Personality is a complex, multi-layered formation that has its own hierarchy. In Russian psychology, the highest level of personality structure is called orientation. This is a system of values, beliefs and attitudes that are formed during life. They largely guide a person’s activities and determine his attitude towards the world, himself and other people.
Values, their types and hierarchy
Everything in our life has its own value, and we are talking here not only about material or monetary terms. But the value of objects and phenomena is different. There are things that are of fundamental importance, and there are those that we can easily abandon in favor of others that are more significant and valuable. This value system largely determines our life choices, our careers, hobbies, principles, and relationships with others.
Types of values
In psychology, values mean objects, phenomena, ideals, etc. that are significant for a person. Each of us has such significant things in different areas of life, and their content is also different. There are 3 types of values.
Material values
These include real objects of the surrounding world that are necessary for a person to feel comfortable. Some of them are vital, for example, clothing, housing, food. And others can be classified as luxury or increased comfort items - cars, household appliances, smartphones, jewelry, accessories, etc. A person can do without them, but for many these things are a symbol of well-being, and owning them is considered prestigious. That is, these things have a transitory value, which is determined either by fashion or by the subjective preferences of a person.
Spiritual values
They are often contrasted with material ones and are considered more sublime and significant for humans and humanity as a whole. However, this is not always the case. Spiritual values are a product of human consciousness, and their significance is determined primarily by cultural traditions, moral norms, ideological principles, etc. You must agree that the spiritual values of the Middle Ages were not always of a sublime nature, and not all of them are significant for modern man .
There are, of course, universal human values that are important in any society and in any historical era. These include freedom, family, love, friendship, loyalty and devotion, and a sense of duty.
From the point of view of human evolution, spiritual values were formed later than material ones and include several types:
- life values associated with universal human norms and of fundamental importance for people’s lives: love, faith, freedom, family, health, protection of offspring, etc.;
- moral values reflect a person’s attitude to the basic categories of morality: honesty and fidelity, humanism and compassion, duty and respect;
- aesthetic values, perhaps the youngest of all types, associated with aesthetic experiences, such as a sense of beauty, enjoyment of form, sound, color, etc.; aesthetic values are determined by cultural traditions.
Speaking about the superiority of spiritual values over material ones, we should not forget about their subjective, individual nature. So, perhaps, for one person, fidelity to duty will be a significant value, but for another it will have no meaning at all. Some will be faithful to the chosen principles of humanism, while others will promote unprincipledness and misanthropy.
Social values
This type of values is associated with interpersonal relationships and a person’s idea of the role of society and his place in it. Social values include the following:
- belonging to a particular social group;
- circle of friends;
- Friends;
- communication skills;
- political views and beliefs;
- social status in the hierarchy of interpersonal relationships.
Man is part of society, and the normal life of even the most withdrawn and unsociable individual is impossible outside of society. Therefore, social values are objective and significant for any person, even if he is not always aware of it.
Terminal and instrumental values
In psychology, these two types of values were described by M. Rokeach (USA), the author of a well-known method of psychological diagnostics of a person’s value orientations.
Terminal values are understood as basic values that are significant in themselves. These include spiritual and social values, and vitally important material ones, for example, friendship, beauty, education, career, family, creativity, health, freedom, comfort, etc. Sometimes terminal values are compared with the goals of life that one sets for one’s life. yourself as a person. This is what we strive for.
Instrumental values, as the name suggests, are tools for achieving life goals. Terminal values include, first of all, personality traits, for example, perseverance, hard work, responsibility, creativity, curiosity, will, tolerance, open-mindedness, etc. This is what we value in other people and in ourselves, what we believe necessary to develop.
Hierarchy of values
Since values have different weights and different significance, in psychology it is customary to talk about a hierarchy of values. It can be presented in the form of a pyramid of several steps or levels, and the structure of the pyramid is different for each person.
For some, the pinnacle will be success, career, material well-being, expressed in a car of a particular brand or penthouse. And another person will have love and a happy family at the top of the hierarchy of values. It is believed that spiritual values are more important and significant than material ones, but not everyone has them at the upper levels of the pyramid.
No less important is what values underlie our lives and form the basis of the hierarchy. Some people consider family to be such a solid foundation, others consider material wealth, while others consider man as the measure of all things at the base of the pyramid.
