Norms and Values In Sociology

Values are the basic beliefs that guide the actions of individuals. Norms are the expectations society has for people’s behavior. Values tell us what is right or wrong; norms tell us what is acceptable or not.

Values are also more abstract and universal than norms. They exist independently of any specific culture or society. Norms, by contrast, are specific to a particular culture: action-guiding rules that spell out exactly what must be done or avoided.

Values also tend to pass down from one generation to the next, while norms can change quickly.

• Values: an evaluative standard, a test for whether an outcome or way of acting is good, that a person carries across situations.
• Norms: a situational rule that only makes sense within a specific setting.

“Be honest” is a value: it applies everywhere someone might be tempted to lie. “Cite your sources” is a norm: it exists only because of the specific context of academic writing.

In short, the values we hold are general behavioral guidelines that tell us what we believe is right or wrong.

But knowing right from wrong is not enough. It does not tell us how to behave in a specific social situation. That is the job norms play in our social behavior.

There is, however, plenty of overlap between norms and values. One of society’s norms, for instance, is that people should not kill one another. This norm is also a value: something societies believe is deeply wrong (McAdams, 2001).

What Are Norms?

Social norms are specific rules dictating how people should act in a particular situation, values are general ideas that support the norm. There are four types of norm we can distinguish:

These four types sit on a scale, from mild custom to formally codified law:

• Folkways: weak, everyday customs like etiquette; violations bring only mild disapproval.
• Mores: strong moral norms; violations bring serious social sanction.
• Taboos: the most serious prohibitions; violations can bring social exclusion.
• Laws: a society’s strongest norms, formally codified into state-enforced rules with defined penalties.

Norms shape attitudes and guide action. They set the boundaries for behavior, build cohesion, and help people work toward shared cultural goals.

Norms also carry real force. Violating one may bring disapproval, ridicule, or even ostracism. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, remains legally permitted in the United States.

Yet most institutions reject it anyway. Norms across academic, cultural, and religious life barely tolerate any association with the Klan or its racist and antisemitic propaganda.

This shows how powerful an informal norm can be: it condemns a viewpoint through informal means alone, with no formal law required.

What Are Values?

Values are beliefs about what is important, both to us and to society as a whole. They are beliefs about how things should be.

Values validate norms. A rule with no value behind it feels arbitrary.

Without corresponding norms, on the other hand, values stay abstract. They lack any concrete direction or execution (McAdams, 2001).

Take the value of honesty. On its own, “honesty is good” does not say what to actually do. It does not say whether a student must cite every source, or whether a friend must share an unflattering opinion about a haircut.

Norms supply that missing detail. The academic rule against plagiarism, and the everyday norm of a tactful white lie, are different, situation-specific answers built from the same underlying value.

Shared values tend to change slowly, generation to generation. Norms shift much faster.

Value Consensus

There are still commonly shared values within societies, but they become generalized: a broad underpinning for social practices rather than one fixed, specific code.

Durkheim argued that value consensus continues to exist in modern societies, though in a weaker form. Industrialization gave people access to a much wider range of knowledge and ideas, through the mass media and science among others.

Talcott Parsons later coined the term “value consensus” itself. He argued that institutions such as the family, education, and religion actively create and maintain value consensus through socialization.

Rokeach and Schwartz’s Value Theories

Sociologists needed a working definition of a value before they could test whether values are the same across cultures. Two theorists supplied that definition, and then tested it.

Rokeach’s Terminal and Instrumental Values

The psychologist Milton Rokeach supplied the field’s working definition of a value:

“An enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence” (Rokeach, 1973).

Three things about this definition matter.

A value is enduring: a stable feature of a person or culture, not a passing preference. This is why values are said to pass down across generations, while norms shift more quickly.

A value also concerns either a mode of conduct (a way of behaving, such as being honest) or an end-state of existence (a goal, such as a comfortable life).

Rokeach called these instrumental values and terminal values.

