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Psychology and Communication | 139

In the remainder of this chapter we will examine how values, beliefs,
and attitudes—the ingredients of a person’s assumptive system—are formed,
held, and changed through interpersonal communication.

values
Values are fairly enduring conceptions of the nature of good and bad, of
the relative worth you attribute to the things, people, and events of your
lives. Values are usually embodied in complex moral or religious systems
that are found in all cultures and societies, from the most ‘primitive’ to the most
complex and industrialized. Values define for people the parameters of their
actions. They indicate to those who share them what is desirable, to that
degree it is desirable, and therefore what one should strive for. They also
provide people with a guidance system which is supposed to enable them to
choose the ‘right’ alternative when several courses of action are possible.
Words you use in making your value judgments, such as ‘bad’, ‘good’,
‘moral’, ‘immoral’, do not stand for any quality of the object or people you
apply them to. Value judgments, those are in turn applied by human beings
to the objects. They are not ‘in’ the objects. Something is good to a particular
individual or group only because it is defined as good.
Values grow out of a complex interaction between basic needs and the
specificity of a given environment. For example, all humans need to eat in
order to survive, but they do not all value the same foods. In America beef is
commonly eaten, while in India the sacred cow must not be touched. What
is valued in a particular area, a region, or country is partly determined by the
availability of certain foods. Values thus differ from place to place because of
the variety of ways specific needs can be fulfilled.
What people value at a given time is based on the needs they try to ful-
fill at that particular time. The indictment of ‘materialism’ directed as the
generation who lived through the great depression in the United States, by
a generation who lived mostly in post World War II affluence, may reflect a
change of need levels. Once people know a certain level of material affluence
which satisfies physiological and safety needs, they can reject what they no
longer need, since it fails to fulfill the next need level, which has become
more prominent.

Beliefs
Beliefs represent the way people view their environment. Beliefs are char-
acterized by a true-false continuum and probability scale. The existence of
ghosts, for example, may be closer to the ‘false’ end of the continuum for
some people than for others. That humans evolved from apes is still debated
by many who place Darwin’s theory of evolution closer to the ‘false’ end of the

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