Development of the theory
At the early stage of its study, it was believed that an attitude in psychology is one of the forms of nervous activity that is not conscious to a person. This opinion existed for quite a long time. The psychology of the attitude of D. N. Uznadze also adhered to it. This theory continued to develop in this direction. The attitude in domestic psychology was considered by the Georgian school, which included followers and students of Dmitry Nikolaevich Uznadze. This scientist not only created the theory of the phenomenon under consideration, but also organized the development of this problem.
Uznadze explained the phenomenon of perception as a reflection of reality and the behavior of a living being. This can be briefly explained as follows. Attitudes occupy the most important place in the life of every person. They influence the perception of phenomena and objects, thinking, as well as the will of a person. Before the slightest movement of the soul takes place, it will necessarily be preceded by a certain attitude. And then the act of will, perception and cognition will certainly be influenced by a person’s life experience, the goal or mood set by him. However, errors cannot be excluded. This was made possible by the experimental foundations of attitude psychology. This is evidenced, for example, by the experiment with balls. The person was asked to estimate the size of these objects. And if at first he was shown balls of different sizes 10-15 times, then in his mind there was an opinion that they must be different. After the researcher offered him the same objects, the reaction did not change. The person continued to perceive the balls as different.
Over time, it became obvious that all the patterns and facts that were considered by the attitude theory are general psychological in nature. In this regard, this direction began to claim the status of a general psychological concept.
Personal Beliefs
In psychology, beliefs are understood as a person’s system of views on the world and his place in it, on relationships with other people and attitude to business. Beliefs are formed throughout an individual's life under the influence of the social environment and personal experience.
The dominant role is played by the social factor; therefore, the foundations of beliefs are laid in our consciousness by society. The authority of the source and the faith factor are of great importance. Children trust their parents and teachers; they are authorities for them, and therefore have a decisive influence on the formation of their worldview. And adults believe in politicians (although they don’t always admit it), the media, authoritative friends and books. It is these sources that have the most noticeable influence on a person’s beliefs.
However, it is also impossible to call a person a passive object of social influence. He passes through himself and processes any information, correlates it with existing experience and significant values. Therefore, we can say that beliefs are a kind of fusion of the social and the individual.
Beliefs play an important role in a person's life. They largely determine his social position and personality orientation. Beliefs are also closely related to life goals and attitudes.
How to replace negative experiences with positive beliefs
All this, of course, is good - an attentive reader might say - but how, in fact, in real life can you replace your negative experiences with positive beliefs? After all, it is impossible to redo the foundation of a house without destroying the house itself.
Of course this is correct. But even if the plans for an existing house have changed, no one forbids building a new one in accordance with their desires and needs.
There are many facts confirming the possibility of building a new, more spacious house on the site of an old one without destroying it. So, a box of a new building is erected around the old one on a new foundation, the necessary finishing work is carried out, and only then the old house is dismantled.
This results in the so-called nesting doll principle, when an old and dilapidated house finds itself inside a new, spacious and beautiful building: the old house was dismantled and disposed of, but the new one remains. The method, of course, is very expensive, but has a right to exist.
Correct life attitudes and their interaction with each other
In the matter of a person’s internal attitudes or beliefs, everything turns out to be a little different, since this concept has an energy-informational structure. And as you know, some types of energy can be replaced by others, you just have to pay the necessary attention to this.
As an example, let's try to use the well-known concept of money. I think that any of us can remember quite a lot of negative statements and proverbs dedicated to the topic of money.
But the question is whether this will be beneficial. After all, a negative attitude towards money in our minds, which actually represents a bad life experience, creates very serious, and sometimes even insurmountable, obstacles to its appearance in our real life.
It turns out that if I speak negatively about money, I thereby direct my energy to ensure that it does not appear in my life under any circumstances. After all, if money is evil, then you must always avoid this evil at all costs.
No matter how hard I try to increase my cash flow in this case, the amount of money in my wallet will never change exactly until I see something positive in it for myself and formulate a new positive attitude.
One has only to believe and admit that money is enormous freedom and ample opportunities for one’s own development and improving the quality of life, and the opportunity immediately arises for the formation of a new positive attitude.
And if you can formulate this statement in the form of a short and sonorous slogan or motto, as Winnie the Pooh did with his chants and screams, and constantly feed it with your energy, then you can be sure that a new positive attitude will gradually displace the old negative belief from consciousness.
Positive life attitude of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet
This algorithm of actions helps to replace any negative beliefs with new positive attitudes in almost all areas of life. It’s hard to even imagine what incredible heights a person can achieve (in the good sense of the word) if he regularly practices this way of thinking and relating to the world around him.
