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Beliefs and values – what are they?
They are the result of the imbrication of emotions and symbolic representations that guide our decision-making process and, ultimately, our behavior.
A large part of human behavior, and especially those that are conscious, are guided by our beliefs and values. Whether it’s a movement, a speech, a thought or a lie, it’s all guided by what we believe.
But what does it mean, and how do values and beliefs guide our behavior?
There are several theories that try to explain this theme. I will make a brief explanation of what is most current:
During our development process, even as children, we build a symbolic system that helps us understand the world and act in it.
This symbolic system is based on our language and, during the process of human development, it mixes (imbricates, it is the most adequate and technical verbal form) with our emotions.
To build it, we use certain sources that can be our parents, our family members, teachers, the communities we participate in, the written messages we have access to, people who offer us models of life and any type of norm or rule, among many other sources.
From this set of [models of] symbols/emotions, we exercise the capacity to consciously think and make our own decisions.
Collective culture and personal culture
In scientific language, the symbolic set made available to us by society is the Collective Culture and the “versions” that each individual builds are the Personal Culture. It is important to say that a person can be an intermediary of the Collective Culture when teaching, for example, social rules.
When someone gives a personal interpretation of some social rule, it exemplifies how, in a Personal Culture, this person reconstructed the symbolic messages coming from the Collective Culture, in a personalized way.
Autonomy and culture
In this context, an autonomous person is one who, from all these sources, builds a personal normative system that helps them to think, make their decisions and guides all their behaviors. The core of this normative system is our values, which consist of meanings that are intensely woven into our emotions.
For this reason, a person guided by their values to respect life, will find it very difficult to kill someone, even if in self-defense.
An extreme historical example was the case of Christian martyrs, who loved God more than their own lives. Their values, intensely oriented towards God, led them to sacrifice their own lives, when the Romans exterminated them in their thousands by bonfires, crucifixion or in the games of the Coliseum. When asked about their faith, they would rather die than deny it.
Individual beliefs and values are, then, the criteria that regulate our decisions and that, in the final analysis, guide the person towards certain behaviors.
In short, this is how the normative system that guides our behavior works.
To learn more, you can read Jaan Valsiner’s book: Culture in Minds and Societies