America's crisis of values Baker, Wayne E; Baker, Wayne E
2013., 20131031, 2013, 2004, 2006-01-01, 20050101
eBook
Is America bitterly divided? Has America lost its traditional values? Many politicians and religious leaders believe so, as do the majority of Americans, based on public opinion polls taken over the ...past several years. But is this crisis of values real?
This book explores the moral terrain of America today, analyzing the widely held perception that the nation is in moral decline. It looks at the question from a variety of angles, examining traditional values, secular values, religious values, family values, economic values, and others. Using unique data from the World Values Surveys, the largest systematic attempt ever made to document attitudes, values, and beliefs around the world, this book systematically evaluates the perceived crisis of values by comparing America's values with those of over 60 other nations.
The results are surprising. The evidence shows overwhelmingly that America has not lost its traditional values, that the nation compares favorably with most other societies, and that the culture war is largely a myth.
The gap between reality and perception does not represent mass ignorance of the facts or an overblown moral panic, Baker contends. Rather, the widespread perception of a crisis of values is a real and legitimate interpretation of life in a society that is in the middle of a fundamental transformation and that contains growing cultural contradictions. Instead of posing a problem, the author argues, this crisis rhetoric serves the valuable social function of reminding us of what it means to be American. As such, it preserves the ideological foundation of the nation.
Saving the modern soul Illouz, Eva; Illouz, Eva
2008., 20080203, 2008, 2008-03-04, 20080101
eBook
The language of psychology is all-pervasive in American culture--from The Sopranos to Oprah, from the abundance of self-help books to the private consulting room, and from the support group to the ...magazine advice column. Saving the Modern Soul examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz plumbs today's particular cultural moment to understand how and why psychology has secured its place at the core of modern identity. She examines a wide range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma.
The Romantic Crowd Fairclough, Mary
01/2013, Volume:
v.Series Number 97
eBook
In the long eighteenth century, sympathy was understood not just as an emotional bond, but also as a physiological force, through which disruption in one part of the body produces instantaneous ...disruption in another. Building on this theory, Romantic writers explored sympathy as a disruptive social phenomenon, which functioned to spread disorder between individuals and even across nations like a 'contagion'. It thus accounted for the instinctive behaviour of people swept up in a crowd. During this era sympathy assumed a controversial political significance, as it came to be associated with both riotous political protest and the diffusion of information through the press. Mary Fairclough reads Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, John Thelwall, William Hazlitt and Thomas De Quincey alongside contemporary political, medical and philosophical discourse. Many of their central questions about crowd behaviour still remain to be answered by the modern discourse of collective psychology.
The ideas of relational values and social values are gaining prominence in sustainability science. Here, we ask: how well do these value conceptions resonate with one Indigenous worldview? The ...relational values concept broadens conceptions of values beyond instrumental and intrinsic values to encompass preferences and principles about human relationships that involve more-than-humans. The social values concept, an umbrella idea, captures a plurality of values related to society and the common good. After a general description of these two concepts as expressed in the Western peer-reviewed literature, we adopt the lens of relational values to engage with decades of scholarly work and millennia of wisdom based on Indigenous Hawaiian worldviews. We describe five long-standing Hawaiian values that embody notions of appropriate relationships, including human–ecosystem relationships: pono (~ righteousness, balance); hoʻomana (~ creating spirituality); mālama (~ care); kuleana (~ right, responsibility); aloha (~ love, connection). We find that all five resonate deeply with, and help to enrich, relational value concepts. We then draw on these Hawaiian values to discuss differences between relational values and social values frameworks; though both concepts add useful elements to the discourse about values, the relational values concept may be particularly well positioned to represent elements often important to indigenous worldviews—elements such as reciprocity, balance, and extension of “society” beyond human beings. As global processes (e.g., IPBES) commit to better reflecting Indigenous and local knowledge and embrace diverse value concepts as (purported) avenues toward representing values held by diverse communities, our findings suggest that relational values offer special promise and a crucial contribution.