Finally, a value is comparative. It only counts as a value if a person judges it preferable to some opposite.

Honesty is a value because a person judges it better than dishonesty, not just because it sounds nice.

Rokeach tested this idea with the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS).

It asked people to rank 18 terminal values and 18 instrumental values in order of importance, rather than rating each one on its own.

Terminal values, the goals, include a comfortable life, family security, freedom, and self-respect. Instrumental values, the means, include being ambitious, honest, forgiving, and independent.

Ranking forces real trade-offs.

A person only truly treats something as a value, Rokeach argued, once they are willing to sacrifice a lower-ranked value for a higher-ranked one when the two conflict.

Schwartz’s Circular Model of Values

The social psychologist Shalom Schwartz built on Rokeach’s work with a theory that could be tested across cultures.

Schwartz (1992) asked what Rokeach’s list could not: which values are truly universal, and which are just artifacts of one culture’s survey?

Schwartz identified ten broad values, each serving a different motivational goal:

• Self-direction: independent thought and action.
• Stimulation: excitement, novelty, and challenge.
• Hedonism: pleasure and sensuous gratification.
• Achievement: personal success through demonstrated competence.
• Power: social status and control over people and resources.
• Security: safety, harmony, and stability.
• Conformity: restraint of impulses that might upset or harm others.
• Tradition: respect for the customs of one’s culture or religion.
• Benevolence: preserving the welfare of people close to you.
• Universalism: understanding and protection for the welfare of all people and nature.

In 2012, Schwartz and an international team refined this ten-value model into nineteen more finely differentiated values. They split security into personal security and societal security, and universalism into three separate concerns: nature, tolerance, and concern for others.

The finer-grained set predicts behaviour and attitudes more precisely, without losing the model’s cross-cultural structure (Schwartz et al., 2012). The circle itself stays the same.

The theory’s most tested claim is that these values sit on a circle, not a list.

Values next to each other get pursued together. Stimulation and self-direction, for example, both come from a similar drive toward independence.

Values on opposite sides of the circle conflict instead.

Power and universalism sit opposite each other for a reason: chasing personal dominance works against a commitment to everyone’s equal welfare.

These ten values group into four broader types.

Openness-to-change (self-direction, stimulation) sits against conservation (security, conformity, tradition). Self-enhancement (achievement, power) sits against self-transcendence (universalism, benevolence).

A person who values both achievement and benevolence feels this tension directly.

They are pulled in two directions by their own value system, regardless of anything society imposes on them.

Value Pluralism and Value Conflict

“Value consensus” is only one of at least three separate claims about how values are distributed across a population. Mixing them up causes real confusion, both in sociology and in everyday argument.

Each claim answers a different question: whether people agree, whether they share a structure they weight differently, or whether they hold genuinely incompatible values.

Philosophical Value Pluralism

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued that human life involves several genuine, ultimate values: liberty and equality, justice and mercy, tradition and progress. No formula can rank these once and for all, and none can be reduced to a single master value. Berlin called this value pluralism.

Real moral and political life, on Berlin’s view, involves irreducible trade-offs between goods that are each genuinely valuable. It is not a simple contest between one true value and various errors.

This is a claim about the structure of value itself. It comes before any empirical question about which values a particular person or culture happens to hold.

Structural, Motivational Pluralism

Schwartz’s circle, described above, offers a related but testable version of the same idea, this time at the level of individual psychology. Some basic values sit in genuine tension. Power sits against universalism; tradition sits against self-direction.

Every person’s own value system already contains these built-in trade-offs. Different individuals and cultures resolve them differently, prioritising different values around the circle. They still share the same underlying structure.

Cross-cultural “value diversity” is less a story of societies holding entirely different values. It is more a story of different societies weighting a shared menu differently.

Societal and Postmodern Pluralism

A third, sociological sense of value pluralism denies even the shared-menu claim. Societies, on this view, are not one structure of values weighted differently. Call this societal pluralism.

