Rokeach M. -1973-. The Nature Of Human Values. New York Free [repack] Press -

Strengths

To understand Rokeach’s contribution, one must look at how he isolated values from other cognitive structures:

These are the ultimate goals we want to achieve in our lifetime. They are the destinations . Rokeach identified 18 terminal values, including:

Limitations and Critiques

Before Rokeach’s groundbreaking research, the study of human values was fragmented, highly subjective, and often conflated with attitudes or opinions. Rokeach provided the scientific community with a rigorous, empirical framework to define, measure, and analyze values. Decades after its publication, this text remains a cornerstone of sociology, political psychology, consumer behavior, and cross-cultural studies. The Core Thesis: Values as the Foundation of the Self Rokeach provided the scientific community with a rigorous,

Before Rokeach, the term "value" was used loosely and inconsistently. Philosophers debated ethics; sociologists spoke of norms; psychologists treated values as mere attitudes or needs. There was no shared operational definition. A researcher might define a value as "something desirable," while another might call it "a specific belief about how to behave."

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They contain cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements that influence how we judge actions.

Consider two of his terminal values:

💡 Rokeach showed that to understand attitudes, ideology, or social change, you must first understand value priorities . Fifty years later, his framework remains foundational for researchers and practitioners alike.

This definition highlights several critical attributes of human values:

Comparisons between Rokeach's model and later models like Schwartz's Value Theory.

To measure these concepts, Rokeach developed the , a methodology that required participants to rank 18 terminal values and 18 instrumental values in order of importance. When someone says

To resolve this dissonance, they often changed their value ranking. And crucially, when the value ranking changed, so did attitudes and behaviors weeks later. This proved Rokeach’s central thesis: . If you want to change society, you don’t just pass laws; you engage in value education.

These represent the "means" or preferred behaviors used to achieve terminal goals.

When someone says, "I want to find meaning," or "I want to be rich," they are expressing a terminal value.