Cultural Psychology of Human Values [1 ed.] 9781617358241, 9781617358234

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Cultural Psychology of Human Values

A volume in Advances in Cultural Psychology Jaan Valsiner, Series Editor

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Cultural Psychology of Human Values

edited by

Angela Uchoa Branco University of Brasilia

Jaan Valsiner Clark University

INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. Charlotte, NC • www.infoagepub.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cultural psychology of human values / edited by Angela Uchoa Branco, Jaan Valsiner. p. cm. -- (Advances in cultural psychology) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-61735-822-7 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-61735-823-4 (hardcover) -ISBN 978-1-61735-824-1 (ebook) 1. Values. 2. Ethnopsychology. I. Branco, Angela Uchoa. II. Valsiner, Jaan. BF778.C795 2012 303.3’72--dc23                             2012011507

Copyright © 2012 Information Age Publishing Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

Contents Editors’ Introduction: Values as Culture in Self and Society............ vii Angela Branco and Jaan Valsiner

Pa rt I Sociocultural Ecology of Values 1 Values, Virtues, Citizenship, and Self From a Historical and Cultural Approach.......................................................................... 3 Alberto Rosa and Fernanda González 2 Cultural Practices and Value Constructions: The Development of Competition and Individualism Within Societies......................... 31 Angela Branco, Marilicia Palmieri, and Raquel Gomes Pinto 3 The Cultural Ecology of Human Values............................................. 63 Jonathan R. H. Tudge, Cesar A. Piccinini, Rita S. Lopez, Tania M. Sperb, Selma C. Dansokho, and Lia B. L. Freitas

Pa rt I I Values in the Field: Framing of Actions 4 Values Internalization on the Move: The Revivification of Faith Along the Pilgrims Path....................................................................... 87 Zachary Beckstead



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5 Making Sense of the Bindi: Urban Indians’ Appraisal of a Culturally Valued Symbol.................................................................. 113 Nandita Chaudhary 6 The Semiotic Construction of Values of Violence in the Colombian Context............................................................................ 137 Francisco José Rengifo Herrera

Pa rt I I I Values and Prejudices: Marking the Borders of Approach–Avoidance Dynamics 7 Persons Living Race in Culture and Society: Psychological Complexity of Symbolic Meaning and Human Values.................... 163 Cynthia E. Winston 8 Diversity and Inclusion as Central Values in the Construction of a Democratic World....................................................................... 195 Ana Flávia do Amaral Madureira and Angela Uchoa Branco

Pa rt I V Inclusion and/or Exclusion: Cultural Ambivalences 9 Education, Peace, or Jail Culture? What is Promoted by Institutions in Charge of Adolescents Involved With Criminal Activities.............................................................................................. 239 Maria Cláudia Santos Lopes de Oliveira and Tatiana Yokoy de Souza 10 Between Freedom and Captivity: Life Projects of Male Ex-Prisoners........................................................................................ 265 Charlotte Mathiassen About the Contributors...................................................................... 289

Editors’ Introduction

Values as Culture in Self and Society Angela Branco and Jaan Valsiner

The study of human values, particularly the investigation of the way ontogenesis intermingles with sociogenesis and is related to microgenesis, has not received much attention within the rapidly advancing field of cultural psychology. The study of language, memory, and cognition has always prevailed over the analysis of topics such as beliefs, values, and other aspects of the psychological domain that are loaded with affective significance. Considering the great relevance of this phenomena in terms of human life and development within contemporary societies, and the challenge of building a just and democratic world, cultural psychology urgently needs to address such issues, usually only partially investigated by traditional social psychologists, anthropologists, and other social sciences. Maybe the reason behind avoiding issues highly imbued with affectivity and motivations was the almost impossibility of submitting the phenomena to the formal logic and rationality that support the value conceded to episteme over phronesis (Aristotle, 1496/1947). For the Greek philosopher, episteme related to rational knowledge construction about the world, while phronesis related to issues concerning wisdom. There should be no doubt that our scientific revolution and knowledge advances about the world relied on epistemological

