By Dr Anthony Lewis
Anthony is Chair of Windsor Humanists. In this article, he writes that our values and beliefs can hijack our very being and drive us to do great things but also to disaster. The values we consciously justify are powerfully influenced by our primeval survival instincts, our surrounding cultures and belief systems, and our experiences. Can science help us understand the cognitive processes that underlie how we develop our own morality and what matters to us? Anthony investigates some recent scientific insights.
Our beliefs and values shape our whole lives, helping us to orient ourselves in reality. They deeply influence and guide our actions, conduct, and interactions with other human beings. They help us co-operate and bond with each other to improve our chances of surviving in the natural world. Values, whether explicit or unspoken, lie at the core of all human affairs and, as a central element of human consciousness, they are what makes us human. They sit at the centre of most belief systems such as religions, political movements, cultures, societies, governments and private organisations. They steer both our collective and individual behaviours. They can be enormously beneficial but also devastatingly harmful.
As Steven Pinker highlighted in The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (2011), humans are particularly violent as a species. Human aggression is nearly always driven by ideological fervour that dehumanises other human beings and provides a justification for their annihilation. As the physicist Steven Weinberg famously pointed out: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.” Our more primitive values can drive us to do horrific things to each other, but more constructive values can also steer us towards great acts of self sacrifice, kindness and generosity. The march of human progress has been about getting our primitive violent tendencies, especially male ones, under increasing control through cultural norms and the rule of law. This has been driven in large part by the development and adoption of more benevolent values about what is right and wrong.
The lifelong churn of our beliefs and values
Each of us holds a unique set of beliefs and values. As we live our lives, we are constantly having our own experiences, ideas and thoughts about reality, which we formalise into our beliefs about how to behave. As a social species, we are also influenced by our upbringing, education, existing ideologies, religions, belief systems and cultures. There is a constant churning of our ideas, beliefs and values, driven by many competing influences and our own assessments of what works for us individually and collectively. It is a continuous iterative process that is in constant flux, and it operates throughout our lives, as illustrated in this flow diagram.
Ideas, beliefs, values, morals, ethics, ideologies, worldviews and cultures are interconnected yet distinct concepts in the context of human behaviour. Together, they form a complex web that shapes how individuals and societies understand and act upon notions of right and wrong. Here’s a brief breakdown of each one:
Ideas are relatively informal thoughts and feelings about the world that are in constant flux as we live our lives. They can be both conscious and unconscious mental impressions about ourselves, about others or about the world around us. Examples include how someone appears, whether a place feels dangerous, opinions about whether to trust someone, or observations about someone’s behaviour or the natural world. As sentient creatures, our thoughts and ideas are a continual subjective backdrop to our lives and an unavoidable consequence of being alive.
Beliefs are ideas or convictions that form part of a more structured and enduring view of reality based on our ongoing lived experience, sometimes without needing empirical evidence. Examples include a belief in a higher power, belief that hard work leads to success, belief in equality, belief in human compassion, conclusions about others such as ‘men cannot be trusted’, or even deep-seated perceptions about one’s own self-worth and abilities. Beliefs can be hidden from our conscious awareness. These implicit beliefs can have a profound effect on our behaviour, and control our reactions to external events and form a large component of our personality as observed by others.
“A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses: it is an idea that possesses the mind.” Robert Bolt, author and director of the film The Mission
Values are beliefs that can be consciously formed into a set of core guiding principles or standards that are used to steer our behaviour and decision-making. Values are usually developed and formalised through dialogue with other human beings using what psychologists term the ‘Justification System’, which is explored in more detail later. There are an enormous number of values – the table lists 230 (click the image for a readable version). Values such as honesty, freedom, respect, fairness, deference to hierarchies, and loyalty appear to be deeply ingrained in nearly all of us and they directly shape our priorities at the personal and group level. For example, the Golden Rule – treat others as you want to be treated yourself – lies at the core of most of the world's religions and many non-religious belief systems such as humanism.
Morals are those personal values we use to distinguish right from wrong. They originate from our upbringing, our culture, and from our own personal experience. They include prohibitions and beliefs such as ‘do not lie’, ‘stealing from others is wrong’, and ‘do not sin’. In patriarchal societies, familial piety and obedience are a strong moral focus whereas in more egalitarian societies concepts such as the primacy of individual autonomy and freedom are considered more important.