Attitudes, their types and role in human life
Attitudes are an ambiguous concept; in psychology it is used in two meanings:
- as a certain, predetermined perspective of perception of reality, events, people;
- as a predisposition to a certain behavior or type of social activity.
In general, an attitude can be considered as a person’s readiness to perform certain actions and actions. For example, before crossing the road, a person usually automatically checks to see if a car is moving. This triggers an attitude formed in childhood. Or another example: seeing through the window that it is cloudy and windy outside, we dress warmer, as the setting is triggered - if there is wind, then it is cold.
These are the so-called everyday attitudes, and ideological attitudes are in many ways close to beliefs, connected with them and often formed in inextricable unity. For example, a person with nationalist beliefs has attitudes toward perceiving people of other nationalities as less valuable, flawed, and endowed with unpleasant qualities.
Unlike beliefs, attitudes are less conscious. For example, there is such a widespread attitude that the higher a person’s social status, the smarter, more educated, and more professional he is. Therefore, without realizing why, we trust the opinion of our boss more than that of a subordinate or even a colleague.
Types of installations
In psychology, there are 3 types of attitudes depending on their influence on a certain area of activity:
- Meaningful attitudes relate to the content of our consciousness and include several components: behavioral – associated with the willingness to act in accordance with beliefs; informational, forming a person’s belief system; evaluative, influencing a person’s attitude to the world and expressed in emotions of sympathy and antipathy.
- Goal settings define the process of goal setting. This type of attitude includes, for example, the idea of the importance of career growth and the need for hard work to achieve success, or the conviction of a girl who associates her future exclusively with marriage. Goal settings support a person’s activity in case of failure and encourage him to start moving towards the goal again and again.
- Operational settings control the choice of ways and means to achieve a goal. This type is perhaps the least stable. Attitudes change under the influence of the learning process, personal experience, advice from others, information from various external sources (books, the Internet, etc.). No matter how inert a person’s thinking may be, he will never endlessly perform actions that do not bring results, but will try to find something more effective.
The identification of these types is rather arbitrary; in the real consciousness of a person, all attitudes are intertwined and interconnected.
On the role of attitudes in a person’s ability to change
James Springer and James Lewis are identical twins who were separated shortly after birth. Until a certain point, they did not know about each other's existence. Both brothers' first wives were named Linda, and their second wives were Betty. The brothers had similar interests. The first James was interested in carpentry, and the second - mechanical drawing. Both were sociable and had approximately the same level of flexibility and self-regulation.
When Barbara Herbert and Daphne Goodship, twins separated at birth, met at the age of 39, they both wore a beige dress and a brown corduroy jacket.
These incredible examples may lead us to believe that a person's personality is something written into the genes, something that cannot be changed. If things like clothing choices and sociability are programmed, it can be assumed that everything else is also predetermined. However, more and more research confirms that this is not the case. A person's personality and character were not once and for all encoded into a person's genes; much of each person's personality is a flexible and dynamic system (Mischel & Shoda, 1995) that can change throughout life through experience (Roberts, Walton, & Viechtbauer, 2006).
In addition, scientists are beginning to understand how to change a person's character and abilities. When talking about a person’s personality, we operate not only with character traits, but also with such concepts as goals, aspirations, interpretation of events, and coping strategies. Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University, in her study “Perception Management—How Attitudes Affect the Ability to Change,” focuses on attitudes and their impact on a person's goals and aspirations, as well as how these attitudes influence a person's emotional reactions and actions.
Allport (1964) defined personality in terms of enduring patterns of behavior and courses of action that are present in different situations and areas of life. Attitudes, with their ability to change a person’s behavior and actions, become a key concept in defining personality.
Attitudes are capable of changing stable patterns of behavior and modes of action, changing the character and personality of a person. A person’s psychological attitudes include his ideas about the world, about himself and about relationships with other people. They are usually formed in childhood. Many experts in the field of personality believe that attitudes are the basis of personality. For example, temperament researcher Mary Rothbart argues that a person's personality and character consist not only of temperament and habitual behavior patterns, but also of how a person perceives himself and the people and events around him.
Focusing on a person's attitudes allows us to more accurately answer the following questions: what personal factors allow a person to be successful - to grow and learn, to build successful relationships with others, to perform well in school and at work, to be able to care for others and to recover from failures? A person’s psychological attitudes can be defined, measured and transformed in order to change their impact on a person’s life. Determining character traits is also not difficult, but this definition does not contain instructions on how a person can change them. Changing psychological attitudes can be difficult, but they tell us where to start.
