Let's talk about mental program; values and culture

This chapter deals with definition and measurement of mental programs in people in general, and values and culture in particular. Mental programs distinguished into three levels of uniqueness; universal, collective, and individul. the least unique but most basic is the universal level which is shared by all, or almost all, mankind. This is the biological "operating system" of the human body, but it includes a range of expressive behaviors such a laughing and weeping and associative and agressive behaviors which are found in higher animals.

The collective level of mental programming is shared with some but not with all other people; it is common to people belonging to a certain group or category, but different among people belonging to other groups or categories. The whole area of subjective human culture belongs to this level, for example the language in which we express ourselves, the deference we show to our elders, the physical distance, etc.

The individual level of human programming is truly unique part-no two people are programmed exactly alike. This is the level of individual personality, and it provides for a wide range of alternative behaviors within the same collective culture.

The values are distinguished into values as the desired and values as the desirable. Values itselves are those things that really matter to each of us. in fact, values determine our subjective definition of rationality. Because our values are programmed early in our lives, they are non-irational.

The term of  "value" or "values" is used in all social sciences with different thought bot completely unrelated meanings. Values have both intensity and direction. Mathematically, values have a size and a sign: they can be represented by arrows along in a line. If we "hold" a value, this means that the issue involved has a certain relevance for us(intensity) and that we identify certain outcomes as a "good" and others as "bad" (direction).

When we talk about values as the desired and the desirable we have to distinguish between as what people actually desire versus what they think ought to be desired; they should not be equated.  In most of the psychological and socialogical research literature, "social desirability" is treated as something undesirable to the researcher.

Culture consists in patterned ways o thinking, feeling, and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by simbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values (Kluckhohn, 1951: 86, 5). Cultures is treated as "th collective progrmmingogf the mind which distinguishes the members of one huan group from another. The word "culture" is usually reservedfo societies (in the modern world is speaked of "nations") or for ethnic or regional groups, but it can be applied equally to othr human collectivities or categories a profession, or a family.