Psychology of Values

Catalog description

Human beings value things. We find things important, meaningful, admirable, righteous, sacred, worth pursuing, and so on. Because so much of our lives involves this process of valuing things, it is a process that we should try to understand in a rigorous way. To that end, this course examines the psychological basis of human values and the processes involved in forming and expressing those values. Within that examination, it pays special attention to issues underlying the question of how people might navigate cross-cultural spaces, exploring how we might understand various values as universal or culturally-dependent, innate or learned, fixed or flexible, and so on. In doing so, it provides a vital foundation for discussions of values that occur in fields like philosophy, religious studies, politics, and public policy. 001315