They contain genuinely distinct, sometimes incompatible value systems held by different groups. No single value consensus binds the whole society together. This is the position postmodernist sociologists take against the functionalist tradition described above.

It sits in direct tension with the psychological universalism of Schwartz’s research. One tradition’s central finding is a stable, near-universal structure to human values. That is exactly what the other tradition denies is possible.

Critical Evaluation

How strong is the evidence that these values are genuinely universal, not just a Western psychological construct?

The case is unusually strong for cross-cultural social science, but it is not perfect.

Evidence for a Universal Value Structure

The clearest test of Schwartz’s model comes from a large cross-cultural study of value priorities (Schwartz & Bardi, 2001).

Aim: Do cultures agree on which values matter most?

Method: The authors compared value rankings from adult samples in 13 nations. They then checked the same pattern in much larger samples: school teachers across 56 nations and college students across 54 nations, all using the Schwartz Value Survey.

Results: Benevolence, self-direction, and universalism ranked most important almost everywhere. Power, tradition, and stimulation ranked least important. Security, conformity, achievement, and hedonism fell in between. Value hierarchies from 83% of all samples correlated at .80 or higher with this pattern.

Conclusion: This is likely an adaptive pattern, shared across societies.

Favouring benevolence and self-direction over power may simply be what tends to work for social groups, regardless of culture.

Evaluation: The study’s strength is scale, replicated independently across huge samples spanning over 50 nations each.

Its main limitation is sample skew: teachers and students skew educated and urban, so the hierarchy may under-represent rural populations.

Contemporary Research

Research since the mid-2010s has tested this evidence base in three ways.

It asks whether the structure appears before socialization has had time to work, whether it has real-world stakes, and whether the universality claim itself might be culturally limited.

Does the Value Structure Appear in Childhood?

The strongest test comes from Döring et al. (2015).

Aim: The researchers asked whether the adult value structure is already present in middle childhood, well before children have adult reasoning.

Method: A sample of 3,088 children was surveyed. They were aged seven to eleven, drawn from six nations: Germany, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, the United States, and New Zealand.

They used pictures, not adult words, to answer. A subset of older, fifth-grade children also completed an adult-style values questionnaire. This let the researchers compare the two methods directly.

Results: The broad value structure found in adults, including its circular pattern, was already clearly present in these seven- to eleven-year-olds.

The same benevolence-over-power pattern documented in adults had, in the authors’ words, “already taken form at this early age.” Sex differences in value priorities were also consistent across all six countries.

Conclusion: This is unlikely to be mere adult learning. A structure this consistent, already visible in seven-year-olds across six nations, points to something more fundamental: an early, perhaps innate foundation for how humans organize their values.

Evaluation: The picture-based method is a real strength.

It answers a fair objection to adult-only value research: that a verbal survey already assumes the adult reasoning the study is trying to test for.

The sample is still a limitation. All six nations are industrialised, so the study cannot rule out a different value structure emerging in a low-income or less Westernised society.

Do Values Predict Real Behavior?

A large synthesis by Sagiv, Roccas, Cieciuch, and Schwartz (2017), published in Nature Human Behaviour, reviewed decades of accumulated evidence.

Values matter far beyond the survey itself.

They predict political orientation and voting, prosocial behavior and volunteering, career choices, and subjective well-being.

The pattern is consistent. Self-transcendence values (universalism, benevolence) predict more cooperative behavior. Self-enhancement values (power, achievement) predict more competitive, status-seeking behavior instead.

Davidov, Cieciuch, and Schmidt (2019) tested this against a real political question: opposition to immigration, using cross-national survey data from several European countries.

Conservation values (security, conformity, tradition) consistently predicted more restrictive attitudes. Openness and self-transcendence values predicted more welcoming ones.

Is the Universal Structure Culturally Limited?

A third strand of research is more cautious.