Ethics are more organised frameworks of values about right or wrong, which are usually subject to collective debate. They are used to help resolve moral dilemmas at group level and in the professions. For example, concepts such as beneficence (‘do no harm’) and the principle of patient bodily autonomy are central to medical ethics. In the legal sphere, equality before the law is a core ethical value that tries to ensure fairness and justice for all.
Our morals and ethics can vary greatly across different cultural and professional contexts. In addition, our collective views about what is right and wrong often change in response to new technology. Radical technologies and scientific advances often force a re-think of existing values, morals and ethical frameworks – a process which can often be culturally disruptive.
Ideologies and worldviews are organised systems of ideas, beliefs and values that arise through public discourse over many years and which are often linked to political, economic, or social systems. Ideologies frequently aim to explain how society should operate or be structured. Examples include liberal democracy, Marxism, fascism, theocracy, and nationalism. Some provide a positive vision for the future for human society and how to improve things whereas the more extreme and autocratic ideologies often lead us to disaster. (I explored worldviews in more detail in the February 2024 edition of Humanistically Speaking When Worldviews Collide and Make us Do Terrible Things.)
Cultures are shaped by all the above elements in society and encompass the full range of human affairs from language, religion, art, traditions, technological innovation, education and intellectual pursuits, to norms of behaviour and community organisations. Cultures are dynamic and in constant flux. They evolve slowly over time as societies progress. Examples include American culture, Japanese culture, corporate culture, youth culture, and even social media culture.
It's clear from the above discussion that human behaviour is inextricably linked to our underlying values and beliefs at multiple individual and group levels. Much of the political polarisation and conflict we see across the world is driven by cultural differences where there is a clash between underlying values and competing worldviews. Examples include the Russo-Ukraine war, the partition of Korea, and the many conflicts driven by extreme Islamist ideologies. In our globalised world, violent clashes between societies, and ‘culture wars’ within them, can devastate social cohesion and peaceful co-existence. For example, when authoritarian zealots driven by righteous ideological fervour impose their intolerant values on a society, devastating violence is never far away. In such situations, the voice of the ‘peaceful majority’ often goes unheard.
World Values Survey
It's important, therefore, to develop a better understanding of how our values can so powerfully drive human behaviour for both good and evil ends. This is an active area of psychological and sociological research. Surprisingly, no single accepted framework has yet been established. Different institutions use a variety of sociological and psychological models. For example, the World Values Survey uses the Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map that charts qualitative measures of secular and traditional values against levels of self-expression, based on regular worldwide surveys of attitudes. Scientists have also begun to investigate the cognitive processes that underlie the development of our values and beliefs. What follows is a summary of some of the ongoing research.
Our ‘tripartite’ cognitive streams
Scientists are also trying to understand how our evolved cognitive processes influence the formation of our values and cultures. Evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists and psychiatrists are developing various approaches, using recent advances in neuroscience and related sciences, that try to understand the cognitive processes that drive the formation of our values and beliefs. Two notable examples are Professor Gregg Henriques, an American psychologist at James Madison University, and Professor Craig Shealy, Executive Director of the International Beliefs and Values Institute at Western Washington University. The diagram is a simplified overview of the key elements based on their ongoing research (links to their websites are provided below). Human behaviour is recognised to be driven by three main streams of cognitive processing as represented in the diagram. Taking each in turn from bottom to top:
1. Experiential Self
As embodied beings, our experiences of reality are mediated through our senses and autonomic systems. Our reactions are often instinctual, such as the fight, flight or freeze responses to immediate external threats. Our emotional systems and feelings have deep-seated connections to our bodies and our physical brains, as described by psychologist Professor Steve Peters in his popular book The Chimp Paradox (2012). Many of these primal thoughts and beliefs about external reality sit outside our immediate conscious awareness, but they wield powerful control over our behaviour. For example, primeval imperatives such as to protect, survive, procreate and to develop effective social bonds, are strong survival instincts in all of us. The Freudian Filter (illustrated as the green curved line in the diagram) controls how much conscious awareness we have of these deep-seated drives and related beliefs about the world around us. Therapy, meditation, and other forms of contemplation are all methods that can be used to ‘tap into’, and become more attuned to, our individual ‘unspoken’ elemental drives and stances.
“.... the ‘public persona’ that we present to the world is a heavily filtered version of our ‘private self’....”
