Carolina Wilmington. We thank Philip Quinlan for his invaluable advice and encouraging words during the long review process. We also thank the members of the Cohen Cognition and Perception Laboratory for their assistance and support. The current work received no funding. There are no real or potential conflicts of interest that may impact the current research. Portions of this research were presented at the 57 th and 59 th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2017) and the North Carolina Cognition Group (2018).

Here, we proposed Subjective Values Theory, a theory of the perception of value, andhow that perception drives preferential choice. Utility Theory, Prospect Theory, and traditional implementations of sequential sampling theory derive value from observers’ preferential choices. Subjective Values Theory goes beyond these theories by (a) precisely defining and measuring value independent of preferential choice, and (b) using these independent measurements of value to a priori predict preferential choice. We instantiate the decision mechanism proposed by Subjective Values Theory in a new Robust Random Walk (RRW) procedure. We evaluate the validity of Subjective Values Theory and the RRW in six experiments that measure the value of human lives and predict participants’ RTs and preferential choices in complex social decisions. In these experiments, we demonstrate that the process of perceiving Psychological Value is the same for objects and human lives, social status influences the perceived Psychological Value of a human life, and quantity has little or no influence on the perceived Psychological Value of human lives or objects. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to decision theory, behavioral economics, and the psychology of morality.