It stress-tests a related theory in genuinely non-Western samples, rather than replicating Schwartz’s own framework again.

Moral Foundations Theory proposes five evolved moral intuitions: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009).

Doğruyol, Alper, and Yılmaz (2019) tested this structure in non-WEIRD cultural samples against WEIRD ones. The five-factor structure held up well in both.

Atari, Graham, and Dehghani (2020) went further still.

They tested the same framework among Iranian participants, a large but chronically under-sampled society in this literature.

The standard model captured much of Iranian moral thinking. But it needed one addition: a culturally specific concern the original framework had not anticipated.

The overall picture is balanced. Values and moral foundations both replicate well across very different cultures.

Where the replications fail, though, they tend to add something local rather than contradict the model outright.

Limitations

That strength should not be overstated.

Every study here traces back to one instrument, built in a Western tradition and then translated elsewhere.

A genuinely alien value system, one that did not map onto the categories the instrument was built to detect, could in principle be missed rather than disproven by this method.

The Atari, Graham, and Dehghani (2020) finding above is a useful corrective: real, substantive gaps do sometimes appear once a theory is tested well outside its original development samples.

A further, more technical concern involves the ranking method itself.

Because ranking one value higher requires ranking another lower, some of the apparent circular structure could be a side effect of the method itself.

It may not be purely a discovery about the world.

A further limitation concerns consensus itself. Sharing the same underlying structure of ten or nineteen values, even ranked very differently, is not the same as agreeing on which values should govern shared political and moral life. Structure is not consensus.

That distinction is what separates the three kinds of value pluralism described above. People everywhere draw on the same menu of motivations.

They can still disagree, sometimes intractably, about which of those motivations should come first. That is exactly Isaiah Berlin’s philosophical point, reached here by an entirely different, empirical route.

Real-World Applications

Value theory is not just an academic exercise. Researchers and practitioners across several fields use it to explain, and sometimes predict, real-world behaviour and decisions.

Political Psychology and Diplomacy

Basic value priorities are more than descriptive labels. As the immigration-attitudes research above shows, they measurably predict where a person lands on genuinely contested policy questions.

Survey researchers and political scientists increasingly use value batteries, alongside the usual demographic and ideological measures, to forecast public reactions to migration, environmental regulation, and other value-laden policy areas.

The logic is simple. An appeal to a specific value, security, fairness, or tradition, resonates differently with audiences who prioritise different regions of the same underlying value circle.

The same logic extends to diplomacy. Most cross-cultural value variation, the evidence above suggests, is a matter of differential weighting within a broadly shared structure, not the presence of wholly alien value systems.

Practitioners in intercultural mediation and diplomacy use this insight deliberately. An apparent value clash, over individual liberty versus collective harmony, say, becomes a trade-off within a shared menu of recognisable human concerns, rather than an unbridgeable divide.

That framing keeps room for negotiation: it denies that the other side’s values are simply unintelligible.

Clinical Practice and Cross-Cultural Management

Outside sociology and political psychology, “values” does real clinical work too. Acceptance and commitment therapy treats clarifying a client’s own values, distinct from externally imposed goals, as one of its core therapeutic processes (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 2011).

The premise is simple. Durable behaviour change is best sustained by committed action in service of values a person has genuinely chosen, not by rules imposed from outside.

This is a meaningfully different use of “values” from the sociological sense used elsewhere on this page. It is an individual clinical tool for guiding one client’s behaviour, not a society-wide account of shared belief.

Organisations face a related translation problem at a larger scale. Multinational employers operate across cultures with genuinely different value profiles.

A management practice built around individual achievement recognition may motivate employees in a self-enhancement-prioritising culture, and demotivate or alienate employees where conformity and benevolence rank more highly instead.

Cross-cultural training programmes and international HR practice lean heavily on this value-mapping research for exactly that reason. It helps anticipate where a policy or incentive scheme will travel well, and where it needs local adaptation.

