Science of Human Values
Dr. Mark Konty
The concept of “values” is ubiquitous in religious and ethical systems, and abused as a factional dog whistle in political discourse. Amid all of the noise, social scientists have quietly made significant progress in studying the concept of “human values” (the term “human” distinguishes the word “value” from its use in economics).
Two international research programs -- the Schwartz values survey and the World Values Survey -- have refined value measurement, developed theories explaining how values influence behavior, and used cross-cultural studies to show reliable differences in value priorities between cultural groups.
From these observations, moral psychologists have demonstrated how differences in value orientation form the basis for differences in moral judgments, both between and within social groups. In addition to moral decision making, values have been shown to affect a wide range of outcomes, including criminal activity, voting behavior, health decisions and emotional well-being.
In this webinar we’ll see how the science of human values has revealed a universal foundation to values and shown how values direct activity as well as mental states.Speaker Bio
Dr. Mark Konty earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Arizona in 2002. Dr. Konty is the American researcher on an international team of social psychologists working universal measurement of human values and a general theory of values (Schwartz et al., 2012).
Dr. Konty’s own work examines the role values play in criminal behavior by synthesizing the general theory of values into existing criminological theory (Konty 2005).
For more information, check out his LinkedIn profile.
Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., Ramos, A. Verkasalo, M., Lönnqvist, J.-E., Demirutku, K., Dirilen-Gumus, O., & Konty, M. (2012). Refining the Theory of Basic Individual Values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 663-688.
Konty, Mark (2005). Microanomie: The Cognitive Foundations of the Relationship Between Anomie and Deviance. Criminology, 43: 107-131.