In sociology, values are the shared beliefs about what is good, desirable, and important in a society. They guide how people judge actions, shape social norms and laws, and influence everyday behavior.
For example, values like equality, honesty, or freedom act as invisible standards that help keep society organized and connected.
Key Takeaways
- Definition: Values are shared beliefs about what a society sees as good, important, and desirable, guiding how people think and act.
- Function: Values provide the foundation for social norms and rules, shaping behavior and maintaining social order.
- Variation: Different cultures and groups may hold different values, which explains why practices and priorities vary across societies.
- Examples: Honesty, equality, freedom, and respect are common values that influence daily decisions and relationships.
- Theory: Sociologists like Durkheim and Weber studied values to show how they hold societies together and direct social change.
Definition and Basics
In sociology, values are shared beliefs about what is good, desirable, and worthwhile in society.
They provide a framework for deciding what is right or wrong, guiding both individual choices and collective behavior.
Unlike everyday “values,” which might describe someone’s personal preferences, sociological values refer to broader cultural ideals that are passed down across generations.
Values can be explicit (clearly stated, such as “freedom of speech”) or implicit (unstated but widely understood, such as respect for elders).
They function as culturally constructed goals that people are encouraged to pursue, often presented as dreams or aspirations beginning in childhood.
Values also change over time. In the past, many Western societies valued men over women and white people over minorities.
Over time, these hierarchies have been challenged, leading to shifts in what societies see as just and important.
Ultimately, values act as general guidelines, helping people decide what should be valued, while norms provide the specific rules that put those values into practice.
Core Concepts
Core concepts explain what values are and how they operate in society. They highlight the building blocks (beliefs, guidelines, norms, judgments, morals) that show the role values play in shaping social life.
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Beliefs and Ideals: Values reflect convictions about what truly matters. For example, the American value of wealth underpins the belief in the “American Dream.”
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General Guidelines: They suggest what is right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, desirable or undesirable, without prescribing exact behaviors in every situation.
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Foundation for Norms: Values are the basis for norms – the concrete rules and expectations that uphold those ideals. A society that values democracy, for instance, establishes norms like free speech.
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Social Judgments: Values always carry a sense of evaluation, telling us how things ought to be and providing standards for fairness and justice.
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Morals: When values are deeply held and seen as essential, they become moral principles. An example is the widespread moral belief that killing another human being is wrong.
Examples
Values are the beliefs and principles a society holds as important and desirable, forming the foundation for social norms and shaping individual and group behaviour.
Cultural Values
Values are a key element of non-material culture and vary significantly across different societies and subcultures.
Individualism, Competition, and the Work Ethic (U.S.):
American culture highly values individualism, independence, and competition.
The “American Dream” is a core belief that anyone can achieve wealth and success through hard work, which is underpinned by the value that wealth is important.
This is linked to a strong work ethic, viewing hard work as morally good.
Americans are more likely than people in other nations to believe that competition is beneficial and that poverty stems from laziness rather than structural factors.
The sociologist Robin M. Williams Jr. tested this impression systematically. He surveyed mid-twentieth-century American society to find a recurring cluster of national values (Williams, 1970). His list included achievement through effort, a preference for action over inaction, and faith in science to solve problems.
The list also included equality (defined as equal opportunity, not equal outcome) and group superiority: valuing one’s own racial or ethnic group above others. Some values pulled against others. Williams himself noted this tension between equality and group superiority, one this article returns to below.
Individualism and Collectivism Are Not Opposites
The U.S.-versus-Japan contrast above is often read as though individualist and collectivist societies produce two mutually exclusive kinds of person. A direct empirical test complicates that assumption.
- Aim: Ghorbani, Bing, Watson, Davison, and LeBreton (2003) tested whether individualist and collectivist values are, as widely assumed, incompatible. They compared Iran, often seen as strongly collectivist, with the United States, often seen as strongly individualist.
- Method: University students in both countries completed the Individualist and Collectivist Values Scales, plus measures of interpersonal commitment and depression. The researchers used structural equation modelling to test how the values related to one another and to these outcomes.