2. Private Self and Public Self
Our private self and public self are formed by conscious thought processes which are predominantly language-based. They have been shown to be functionally organised into systems of justification which determine what is justifiable and what is not. We ‘build’ opinions and beliefs about what is factual, what we think could be true and what we think ‘ought’ to be. From such internal deliberations, and interactions with others, we develop our own values, personal morality, and life purpose. Social exchange, parents, the surrounding culture, and existing ideologies and worldviews (the top cognitive stream on the diagram) also have a powerful influence on these private deliberations (see below). Our internal ‘private narrator’ then steers our observable behaviour, guiding our social interactions, personal conduct and outward demeanour. However, this ‘public persona’ that we present to the world is a heavily-filtered version of our ‘private self’. The version of our self that we present to the world is shaped by powerful emotional desires ‘to fit in’ with group imperatives and avoid social ostracism. This is called the Rogerian Filter (after the US psychologist Carl Rogers) and it is shown as a blue vertical line on the diagram, between the Private Self and Public Self boxes. Our reticence to publicly share our innermost perspectives can help to explain why, during the recent US election, opinion polls significantly underestimated Donald Trump's true support. The Rogerian Filter may explain the phenomenon of the ‘Shy Trump Voter’.
3. Group Interactions
Through complex dialogical processes of debate, rhetoric, argument, reasoning and social exchange, humanity has developed a large number of different, and often competing, sets of belief systems and worldviews. Each is based on an ‘agreed’ subset of values and ethical frameworks. At group and society levels, this ‘justification process’ defines what constitutes moral and acceptable behaviour in terms of social norms, relationships, conduct, and community interactions, across all state and private institutions. Many different systems have been trialled throughout our history, often with tragic consequences. For example, communism and Marxism, despite their stated good intentions, have often been disastrous for those societies where they have been implemented. As social beings, our personal morality and daily behaviour is powerfully constrained by group cultures, belief systems and societal norms. The impact of these varies, depending on where we direct our attention. This focus is controlled by our upbringing, education, ideological indoctrination, informal social interactions, political activity, and through social media and private study. This ‘attention filter’ is the orange line illustrated on the diagram. Finally, all belief systems and ethical frameworks, by necessity, incorporate compromises, contradictions and inconsistencies that often lead to unintended consequences. These negative aspects are often ignored, or deliberately underplayed by advocates. Also, in some belief systems there can be unstated implicit objectives that are cynically denied, or hidden by deliberate deception, by their proponents. These negative aspects are often ‘hidden’ behind what is termed an ‘Objectivity Filter’ which is illustrated on the diagram by the red vertical line.
“History teaches us that no single worldview, political system or ethical framework is perfect given the complexity of reality...”
These three cognitive streams are central to the functioning of human society at both individual and group levels. Our beliefs and values lie at the very heart of why we all do what we do and how we live our lives. Individual behaviour is heavily influenced by our primeval instincts but also constrained by surrounding cultures and belief systems. Professor Greg Henriques has concluded that 'the formal policies of all organisations are mediated by beliefs and values that may be highly subjective and unconscious, rather than just, equitable and rational'. History teaches us that no single worldview, political system or ethical framework is perfect, given the complexity of reality and human social interactions. For me, it is clear that as a species we still have a long way to go before we have an agreed set of overarching values that can, without going to war, reconcile our differences in a multipolar world. Perhaps science can eventually help us by developing a better understanding of the cognitive processes that underlie how we develop our own morality and values.
Final thoughts
Our values and beliefs can hijack our very being, driving us to do great things but also to destruction and alienation. I believe that Enlightenment secular values, as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and expressed succinctly in the five official British Values, already represent an agreed set of global values. Who can argue with the need for more democracy, the importance of the rule of law, the primacy of individual liberty, and the need for all of us to treat each other with mutual respect and tolerance?
Useful links
Humanistically Speaking - When Worldviews Collide and Make us Do Terrible Things Feb 2024
Professor Greg Henriques James Madison University Making Sense of Beliefs and Values Psychology Today 2016 based on his Justification Systems Theory
Core Values Image from The Happiness Planner by Scott Jeffrey
Steven Pinker 2012 The Better Angels of Our Nature - Lecture on Youtube
Professor Craig N Shealy Western Washington University - Into the Beviverse
The Chimp Paradox: How our Impulses and Emotions Determine Success and Happiness and How We Can Control Them Professor Steve Peters 2012
World Values Survey Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights - An Overview Humanistically Speaking Jan 2023
The 5 British Values
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