Cultural Psychology of Human Values, pages vii–xviii Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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grounds, and along history, phronesis did not appeal to the scientists because of its extremely fluid, interpretative (subjective), and relative basis, strongly embedded in affective, motivational, and subjectively “biased” foundations. However, the contributions from cultural psychology are very important to revealing the historical and cultural basis of human values, as well as to making sense of how they operate as fundamental components of motivational systems, and how they permanently translate into cultural practices that, reciprocally, promote the emergence and consolidation of cultural and personal values. In fact, from a cultural psychological perspective, values, viewed from a semiotic vantage point, originate in and simultaneously promote cultural practices. In other terms, observable cultural practices and inferred values that meaningfully guide observable actions, mutually construct each other. This helical nature of mutual infeeding guarantees constant innovation in both values and practices—practice A is led by value B, and in its turn, it leads to a modified version of the value (B′) which in its turn leads to modified practice (A′) and so on. However, there is an important tension: both practices and values are conservative in their nature, while their dynamic relating to each other is constantly producing innovation. Values prevail across irreversible time, while being constantly reconstructed. The same sort of mutual constitution occurs, from a cultural approach, when we define “self” and “culture” as dynamic and interrelated constructs that consist of dialectical parts of a very same complex and open system. The reason this book addresses values as culture in self and society derives from such understanding and this is in no way irrelevant to the point we want to make. From the perspective of cultural psychology, psychological constructs such as values necessarily have a complex and dynamic nature, and they will never make sense if investigated by artificially structured questionnaires or rating scales. They are not entities or fixed categories of any sort, subject to clear-cut classification, and cannot be “extracted” from individuals. In fact, they consist of fluid and complex motivational tendencies that we try to infer from qualitative indicators found in verbal and nonverbal actions and interactions. Beyond the Methodological Tyranny of Rating Scales For a long time, scientific psychology considered observed (measurable) behavior as its unit of analysis (Valsiner & Cairns, 1992). Yet behavior is ephemeral; it is transitory, and its generative mechanisms are nonbehavioral (Valsiner, 2011). The use of rating scales—a method that relies upon

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abbreviated introspection while denying it (Rosenbaum & Valsiner, 2011; Wagoner & Valsiner, 2005)—is an impasse in the efforts to study values. Still, traditionally, values and beliefs have been addressed by social psychologists as stable traits or characteristics that could be extracted from individuals by questionnaires, rating scales, and even from interviews, after the application of statistical procedures on the obtained “data” (e.g., Schwartz, 2004; Schwartz et al., 2001; Tamayo, 2007). According to such an approach, even when interviews are used, they are submitted to a so-called qualitative analysis that makes use of content analysis softwares, used to quantify the frequencies of specific units (words, verbal enunciations). However, a significant amount of research grounded in an actual qualitative approach is increasingly carried out by social scientists—including psychologists—to make sense of the meaning–co-constructive processes taking place within communication practices (e.g., Camic, Rhodes, & Yardley, 2007; LeedsHurwitz, 1995; Murray, 2008; Shweder & Much, 1987; Tappan, 1998). Such research interviews include the researcher as a participant in the dialogue, and his conduct must be analyzed since it contributes to information-gathering techniques used in research. The major point then is that data will always result from interpretative processes that take place at two different moments. First, they result from procedures designed to obtain information on the target issue, and second, they are central to the analysis and theoretical appraisal of information significance. The importance of meaning-construction processes was masterfully addressed by Bruner (1997) and many other contemporary scientists (e.g., Camic et al., 2007; Smith, 2008; Valsiner, 2007). To be truthful, we also have to acknowledge the past efforts of think-tankers such as Baldwin, Janet, Vygotsky, Werner, and others. In general terms, interpretation is meaning construction, and meaning-construction processes are fundamental for the ontogenesis of beliefs and values emerging from specific cultural contexts. Hence, the major point we want to make is how crucial values are to actually orient individuals’ interpretations of the world and therefore their own conduct toward expected, desirable goals. In our own elaborations over the definition of the term “values” (Valsiner, Branco, & Dantas, 1997), we suggest that values are motivational dispositions that are deeply rooted in individuals’ affective domains. Often people talk about their values, but in fact they mean their ideal expectations or the moral principles they wish to be guiding their everyday goal orientations and actions. This means that we can desire and hope for being guided in life by certain values—and we can elaborate nice discourses about them— but not rarely are we, instead, actually making choices and orienting our everyday life interactions and struggles toward completely different kinds of values (“I hate la bourgoisie, but I need to buy this excellent griffe clothing,” etc.). Even though such idealized values should also be studied from

