The psychology of ultimate values: A computational perspective

Abstract

Ultimate values can be defined as abstract rules or goals transcending specific contexts and defining the utmost purposes of existence. Although the literature about human values is vast, several fundamental questions about ultimate values remain open. What are the processes responsible for the formation of ultimate values? What is the impact of inbuilt affective processes and of learning, respectively? Regarding learning, what is the role of society? Empirical evidence shows dramatic variability in ultimate values pursued by different people. Why? These open questions suggest that a precise picture of ultimate values is lacking. This paper offers a computational theory of ultimate values. The key idea is that our brain represents values along a hierarchy where ultimate values are built upon experiences with inherent affective nature (basic values). Based on these representations, the proposal is that the brain infers the rules that foster basic values in a variety of contexts. These would become ultimate values and drive human behaviour independent of the ongoing context. We discuss how the theory can contribute to understanding a variety of aspects of human values, including morality, to what degree values are innate or culturally determined, and how values shape and are shaped by society.

Political Extremism and a Generalized Propensity to Discriminate Among Values

“…These judgments are the focus of a large body of research asking people to rate the importance of certain values in their life (e.g., Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz, 1992). The VDT proposes that a person's judgment about a value depends on an individual inclination toward that value, which in turn might derive from factors such as underlying personality traits (e.g., an anxious personality might disqualify values such as pursuing novelty and change; Bilsky & Schwartz, 1994; Roccas et al, 2002), experiences about the consequences of pursuing certain values (e.g., the pleasure experienced by pursuing wealth, or the satisfaction experienced when helping others; Rigoli, 2021a), and judgments expressed by other people or by the media (Schwartz, 2016). More formally, the VDT proposes that for each value V , an individual's inclination, , toward this value is simply captured by a real number, where a positive number indicates a value to be pursued and a negative number a value to be avoided (overall, we assume that each person will attribute a positive INC to some values and a negative INC to other values, with an average of zero).…”

Prisoner of the present: Borderline personality and a tendency to overweight cues during Bayesian inference.

“…What does this imply for behavior? Let us assume that (i) a person performs actions according to the life context inferred as the most likely (e.g., a person acts cooperatively if the Cooperation life context is judged as the most likely, and she acts defensively if the Betrayal life context is judged as the most likely) and that (ii) the vigor of actions increases as entropy decreases (i.e., when confidence about the life context increases; Rigoli, 2021). Being linked with lower entropy, extreme inferences as those expressed by the BP agent imply higher action vigor.…”