To confirm this theory, Carol Dweck tested two basic attitudes: the first - about whether a person and his character traits can develop, and the second - how attitudes affect relationships with other people. The author emphasizes that psychological attitudes and their influence on a person’s life contain the most important aspects of adaptive functioning and are reflected in all areas of a person’s life.
GROWTH MINDSET
Carol Dweck's research shows that acquired psychological attitudes influence a person's success in life. People with a fixed mindset are confident that their qualities, for example, intelligence, are embedded in them once and for all and cannot be changed. People with a growth mindset believe that most of their qualities can be developed and that much depends on their effort and willingness to learn.
Early research shows that people with a growth mindset are more open to learning, willing to take on challenges, and bounce back more easily from setbacks (Dweck, 1999). This mindset allows one to successfully cope with events such as school transfers (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007), difficult business negotiations (Kray, 2007), and conflict resolution in romantic relationships (Kammrath & Dweck, 2006). That is, a growth mindset has a positive effect on key aspects of a person’s life (study, career, personal life).
Anyone can develop a growth mindset, which allows them to become more motivated and better able to cope with challenging tasks. In a study by Aronson, Fried, and Good (2002), students at a prestigious university were shown a film about the brain that suggested that new neural connections are formed throughout life in response to learning. In addition, each student in the experimental group wrote a letter to junior students about how the human brain is a flexible system that can develop throughout life in response to intellectual effort and hard work. At the end of the semester, college students who learned about the brain's ability to develop throughout life scored significantly higher in academic performance, interest in learning, and willingness to work hard than students who were not exposed to the film.
People acquire attitudes in response to being praised (Mueller & Dweck, 1998). Surprisingly, when students are praised for their intelligence, they acquire a fixed mindset. Not only does such praise fail to build self-esteem, but it also makes them vulnerable and causes them to avoid difficult tasks. Once students with a fixed mindset encounter an obstacle in their path, they lose self-confidence, interest in learning, and demonstrate poorer academic performance. When students are praised for their effort or choosing the right strategy, they acquire a growth mindset: they want to learn and they don't give up at the first challenge.
Thus, psychological attitude plays an important role in the strategy of solving complex problems, self-regulation and the ability to accept failure and move on. Changing an attitude can radically change a person's entire life.
ATTITUDES AND RELATIONSHIPS: EXPECTATIONS OF ACCEPTANCE OR REJECTION
Almost sixty years ago, John Bowlby suggested that children develop attachment patterns of one kind or another during infancy. It is this model that has a key influence on a person’s ideas about relationships with other people. If a child's attachment to a significant adult was secure, then he is more likely to build harmonious relationships with other people in adulthood. If the attachment was insecure, there is a high probability that in the future the person will not be able to recognize and respond to another person's attachment to himself.
Expectations regarding positive or negative responses from other people are at the core of adult relationships. Geraldine Downey and her colleagues have shown that people who anxiously anticipate negative reactions from others build insecure relationships, perceive rejection and attachment threats even where they do not exist, and generally downplay the importance of relationships in a person's life (Pietrzak, Downey, Ayduk , 2005). Psychological attitude influences how satisfying a person's relationships will be with the people around him.
MINIMUM INTERVENTIONS, SIGNIFICANT RESULTS
Changing attitudes about one's own development or relationships with other people has shown very significant results with minimal effort on the part of the therapist and client. Psychotherapy aimed at changing attitudes consists of rethinking events and changing one’s own reactions to them. These interventions are aimed at changing a person’s attitude, which affects motivational, regulatory and communication patterns.
In addition, in the course of such work, character traits that are often considered “relatively stable” also change: openness to new things, thoroughness, sociability, negative reactions in response to a situation of failure.
To summarize, we note once again that psychological attitudes influence all areas of life. Changing attitudes means changing a person's character, which in turn means changing his life.
Original article: Carol S. Dweck. Modulating emotion perception – Can Personality Be Changed? The Role of Beliefs in Personality and Change. Current Directions in Psychological Science, December, 2008
Translation: Eliseeva Margarita Igorevna
Editor: Simonov Vyacheslav Mikhailovich
Key words: psychological attitude, self-development, self-realization, motivation, change
Photo source: powerthoughtsmeditationclub.com
Available for download:
- On the role of attitudes in a person’s ability to change
Psychological phenomenon
It is already obvious to a person living in the third millennium how rapidly the world in which he lives is changing. Moreover, any newly arriving reality is invariably accompanied by certain changes. This requires changes in the people themselves. But admitting that you need to change yourself is much more difficult. In each case, a mechanism to counteract the newly created conditions begins to work in a person, which is called a psychological barrier. This is nothing more than a specific form of resistance to change syndrome, which has two sides. A person is afraid of losing his old, familiar, and at the same time he has a fear of what is unusual for him, new.