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a psychological point of view, we are at the moment particularly interested in learning more about the development of those values that seem, in reality, to orient the person’s conduct as s/he interacts with others, with themselves, and with the world at-large. This means that we have to face a continuous challenge on both theoretical and methodological grounds, because the very nature of the phenomena under study is exceptionally complex. However, their relevance and the possibilities opened by careful qualitative investigation may result in productive analysis and knowledge construction about our topic: values as culture in self and society. With this book, we argue once more (Branco, 2003, 2012; Branco & Valsiner, 1997; Valsiner, 2007) that psychology’s best solution to its epistemological crises is to overcome the traditional tendency (e.g., Schwartz, 2004; Tamayo, 2007; Triandis, 1995) of studying values as fixed entities. When we consult the literature about values, we rarely find theoretical elaborations on their development, which requires taking a perspective encompassing the occurrence of change over time at both cultural/contextual and personal/subjective levels. Certainly we can find some authors addressing the issue and pursuing explanations for values development from various sociocultural perspective versions, drawing on the work of Vygotsky and Bruner, some stressing the centrality of cultural activities, and others, meaning construction (e.g., Rogoff, 2003; Shweder, 1991). Alternative cultural approaches, though, need to rely on sociohistorical elaborations and preserving the dynamic nature of the phenomena. Moreover, the cultural paradigm makes possible taking into account the complexities of human development, bringing to the forefront the analysis of ever-developing cultural contexts, as well as the constructive role played by individuals. However, cultural psychology is still incipient regarding the topic (Branco, 2012). Cultural psychological perspective allows for relatively varied forms of conceptualizations and is characterized by intellectual freedom. This results in different though relatively compatible theoretical diversity. The contributors to this book will partially reflect this characteristic, while discussing contemporary aspects of the topic. In our own studies, respectively carried out at the University of Brasilia (Laboratory of Microgenesis in Social Interactions) and at Clark University (with the collaboration of a substantial group of international researchers), we approach the issue of values development, taking into account the primacy of the affective dimension of human development (see Chapter 8 and the Semiotic Regulatory System developed by Valsiner, 2007). In Brasilia, we have particularly carried out empirical studies concerning topics related to socially interdependent interactive patterns, values, social practices and motivation, morality conceptualizations, and moral development. Research on such topics has mostly taken place within school contexts, with an emphasis on teacher-student and child-child interactions.