- Results: Individualist and collectivist values correlated positively with one another in both Iran and the U.S., not negatively. In both samples, collectivist values statistically linked individualist values to stronger interpersonal commitment and to lower depression.
- Conclusion: Individualist and collectivist values function as compatible orientations within the same person, not as two poles a culture is forced to choose between.
Even a culture routinely labelled “individualist” or “collectivist” turns out to hold both kinds of value at once. That only shows up when we measure individuals, not stereotypes.
The study’s own limits are the ones common to student samples: they are not nationally representative, so how far this finding generalises beyond Iran and the U.S. remains open.
Group Harmony and Cooperation (Japan):
In contrast to the U.S., Japanese culture places a central value on group harmony and cooperation.
Interpersonal conflict is disliked, and individuals tend to be unassertive to avoid imposing their will on others.
This value is reinforced in schools, where the performance of the group (kumi) is often valued more than individual achievement.
Generosity and Bravery (Traditional Cheyenne Culture):
The traditional culture of the Cheyenne people valued generosity highly.
Wealth was not to be hoarded but given away, with the greatest reward being the prestige and respect gained from this generosity.
Bravery was another key value, with specific acts like rescuing a comrade being ranked higher than killing an enemy.
This ranking comes from an early work in legal anthropology. The legal scholar Karl Llewellyn and the anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel spent years recording real Cheyenne disputes. They worked from real, resolved cases (Llewellyn & Hoebel, 1941).
Their case records show bravery working as a graded value, not a single yes-or-no trait. A warrior who touched a living, armed enemy and escaped unharmed earned more prestige than one who killed from a distance.
That act showed courage under direct personal risk, which killing from afar did not. Rescuing a wounded comrade under fire outranked either act.
Generosity worked on the same graded logic. Repeatedly giving away horses, food, or other wealth converted material success into social standing in a way that simply keeping it could not.
British Values and Citizenship:
New Right sociologists and politicians have promoted the idea of transmitting specifically British values through the national curriculum to maintain a shared cultural identity.
Since 2014, teachers in England have been required not to undermine “fundamental British values.” This came from the government’s Prevent counter-terrorism strategy. The values are usually glossed as democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for different faiths.
Elton-Chalcraft, Lander, Revell, Warner, and Whitworth (2017) studied how student teachers at four English universities actually experienced this requirement. The reality was messier.
Rather than a welcomed transmission of agreed values, many struggled to justify the values as distinctively British, rather than simply human or already widely shared. Others worried that badging them as “British” risked casting pupils from minority-faith backgrounds as outsiders to values they already held.
Love and Freedom to Choose a Partner:
The belief in love and an individual’s right to choose their own partner is cited as a general value in “our society’s culture”.
In the U.S., romantic love is the common basis for marriage.
Ideal vs. Real Culture:
Sociologists distinguish between ideal culture (the values and standards a society would like to embrace) and real culture (the values and norms people actually follow).
For instance, marital monogamy is a value in many cultures (ideal), but infidelity still occurs (real).
This gap highlights that societal values are not always perfectly reflected in behaviour.
Subcultures:
Within a larger society, smaller groups known as subcultures share a particular way of life, including their own distinct values, norms, and lifestyles.
Examples include college students, who may value gaining a qualification, or religious groups like Orthodox Jews, who hold specific moral and religious values.
These subcultural values can coexist with or sometimes challenge the dominant culture’s values.
Moral and Religious Values
Moral values are beliefs about right and wrong behavior. They are usually shaped by religion, culture, or philosophy, and may vary depending on individual belief systems. While they are not scientific in nature, they are often used to evaluate social institutions and can overlap with political values.
Prohibition of Killing and Stealing:
The Ten Commandments provide a clear set of values for Christianity and Judaism, including “You should not kill another person” and “You should not steal from another person”.
The moral value that it is wrong to kill another human being is a fundamental principle in many societies.
Fidelity and Monogamy:
In the UK and other societies, fidelity (faithfulness) within marriage is highly valued.
