engleski

Human Values and General Beliefs about the World: Evidence from a Study with Croatian Students

Drawing upon research on the functional theory of values (Gouveia, 1998, 2003, 2013), this study aimed at exploring the relationships between basic human values and general beliefs people hold about the world. Six basic values or values subfunctions were assessed with specific marker values forming the Basic Values Survey (Gouveia, 2003): excitement, promotion, suprapersonal, existence, interactive and normative values. The Social Axioms Survey (Leung et al., 2002) was used to assess five general beliefs about the world, including cynicism, reward for application, fate control, religiosity, and social complexity. The data were collected among the students from the University of Zadar, Croatia. The overall pattern of the results indicates a small overlap between values and social axioms. In addition to values and beliefs tapping the same realm (e.g., religiosity), significant correlations were observed primarily for the faith control dimension of social axioms. The discussion will center on the relative independence of the human values and general beliefs about the world, as well as on the bearings that the particular knowledge or representation about the world may have for the internal motivations to achieve various goals, and vice versa.

Values; functional theory; social axioms

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