If we consider the concept of “barrier” in a broad sense, then it means a long partition that is placed as an obstacle on the way, that is, it is an obstacle. This word has a similar meaning in the field of psychology. In this science, it denotes those external and internal obstacles existing in a person that do not allow him to achieve his goal.
A psychological barrier is understood as a state of an individual in which his or her inadequate passivity manifests itself, becoming an obstacle to performing certain actions. In emotional terms, the mechanism of this phenomenon is the strengthening of attitudes toward low self-esteem and negative experiences. Psychological barriers also exist in the social behavior of an individual. They are expressed by communication obstacles, which manifest themselves in the rigidity of interpersonal and other attitudes.
How to solve the problem of barriers? This will allow us to create a broader framework for such a concept as “psychological attitude.” It is expressed in a person’s readiness to act and perceive, as well as interpret the object of thinking and perception or future events in one way or another.
What does the concept of attitude mean in psychology? This is a special vision that is the basis of human behavior and his selective activity. It is capable of regulating conscious as well as unconscious forms of personality activity in the emotional, cognitive and motivational spheres. Any attitude is formed thanks to the life experience accumulated by a person and can be both a colossal advantage and a significant limitation for him.
Types of psychological attitudes
In psychology, human perception is classified into the following groups:
- positive;
- negative;
- adequate.
What does each of these types mean? With a positive attitude, the positive qualities of a person are assessed. Negative perception leads to consideration of only the negative character traits of a person. The most optimal setting is considered adequate. After all, every person has both positive and negative personal qualities. The presence of each of these attitudes is considered by psychologists as an unconscious predisposition to evaluate and perceive the qualities of the interlocutor.
When starting their communication, people influence each other using deep psychological mechanisms. Researchers have proven that in this case a property such as infection arises. It represents the effect of enhancing the emotions of people in contact with each other. Infection occurs on an unconscious level. Moreover, most often it is observed in public, in a queue or in a crowd. For example, laughter, anger and other emotions can be contagious.
Among psychological attitudes there are also such properties as imitation and suggestion. The first one is dynamic. Its manifestations can be blind copying of gestures and behavior, as well as intonation, up to conscious imitation of behavior. Suggestion can be group or individual, occurring at a conscious or unconscious level, which will depend on the purpose of the contact. In psychology, this property is understood as a person’s ability to perceive feelings, actions and ideas conveyed to him in such a way that involuntarily they seem to become his own.
Among the psychological mechanisms of communication is also competition. It represents people’s desire not to lose face, to be no worse than others, as well as the desire to compare themselves with others. Competition creates a strain of physical, emotional and mental strength. It’s good if such attitudes serve as a stimulus for development. The worst option is when competition develops into rivalry.
The next level of human interaction is the reasoned, written or speech, conscious expression of actions, opinions and ideas with the purpose of persuasion. Such an attitude becomes effective only when it is based not only on words, but also on emotions, deeds, as well as on the effects of imitation, suggestion and infection.
How to remove negative attitudes. Part 3. Elimination and replacement
For the next 3 days you need to read the ENTIRE notebook in the morning and evening. Read all the notes - both pencil and red. This process takes me about 15 minutes. Depending on your handwriting, it may take you a little less or more time.
As you read, pay attention to how you feel. On pencil notes you may feel rejected, but on red notes you may feel inspired.
You may not want to read negative attitudes at all, but you should be patient for 3 days. During this time, your brain will “reformat” your beliefs, replacing the usual gloomy thoughts with positive ones, which you wrote with a red pen.
The longest, but also the most joyful stage remains. After 3 days, take an eraser and erase all negative beliefs. You will only have positive phrases written in red ink. And then you need to read the entire notebook every morning and evening for the next few months. Optimally - six months, more is possible. Each reading will take you 5-10 minutes.
When you leaf through your notebook and read positive statements, phrases about gratitude, love and happiness, you will feel a surge of strength and joy
But the most important thing is that your consciousness and subconscious will begin to rebuild. New neural connections are formed in the brain, you will begin to think differently
When your thinking changes, your actions will change. Make your new decisions with gratitude, don't try to hold on to old patterns. Changing your habitual behavior will bring real changes in your life.
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