Cultural Values

Concept Psychology Synonym

Credited to Tom Crompton, Shalom Schwartz

Summary

Cultural values are what a society treats as important and so teaches its members to care about, mostly without their noticing. Campaigners took up the term through ‘Common Cause’, a 2010 report written by Tom Crompton for WWF-UK. It builds on the psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s finding that values cluster in similar ways across cultures. Some sit together easily; others pull against each other, as ‘intrinsic’ values like community do against ‘extrinsic’ ones like wealth and status.

Crompton argues that such values work “beyond conscious awareness” and are “shaped in important part as a result of collective decisions about how society is organised”: by policies and institutions as well as messages.

Rationale

Part 2’s footnote lists ‘core values’ among other names for this territory. One of us, Ruth Taylor, came to this inquiry from Common Cause Foundation, whose founding report holds that no policy is value-neutral: institutions teach, as do stories.

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✳ This definition was drafted with AI assistance from the cited source, and reviewed before publishing. See Rights.

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