Concerning the dispositional determinants of prosocial behavior and cooperation, work based on the classic 5 personality factors, and especially Agreeableness, has turned out somewhat inconsistent. A ...clearer picture has emerged from consideration of the HEXACO model of personality-though supported entirely by hypothetical behavior as criterion, so far. Thus, in 2 studies and a reanalysis, we investigated "actual behavior" in the form of individually and socially consequential distribution decisions. As expected, HEXACO Honesty-Humility consistently predicted prosocial behavior, including a theory-consistent pattern on the facet level. Importantly, this pattern might explain why five-factor Agreeableness has only sometimes been found to account for prosocial behavior. Indeed, further results indicate that five-factor Agreeableness comprises some aspects that are predictive of prosocial behavior-aspects well covered by HEXACO Honesty-Humility-but also others that play no role for this criterion. As such, the links between five-factor Agreeableness and prosocial behavior are well-covered by HEXACO Honesty-Humility, but not vice versa. Taken together, these findings hint that especially HEXACO Honesty-Humility (and certain aspects of five-factor Agreeableness) account for prosocial behavior-thus explaining previous inconsistencies and providing a more nuanced understanding of the links between basic personality and prosocial or cooperative behavior.
This volume is driven by the conviction that the key to the establishment of stable liberal democracy anywhere in the world and, in this case, in Kosovo lies in the completion of three interrelated ...tasks: first, the creation of effective political institutions, based on the principle of the separation of powers (including the independence of the judiciary); second, the promotion of the rule of law; and, third, the promotion of civic values, including tolerance or ethnic/religious/sexual minorities, trust, and respect for the harm principle. In fact, there are problems across all three measures, including with judicial independence, with the rule of law, and with civic values. On the last of these, research findings show that the citizens of Kosovo rank extremely low on trust of other citizens, low on engagement in social organizations, and tolerance of gays, lesbians, and atheists, but high on trust in the political institutions of their country and in pride of their newly independent state.
There is mounting evidence that a new set of principles is required to form and express, rather than capture, social values for sustainability. This is because many policy questions are sufficiently ...complex that individual people do not—possible cannot—hold fully pre-formed values with respect to them. Thus, when people are faced with such issues, a process is required to enable them collectively to form and express a bespoke set of values that are shared. This process of shared social value formation can be understood as normative, to the extent that those involved participate in a process of ascribing values to others. This invites us to reconsider the role of normative economics, because it implies that both procedural and distributive justice is unlikely to be achieved through conventional economic logic and processes. The paper argues that the theoretical traditions that have juxtaposed positive and normative economics have been lost, such that rational choice has been progressively limited to the maximisation of economic surplus. This may be acceptable for some policy areas where the state and the individual dominate. However, the formation of social values for sustainability demands a composite approach that enables individuals to work together to form values with respect to issues about which they may have little immediate reference. The paper identifies five principles for establishing normative shared social values, relating to social units of analysis, procedural and distributive justice, dialectical decision-making and the development of social value transfer as a means of relating the shared social values formed and expressed in one context with those appropriate for a related context. The paper concludes with an agenda for research that can test, develop and refine the five principles for normative deliberated social values for sustainability.
Four studies tested whether cultural values moderate the content of gender stereotypes, such that male stereotypes more closely align with core cultural values (specifically, individualism vs. ...collectivism) than do female stereotypes. In Studies 1 and 2, using different measures, Americans rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas Koreans rated men as more collectivistic than women. In Study 3, bicultural Korean Americans who completed a survey in English about American targets rated men as less collectivistic than women, whereas those who completed the survey in Korean about Korean targets did not, demonstrating how cultural frames influence gender stereotype content. Study 4 established generalizability by reanalyzing Williams and Best's (1990) cross-national gender stereotype data across 26 nations. National individualism-collectivism scores predicted viewing collectivistic traits as more-and individualistic traits as less-stereotypically masculine. Taken together, these data offer support for the cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis, qualifying past conclusions about the universality of gender stereotype content.
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