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In such studies, both observations (in natural settings and in structured situations) and interviews were utilized in order to construct data. Other projects have been carried out with adolescents, mostly using semistructured narrative interviews in which selected video scenes were used as tools to trigger participants’ elaborations. The Sociocultural Constructivist Approach in Cultural Psychology Among others, cultural psychology may take a sociocultural constructivist approach to better conceptualize self and culture. It requires the adoption of a historical, dynamic, semiotic, and dialogical approach to the reciprocal constitution of culture and individual. This issue has been analyzed by many theorists (e.g., Elias, 1994; Morin & Prigogine, 2000; Valsiner, 2007), demonstrating the need for fundamental innovation in the theoretical core of psychology. Much of the 20th-century psychology, despite its claims for various “revolutions” (behaviorist, cognitivist, etc.), has not only failed to solve general problems of the nature of the psyche, but has made the solutions increasingly difficult (see Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). The assumption of the centrality of quantification in bringing about “objectivity” in psychology has kept the discipline away from looking objectively at its phenomena. In contrast, from a systemic point of view, human condition is conceived as a plural and dynamic phenomena consisting of an intertwined network of relations that result in a complex system—the developmental self—encompassing multiple dialogical interactions at both intra- and interindividual levels. The systemic nature of the sociocultural constructivist approach overcomes the dichotomy between subject versus culture and acknowledges their legitimacy (subject, culture) and their constant codevelopment. Where there is whatever-we-call “culture,” there is necessarily a “culture maker.” The joint work of cultural canalization, via social suggestions, explicit plus implicit constraints, and the constructive nature of individuals, consists of the pillars that sustain all theoretical and methodological edifices of this contemporary approach. In other words, cultural canalization processes occur along historical and ontogenetic time and interact with human agency through complex and yet-to-be-revealed intricate processes, and simultaneously give rise to human development. In similar ways, cultural practices and psychological meanings co-construct each other along microgenesis and ontogeny. This theoretical framework also emphasizes the centrality of meaningconstruction processes to human condition and development, therefore the role of semiosis cannot be underestimated (Lotman, 1990; Peirce, 1967; Rosa, 2007). Human nature and development are necessarily nurtured

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within symbolic contexts, composed by sociocultural practices (Rogoff, 2003; Wertsch, 1998) and critical reflexivity. The constant work of cultural canalization processes, through direct and indirect social suggestions, occurs along historical and ontogenetic times, in complex interactions with each individual’s agency in relation to both personal and sociocultural development. The principles of determinism and indeterminism (Fogel, Lyra, & Valsiner, 1997), hence, trigger interdependent processes that will explain the similarities and dissimilarities found among individuals and groups. Valsiner et al. (1997) suggest differentiating beliefs from values based on the load of affectivity attached to each “promoter sign” (Valsiner, 2007). Values become emotionally laden along ontogeny, while beliefs are easier to change as new trustful information is provided. Values, though, are more resistant to simple information, instruction, or training. Their relevance also includes the strong hypothesis that they play, together with cultural historical characteristics, a very important role in each person’s life projects and ideals. In addition, they provide for the energy pushing the individual to pursue particular goals in specific situations and in life as well (Barrios & Branco, 2008; Martins & Branco, 2001). Human values, though, are not necessarily coherent or compatible with each other, and as put before, they are part of a complex motivation system that empowers some values over others depending on specific situations. Due to the complexities of open motivational systems, then, some people can seem more consistent and predictable, while others are not, and can even surprise people with unexpected actions or reactions. We can surely affirm that the culture-psychological perspective has proved fruitful in the study of human values, patterns of interactions shown in social practices, and in the investigation of concepts referring to phenomena related to morality and moral development (Branco, 2012). From such a historically oriented approach, culture, activities, affect, motivation, language, and values all become fundamental aspects of the complex phenomena under investigation. Consequently, we concluded that to scientifically investigate values-development processes, it is indispensable to take into account the complex flux of ontogenesis within culturally structured contexts, giving a special emphasis to the co-constructive development of values and practices in certain directions, instead of others. Our Major Questions The major questions we now face consist of asking, “Which are the processes involved in the sociogenesis of human values and everyday social practices?”; “How do such processes actually work?”; “How do internalization processes take place?”; and similar questions. Each chapter of this book

