Milton Rokeach's book The Nature of Human Values (1973), and the Rokeach Value Survey, which the book served as the test manual for, occupied the final years of his career. In it, he posited that a relatively few "terminal human values" are the internal reference points that all people use to formulate attitudes and opinions, and that by measuring the "relative ranking" of these values one could predict a wide variety of behavior, including political affiliation and religious belief. This theory led to a series of experiments in which changes in values led to measurable changes in opinion for an entire small city in the state of Washington.

Milton Rokeach's book The Nature of Human Values (1973), and the Rokeach Value Survey, which the book served as the test manual for, occupied the final years of his career. In it, he posited that a relatively few "terminal human values" are the internal reference points that all people use to formulate attitudes and opinions, and that by measuring the "relative ranking" of these values one could predict a wide variety of behavior, including political affiliation and religious belief. This theory led to a series of experiments in which changes in values led to measurable changes in opinion for an entire small city in the state of Washington.

This volume presents theoretical, methodological, and empirical advances in understanding, and also in the effects of understanding, individual and societal values.

This original and engaging book advocates an unabashedly empirical approach to understanding human values: abstract ideals that we consider important, such as freedom, equality, achievement, helpfulness, security, tradition, and peace. Our values are relevant to everything we do, helping us choose between careers, schools, romantic partners, places to live, things to buy, who to vote for, and much more. There is enormous public interest in the psychology of values and a growing recognition of the need for a deeper understanding of the ways in which values are embedded in our attitudes and behavior. How do they affect our well-being, our relationships with other people, our prosperity, and our environment? In his examination of these questions, Maio focuses on tests of theories about values, through observations of what people actually think and do. In the past five decades, psychological research has learned a lot about values, and this book describes what we have learned and why it is important. It provides the first overview of psychological research looking at how we mentally represent and use our values, and constitutes important reading for psychology students at all levels, as well as academics in psychology and related social and health sciences.

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Human values--including accountability, privacy, autonomy, and respect for person--emerge from the computer systems that we build and how we choose to use them. Yet, important questions on human values and system design have remained largely unexplored. If human values are controversial, then on what basis do some values override others in the design of, for example, hardware, algorithms, and databases? Do users interact with computer systems as social actors? If so, should designers of computer persona and agents seek to build on such human tendencies, or check them? How have design decisions in hospitals, research labs, and computer corporations protected or degraded such values? This volume brings together leading researchers and system designers who take up these questions, and more.

Employee-Organization Linkages: The Psychology of Commitment, Absenteeism, and Turnover summarizes the theory and research on employee-organization linkages, including the processes through which employees become linked to work organizations, the quality of such linkages, and how linkages are weakened or severed. The text identifies the determinants of employee commitment, absenteeism, and turnover, as well as their consequences for the individual, work groups, and the larger organization. The book also presents conceptual models on how employees become committed to, decide to be absent from, and decide to leave their organizations. Human resource practitioners, managers, employers, and industrial psychologists will find the book very informative and insightful.

What, if anything, does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, ethical values, or even the meaning and purpose of life? The Moral Meaning of Nature sheds new light on these enduring questions by examining the significance of an earlier—and unjustly neglected—discussion of Darwin in late nineteenth-century Germany. We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or “life-philosophy,” that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, including Franz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique question concerning the meaning of biological evolution “for life.” At the heart of the discussion were debates about the relation of facts and values, the place of divine purpose in the understanding of nonhuman and human agency, the concept of life, and the question of whether the sciences could offer resources to satisfy the human urge to discover sources of value in biological processes. The Moral Meaning of Nature focuses on the historical background of these questions, exposing the complex ways in which they recur in contemporary philosophical debate.