Marital monogamy is a value in U.S. culture, although real-world behaviour (infidelity) sometimes conflicts with this ideal.
Religious Values:
Religious values can shape a wide range of social norms.
For instance, in Saudi Arabia, a ban on drinking alcohol for everyone, regardless of age, is related to Islamic religious values.
A devout Muslim family will ensure religion plays a strong part in a child’s upbringing.
Values Transmitted Through Social Institutions
Social institutions, particularly the family and education system, are primary agents for socialising individuals into a society’s core values.
Values Taught in Schools:
Schools teach both an academic curriculum and a hidden curriculum of values and norms.
- Respect for Authority: A key value transmitted in schools is respect for authority figures like teachers and administrators.
- Patriotism: Schools teach patriotism through rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance and history lessons focusing on national heroes.
- Individual Achievement and Competition: In the U.S., schools foster the values of individual achievement and competition through grades and sports, preparing students for the competitive nature of the wider society.
- Equality of Opportunity: Schools are also meant to transmit the value of equality of opportunity, suggesting everyone has an equal chance to succeed.
- Punctuality and Discipline: The hidden curriculum socialises children to societal norms like punctuality, discipline, order, and conformity.
Values Taught in the Family:
The family is the first agent of socialisation and instils fundamental values.
- Distinguishing Right from Wrong: Parents use their own values to teach children the difference between right and wrong behaviour.
- Social Class Values: Research suggests parenting values can differ by social class. Middle-class parents often value autonomy and independent judgment, reflecting their own work experiences, while working-class parents may place a greater emphasis on obedience.
- Obedience: The importance of obedience as a value for children to learn varies cross-culturally, with the United States falling somewhere in the middle compared to other nations.
Melvin Kohn first documented this pattern. He interviewed American parents and found that occupational self-direction predicted what they wanted for their children (Kohn, 1959). Occupational self-direction means how much independent judgement and freedom from close supervision a parent’s own job demands.
Self-directed parents ranked independent thinking highest. Parents in closely supervised, routine jobs tended to rank obedience highest. Kohn’s explanation was that parents unconsciously prepare children for the kind of working life the parents themselves have experienced.
A 2025 study tested this directly. Burger, Mele, Johnson, Mortimer, and Han (2025) followed parent-child pairs from 1988 to 2011 using the Youth Development Study.
They found that parents’ own occupational self-direction predicted their adult children’s occupational self-direction a generation later. This pathway ran specifically through the intrinsic work values a parent held and modelled, not through social class alone.
Values as a Source of Conflict and Inequality
Different sociological perspectives highlight how values can either promote social harmony or reflect and reinforce societal divisions.
Ruling Class Ideology (Marxism):
From a conflict perspective, the dominant values in a capitalist society are those of the ruling class (bourgeoisie), imposed on everyone else through institutions like media and education.
Values like competition and the idea that success is a reward for hard work are part of a ruling class ideology that justifies inequality and discourages challenges to the system.
Cultural Capital (Bourdieu):
Neo-Marxists argue that the education system is dominated by middle-class values, such as respecting authority and appreciating high culture (e.g., opera, classical music).
Middle-class children possess this cultural capital, which gives them an advantage in school, whereas working-class culture, values, and experiences are often devalued.
Group Superiority:
One of the core values identified in the U.S. is group superiority, where people tend to place a greater value on those from their own race, class, or ethnic group.
This value can lead to racism and discrimination.
Functions of Social Values
According to the Functionalist perspective, values are essential for the smooth functioning and stability of society.
Value Consensus:
Functionalists like Émile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons argue that for a society to work, its members must share a common set of beliefs and values. This is a concept known as value consensus (Parsons, 1991).
This societal-wide agreement on the most appropriate values and norms helps to produce social order, as most people agree to abide by the same rules.
Socialization and Transmission:
Values are transmitted from one generation to the next through the process of socialization.
Social institutions like the family and education system are seen as key agents in this process, responsible for teaching children the core cultural values of their society.
