As a psychotherapist I spend much time listening to people rationalize and defend the choices they make. I'm particularly intrigued by the claims of people who have behaved badly that they are "really better people than that", as if having a set of internal values to which they do not adhere is really a better measure of their quality as a person than their behavior is.
I want to offer the premise that values come under several headings or flavors. For instance, if you ask me what my values are, I can describe the ideal choices that I would make. I can generalize about my religious or political beliefs. I can tell you that I would do "x" if given a choice between "x" and "y". This set of values comprises my public and verbal values. I can be pretty vehement in defending them.
I can also have a set of private values which I may or may not admit. The private values are frequently less socially acceptable than the public verbal values, or they may be socially acceptable only in limited or semi-private circumstances, such as in a private discussion.
My behavioral values are the ones that I actually make. If you kept a record of the choices I actually made when given the opportunity, you would have a pretty clear set of behavioral values which would be good predictors of my future choices. In fact, they would be a much better predictor of my future choices than either my public verbal or private values.
So I can assign an order of primacy to these three sets of values. The set that is the least useful predictor of my future behavior is the set of public verbal values. A somewhat better prediction is based on my private values, but the best predictor is the set of my behavioral values, the choices that I have actually made in the past.
An interesting fact is that when you change your behavioral values by making different choices, your private and public verbal values tend to change. Festinger’s research on cognitive dissonance establishes pretty clearly that when we make a previously-unacceptable behavioral choice, even under coercion, our private values begin to shift. When we act on a choice, we begin to change in that direction. We begin to become what we do. Even “temporary” departures from our values start shifting us.
It’s very interesting to me that we can have sets of private values that are totally inconsistent with one another, and they are not accompanied by any sense of discrepancy or conflict. A person can believe in the dignity of man and enjoy a boxing match; one can believe in the precepts of Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) while shooting someone to death. The list of such discrepancies is nearly boundless, and we all have them, and we all are unaware of them (for the most part) UNLESS something or someone brings them simultaneously to our conscious awareness. If we begin at that time forcing ourselves to act on one of the sets of conflicting values and not on the other, our value set will begin to shift and become more consistent.
I think it is a good thing to become more consistent in my behavioral, verbal and private values. I think that this may be what “maturity” consists of. I don’t have any scientific proof of this, of course, but on the personal level I find that as I bring my values into greater consistency I feel better about myself.
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