Worldviews and the role of social values that underlie them

Abstract

In today’s ideologically diverse world, it is pertinent to have a better understanding of how our beliefs of the social world shape our thinking and behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the key social values that underlie particular sets of beliefs, referred to here as worldviews. Worldviews encompass beliefs that shape one’s outlook on life and are, therefore, instrumental in providing meaning to one’s reality and one’s understanding as to how one fits in it. They can be classified into five unique types, namely, Localised, Orthodox, Pragmatist, Reward, and Survivor. In this paper we start by proposing a theoretical relationship between this five-factor typology and social values. Following this, we present findings that show that worldviews may be mapped onto the two higher order value dimensions of Openness to Change versus Conservation, and Self-transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. We conclude by outlining the implications that these findings have on understanding individual cognition and society in general.