This socialization ensures that shared values are internalised by individuals, becoming part of their personality and guiding their behaviour.
Social Solidarity and Integration:
Shared values create social solidarity – a sense of belonging to a coherent group—and social integration, binding individuals together and reinforcing their respect for society’s rules.
For example, Durkheim argued that schools transmit shared cultural values like competition, achievement, and social solidarity, which helps integrate children into society.
Other Sociological Theories
Each perspective below reads this evidence differently.
Conflict Theory:
In contrast, conflict theorists, particularly Marxists, argue that societal values are not neutral. They serve power, not everyone. Ruling elites, the bourgeoisie, impose them to protect their own interests.
The values promoted through institutions like education and media are part of a ruling class ideology — a false picture of society that justifies the existing class structure and inequalities.
Competition and hard work being its own reward are two examples. These values primarily benefit factory and business owners. Workers become less likely to question their own exploitation.
From this perspective, the appearance of a “value consensus” is manufactured to maintain the status quo. It prevents the subordinate class — the proletariat, the working class who must sell their labour to survive — from challenging their position.
Symbolic Interactionism:
This micro-level perspective is less concerned with why societal values exist and more interested in how they are created, interpreted, and modified through daily social interactions.
Interactionists study how values are conveyed through symbols, such as language and gestures, and how individuals negotiate the meanings of these symbols.
For interactionists, values are not static; they are fluid and dependent on how people interpret them in specific situations.
Feminism:
Some feminist theorists, in a similar vein to Marxists who believe that values serve the ruling class, believe that values serve the needs of men.
The values that are most prominent in society – such as individualism, competition, and materialism – benefit men more than women, who are expected to be caretakers and providers.
Other feminist theorists have argued that there is no single set of values that characterize all societies; rather, values vary depending on the specific culture or subculture (Armstrong, 2020).
Critical Evaluation
The functionalist claim that societies rest on a shared value consensus, discussed above, raises an obvious question. Do values converge across societies because they solve a genuinely shared problem, or is any resemblance closer to coincidence?
Shared Function, Not Shared Content
Moral and religious values look, on the surface, like a strong candidate for real cross-cultural universality.
The prohibition on killing recurs independently across very different cultures.
One influential account, the “Big Gods” hypothesis, argues that belief in a watchful, punishing god helped large societies sustain cooperation among strangers (Norenzayan, 2013).
- Aim: Purzycki et al. (2016) tested whether believing that one’s own god monitors and punishes moral transgressions predicts fairer economic behaviour toward distant strangers who share the same faith.
- Method: The researchers recruited participants from eight culturally and religiously diverse field sites, including Christian, Hindu, and traditional-religion communities. Each participant played an anonymous economic game and separately rated how knowledgeable, moralistic, and punishing their own god was believed to be.
- Results: Participants who rated their god as more moralistic and more willing to punish allocated resources more fairly toward distant co-religionists. This pattern held across all eight very different field sites.
- Conclusion: Belief in a moralising, punishing god expands the circle of people treated fairly, in a broadly consistent way across diverse societies.
This is strong cross-cultural evidence that moral and religious values converge on a shared cooperative function, not necessarily on shared content. The specific things different traditions prohibit still vary widely, from a total alcohol ban in Saudi Arabia to no such rule in most Christian-majority societies.
A Weaker, More Realistic Consensus
Taken together, the evidence in this article makes the strongest version of Durkheim and Parsons’s value-consensus claim hard to sustain. No society transmits one identical set.
What the evidence does support is a shared set of problems, such as sustaining cooperation among strangers and raising children fit for the society they will inherit.
Different societies, and different groups within the same society, bring differently weighted answers to those problems. That functional reading, rather than a substantive one, is what allows value consensus to survive contact with the diversity this article has documented.
This does not erase Durkheim’s and Parsons’s insight above. It simply narrows what a “shared value” can honestly claim to be.
Durkheim’s own account emphasised shared ritual, not only shared belief. It is practices performed together that bind a group, whether or not everyone agrees on why.
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