Milton Rokeach’s 1973 work, The Nature of Human Values, established that underlying "core values" drive human attitudes and behavior, proposing that individuals hold a small, hierarchical set of values. The text introduced the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS), which measures 18 "terminal" (goals) and 18 "instrumental" (modes of conduct) values to predict social and personal actions. For more details, visit UCL Open - ScienceOpen. Rokeach Value Survey (RVS)
In the landscape of social psychology, few works have shaped how we understand human motivation quite like Milton Rokeach’s The Nature of Human Values. Published in 1973, this text moved beyond the simple question of "what do people like?" to the deeper inquiry of "what do people stand for?"
If you work in organizational behavior, marketing, political science, or psychology, this book is likely the bedrock upon which modern value surveys stand. rokeach m 1973 the nature of human values pdf
Rokeach emphasized that people do not hold values in isolation. Instead, they organize them into a hierarchy of importance. For Person A, “Salvation” might be the most important terminal value, while “Pleasure” is last. For Person B, the order is reversed. These hierarchies act as “standards for guiding action.”
Rokeach didn’t just create a survey; he conducted extensive research. Key findings include: Milton Rokeach’s 1973 work, The Nature of Human
Milton Rokeach (1918–1988) was a Polish-American social psychologist who taught at Michigan State University, the University of Western Ontario, and Washington State University. He is best known for his work on dogmatism (The Open and Closed Mind, 1960) and, of course, human values.
Rokeach was dissatisfied with how psychologists treated values. He observed that while everyone used the term “value,” no one had a unified theory. Some saw values as purely economic; others saw them as moral imperatives. Rokeach’s 1973 book was his magnum opus—a comprehensive attempt to define, categorize, and measure values in a way that was scientifically rigorous yet accessible. Book Spotlight: The Blueprint of Our Beliefs –
He passed away in 1988, but his intellectual legacy lives on through the Rokeach Value Survey, which remains one of the most widely used psychometric tools in the world.
Before diving into the PDF, it is crucial to understand the author. Milton Rokeach (1918–1988) was a Polish-American social psychologist renowned for his work on dogma, authority, and human beliefs. Unlike many of his contemporaries who focused on attitudes, Rokeach argued that values are the central cognitive structures that determine how people form attitudes and behaviors.
His 1973 publication, The Nature of Human Values, was the culmination of over a decade of empirical research. In this book, he formally defined what a value is, how values organize into systems, and why understanding values predicts social behavior better than situational variables alone.