The study of social values has its origins in the study of both cross cultural and within cultural differences in latent or manifest definitions of the right social order to achieve the good life. To this extent, the social scientific literature is replete with references to them. Yet, researchers either use the term values Social values are often used interchangeably with that of attitudes or treated as a post‐hoc explanatory concept. When values are the focal research point, such endeavours predominantly depart from universal and reductionist understandings of their functions, meanings and structures. Through tracing the roots of key theoretical and empirical investigations in values, originating in the work of Charles Morris, Gordon Allport, Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, Milton Rokeach and Shalom Schwartz, we reveal the common as well as the different tenets underpinning their work. It will be shown that these accounts have lost sight of the importance of plurality and context. We claim that a renewed program of research in values is needed, which should be characterised by methodological pluralism in order to investigate a) value plurality, b) value specificity and c) values as properties and as processes.

Psychological life is subject to the influence of a constructed and potentially reconstituted past, as well as to future anticipated outcomes and expectations. Human behaviour occurs along a temporal trajectory that marks the projects individuals adopt in their quests of human action. Explanations of social behaviour are limited insofar as they exclude a historical concern with human purpose. In this paper, we draw on Bartlett's notion of collective remembering to argue that manifest social relations are rooted in past events that give present behaviours meaning and justification. We further propose an epidemiological time-series framework for social representations, that are conceptualised as evolving over time and that are subject to a 'ratchet effect' that perpetuates meaning in a collective. We argue that understanding forms of social behaviour that draw on lay explanations of social relations requires a deconstructive effort that maps the evolutionary trajectory of a representational project in terms of its adaptation over time. We go on to illustrate our proposal visiting data that emerged in an inquiry investigating Maltese immigrants' perspectives towards their countries of settlement and origin. This data reveals an assimilationist acculturation preference amongst the Maltese in Britain that seems incongruous with the current climate of European integration and Maltese communities in other countries around the world. We demonstrate that a historical concern with regard to this apparent behaviour helps explain how Maltese immigrants to Britain opt for certain forms of intercultural relations than others that are normally preferable. We demonstrate that these preferences rely on an evolved justification of the Maltese getting by with foreign rulers that other scholars have traced back to the medieval practice of chivalry.

Since its inception, psychology has struggled with issues of conceptualization and operationalization of social-psychological phenomena. The study of social values and points of view has been prone to such difficulties, despite a predominant concern of qualitative distinctions in the variability of both of these phenomena across different individuals and social groups. And while interest in both traces a common origin in Rokeach's studies of narrow mindedness, the study of both phenomena has since proceeded apace. In this study, we posit a renewed reconciliation between the two that is best served through a social-psychological model of points of view in terms of the values that inspire them. We draw on critical linguistics to propose a theoretical and methodological framework that can aid a systematic study of value structures as they take different forms and meanings through particular types of points of view. In five stages of qualitative analysis, the model deconstructs utterances into distinct terms that reveal a predominant perspective-taking style that can be utilized towards the categorization of different points of view, in terms of values that imbue them and that serve to provide them with a coherent angle of constructing a particular narrative.

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