Comparison with Related Theories

Schwartz’s circle is not the only account of values, and psychology is not the only field asking about them. Related theories tackle the question from different angles.

How Schwartz Refined Rokeach’s Model

Schwartz’s theory did not replace Rokeach’s. It refined it.

Rokeach supplied the groundwork: the enduring-belief definition, the terminal/instrumental split, and the insight that ranking values, not just rating them, is what reveals genuine trade-offs. Schwartz took that groundwork and tested it across cultures, reorganising it into a more precise, empirically validated structure.

The real advantage is the circle itself. Rokeach’s survey produced two long lists. Schwartz’s model makes an explicit, testable claim about how values relate to each other, which are compatible and which conflict. That relational claim is what allowed the cross-cultural replication described above to happen at all.

Inglehart’s Theory of Value Change

Ronald Inglehart is a political scientist. He asked why value priorities shift across generations, not how they are structured.

Inglehart (1997) drew on large-scale surveys. The source was the World Values Survey. Societies with sustained economic security, he found, tend to shift, generation by generation, from materialist values (physical and economic security, order) toward postmaterialist values (self-expression, autonomy, quality of life).

Once basic survival needs are reliably met, priorities shift toward less survival-focused goals. This societal shift echoes Schwartz’s openness-to-change dimension. It is a claim about change over time, though, not about structure at a single point.

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory

The organisational psychologist Geert Hofstede compared entire national cultures, not individuals.

Hofstede (2001) built his cultural dimensions theory from employee survey data collected across one large multinational company. It ranks nations along dimensions including individualism-collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance.

The framework carries a real risk. Treating a whole nation as one score can understate how much values actually vary within it. Schwartz’s individual-level surveys, sampled directly across age and class, are better placed to catch that internal diversity.

Moral Foundations Theory

Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009) offer a related but distinct account, focused on moral and political judgement rather than the wider ground Schwartz’s values cover.

Political liberals and conservatives, the theory’s sharpest finding shows, weight the five foundations differently. Conservatives draw fairly evenly on all five, including loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Liberals lean heavily on just two: care and fairness.

That gives moral foundations research a sharper political application than the broader values circle, though it explains a narrower slice of behaviour.

Why Do Societies Appear to Share Values?

Sociology asks a related but different question here: not what values people hold, but why a society appears to share values in the first place. Two rival answers exist.

Functionalist sociology credits shared institutions, family, education, religion, with actively building value consensus. Conflict theory disagrees: an apparent consensus may really be the values of one dominant class or group, imposed on everyone else.

Postmodernist sociology, discussed above, goes further still. It denies that any single value system unites a fragmented modern society at all.

References

Atari, M., Graham, J., & Dehghani, M. (2020). Foundations of morality in Iran. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(5), 367–384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.014

Davidov, E., Cieciuch, J., & Schmidt, P. (2019). Direct and indirect predictors of opposition to immigration in Europe: Testing different theoretical models. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(3), 439–459. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1550152

Doğruyol, B., Alper, S., & Yılmaz, O. (2019). The five-factor model of the moral foundations theory is stable across WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures. Personality and Individual Differences, 151, 109547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.109547

Döring, A. K., Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Groenen, P. J. F., Glatzel, V., Harasimczuk, J., Janowicz, N., Nyagolova, M., Scheefer, E. R., Allritz, M., Milfont, T. L., & Bilsky, W. (2015). Cross-cultural evidence of value structures and priorities in childhood. British Journal of Psychology, 106(4), 675–699. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12116

Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1046. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015141

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Sage.

Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton University Press.

McAdams, R. H. (2001). Conventions and norms (Philosophical aspects). In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (pp. 2652–2657). Pergamon.

Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. Free Press.

Sagiv, L., Roccas, S., Cieciuch, J., & Schwartz, S. H. (2017). Personal values in human life. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(9), 630–639. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0185-3

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