding post’s you are crystal clear on what values are and how to classify them. So no let’s talk a bit about what they do and how you can use them. Values have 3 major functions or roles that they play in the course of a person’s life:

1.       Motivators – induce valences or the linking of actions that a person will take in response to situations or scenarios. In other words they are a major factor in determining what someone will do in a given scenario… Fight, flight, talk, sit, plan, etc… Values will play a major role in determining this.

2.       Attentional, perceptual and interpretational filters – Values can be considered chronically activated goals. High priority values are continually and readily accessible and are put into play in most situations. As a result, they are a strong determinant as to what information is processed, at what “angles” the information is viewed from (perceptual filters) and what the information means to the person evaluating it.

3.       Future planning filters – Due to the overwhelming strength of values and their influence on life direction they are a huge determinant of what actions will be planned in the future and how they are planned.

I won’t go into the specific studies that ground this work, but if you are just dying for more information you can seek out the work of Norman Feather, Milton Rokeach, Bas Verplanken, Rob Holland and Peter Gollwitzer. Much of their work empirically grounds the information above in conjunction with Shalom Schwartz’s work.

Something that is important to know about values though is that they only have affective influence on behavior when they are activated. Activation is generally situational and if a situation does occur that necessitates the use of values as a filter, the more readily accessible a value is to the working memory of an individual the stronger it’s chances of activation.

Values don’t necessarily need conscious thought in order to affect behavior. On the contrary they rarely are given any conscious thought… They simply “occur” in the subconscious mind and the result “happens”. The result can be anything from a directionally particular communication to a directionally particular action to complete inaction.

As a result of this, events such as a promotion or an accident will employ and retard the usage of different value systems. Also, in light of the fact that accessibility of a value greatly affects the activation of a value priming can play a major role in what values are being employed at a given moment. Priming can happen from something as slight as reading value-based terms in an article or even an epitaph for that matter…

This brings us to the meat that you have all been waiting for… that is “how are values valuable to the effective communicator?”   I realize that there seems to be quite a bit of information here and there also seems to be some contingencies involved as well. Not to fret though, this can all be summed up into two very simply yet powerful concepts that can be used when communicating with someone.

1.       Predictability - Values are an extremely permanent and predictable entity in a person’s psyche. Can they be changed? Of course… Are they easy to change? No. So what this means is that by eliciting someone’s values you have a very accurate filtering system and map by which to direct both the type of content you will use in your communication and the frames in which it will be presented.

2.       Priming - Values can be activated through priming. This means that you have some control over which values will run in someone’s subconscious so that you may better persuade and influence their behavior during the course of a communication.

So as you can see values can be very readily used in effective communication if you know how… Tomorrow we will finish our miniseries on values by determining how to elicit surface and core values along with showing you how to prime someone in order to facilitate particular value usage.

As always, to learn more about values and how they can help provide effective communication, please visit my site The Communication Expert.

The Communication Expert | David J. Parnell
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