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will provide the reader with a particular contribution toward this general quest. With this book, we want to stress not only theoretical issues related to the topic but also trigger a broad and meaningful discussion on innovative ideas and methodologies, which can allow for the study of complex psychological processes. We especially highlight the use of microgenetic analysis (Siegler & Crowley, 1991) of meaning-construction processes that take place within specific cultural contexts. The role played by language, cognition, and affect, all intertwined, is emphasized to make sense of the emergence of motives as well as actions put in motion by individuals. In short, with the present selection of texts, we want this book to invite the reader to reflect upon how cultural psychology may help to further investigate socially relevant phenomena concerning moral values and cultural practices, keeping in mind the mutual construction of cultural activities and values, both comprised in the cornerstone of human development. This is a particularly relevant topic for investigation all over the capitalist globalized world, where violence and an increasing difficulty to live according to ethical principles, and even relatively gentle social interactions, prevail. Values as Hypergeneralized Signs Values are culture, not of culture. Talk about “cultural values” is as precise as talking of “sugary sugar” or “watery water.” In the semiotic version of cultural psychology (Branco & Valsiner, 2010; Valsiner, 2007), values belong to the highest level of semiotic regulatory hierarchy (Level 4; see Figure I.1, also in Beckstead, Chapter 4, and Madureira & Branco, Chapter 8, this volume). They guide our conduct, yet are ephemeral when we try to locate them. They are everywhere in human lives, and by being there, they are nowhere to be found. We can, of course, label the values and talk about them through the use of such labels in more (Level 3) or less (Level 2) vague verbal terms. In terms of the dynamic semiotic view in cultural psychology, that amounts to downward translation of the hypergeneralized sign field: from Level 4 (not describable in its fullness through words) to Level 3 or 2 (where verbal communication is possible). Talking about values is not a full account of these values. Values are silent as they operate; talking about them breaks that silence, and no longer fully represents the values. Still, as is evident from Figure I.1, each of the levels of affective presentation of the feeling can participate in the regulation of future conduct as a new general feeling orientation (Level  1) emerges from the flow of bodily experiencing. In Figure I.2, we try to depict the hierarchical dynamic organization of values, goal orientations, and their complex role in canalizing human

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Figure I.1  Five levels of affective self-regulation.

actions and interactions. As time goes by, the open system dynamically changes, but some values may continue to prevail over others (or not), depending on their affective power to regulate the system, as well as on other interdependent factors, particularly the nature of the current experienced contexts. Conceiving motivation and actions as in Figure I.2, there is no way to study the topic by simply applying questionnaires or rating scales, as do traditional social psychologists.

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Figure I.2  Dynamic interactions between hierarchically organized levels of Individual Motivation System at time (t1) (simplified depiction) V = Values Fields; GO = goal orientations.

Overview of the Structure of the Book This book is organized in four parts. Each part complements the other and is presented to the reader with a short introduction that might be helpful to keep the connectedness of the contribution. In Part I, “Sociocultural-Historical Foundations of Values,” Rosa Rivero and Fernanda González discuss values, virtues, citizenship, and self from a historical and cultural approach, providing the reader with a general cultural perspective on the book’s topic; Branco, Palmieri, and Gomes Pinto stress the mutual construction of values and cultural practices as they present empirical data supporting their elaborations; and Tudge et al. approach the issue from a cultural ecological perspective. In Part II, “Values in the Field: Framing of Actions,” Beckstead provides a very interesting analysis of value internalization processes regarding pilgrims’ experiences, Chaudhary discusses the role of the bindi as a semiotic marker related to values in the Indian culture, while Rengifo-Herrera analyzes the issue of violence as a historically situated cultural

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value in Colombia. Chapters in Part III, “Values and Prejudices: Marking the Borders Of Approach-Avoidance Dynamics,” approach the issue with the theoretical contributions of Winston concerning racial prejudices, and Madureira and Branco present an elaboration on the issue of other sorts of prejudices related to the need for diversity acceptance and social inclusion as central values in the construction a democratic world. In the last Part, “Inclusion and/or Exclusion: Cultural Ambivalences,” Lopes de Oliveira and Yokoy analyze the ambiguities regarding values with which adolescents involved in criminal activities need to deal within the pseudo-educational contexts where they are sent by the Brazilian penal system. Their chapter is followed by Mathiassen’s, which deeply studies the life projects of male exprisoners in Denmark. We hope this international selection of theoretical elaborations will contribute to further promote the theoretical study and empirical investigation that we believe are absolutely necessary to better understand, from a psychological standpoint, human values constructions and cultural practices. References Aristotle (1496/1947). The Nicomachean ethics. London, England: William Heinemann. Barrios, A., & Branco, A. U. (2008). Desenvolvimento moral: Novas perspectivas de análise. Revista Psicologia Argumento (PUCPR), 25(51), 413–424. Branco, A. U. (2003). Social development in social contexts: Cooperative and competitive interaction patterns in peer interactions. In J. Valsiner & K. Connolly (Eds.), Handbook of developmental psychology (pp. 238–256). London, England: Sage. Branco, A. (2012). Values and socio-cultural practices: Pathways to moral development. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), Oxford handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 1833– 1880). Oxford, England: University of Oxford Press. Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (1997). Changing methodologies: A co-constructivist study of goal orientations in social interactions. Psychology and Developing Societies, 9(1), 35–64. Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (2010). Towards cultural psychology of affective processes: Semiotic regulation of dynamic fields. Estudios de Psicologia, 31(3), 243–251. Bruner, J. (1997). Atos de significação. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Artes Médicas. Camic, P. M., Rhodes, J. E., & Yardley, L. (2007). Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Elias, N. (1994). A sociedade dos indivíduos. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Zahar Editora. Fogel, A., Lyra, M. C., & Valsiner, V. (1997). Dynamics and indeterminism in developmental and social processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Leeds-Hurwizt, W. (1995). Social approaches to communication. New York, NY: Guilford.

Values as Culture in Self and Society     xvii Lotman, Y. (1990). Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Martins, L. C., & Branco, A. U. (2001) Desenvolvimento moral: Considerações teóricas a partir de uma abordagem sociocultural construtivista. Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa, 17(2), 169–176. Morin, E., & Prigogine, I. (2000). A sociedade em busca de valores. Lisbon, Portugal: Instituto Piaget. Murray, M. (2008). Narrative psychology. In J. Smith (Ed.), Qualitative psychology (pp. 111–132). London, England: Sage. Peirce, C. S. (1967). Annotated catalogue of the papers of Charles S. Peirce. In R. Robin (Ed.), Amherst: University of Massachusetts. Rogoff, B. (2003). The cultural nature of human development. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Rosa, A. (2007). Acts of psyche: Actuations as synthesis of semiosis and action. In J. Valsiner & A. Rosa (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology (pp. 205–237). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Rosenbaum, P. J., & Valsiner, J. (2011). The un-making of a method: From rating scales to the study of psychological processes. Theory & Psychology, 21(1), 47–65. Schwartz, S. H. (2004). Mapping and interpreting cultural differences around the world. In H. Vinken, J. Soeters, & P. Ester (Eds.), Comparing cultures: Dimensions of cultures in a comparative perspective. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. Schwartz, S. H., Melech, G., Lehmann, A., Burgess, S., Harris, M., & Owens, V. (2001). Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human values with a different method of measurement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(5), 519–542. Shweder, R. (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shweder, R. A., & Much, N. C. (1987). Determinations of meaning: Discourse and moral socialization. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Moral development through social interaction (pp. 197–244). New York, NY: Wiley. Siegler, R. S., & Crowley, K. (1991). The microgenetic method. American Psychologist, 46(6), 606–620. Smith, J. (2008). Qualitative psychology. London, England: Sage. Tamayo, A. (2007). Hierarquia de valores transculturais e brasileiros. Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa, 23, 7–15. Tappan, M. (1998). Moral education in the zone of proximal development. Journal of Moral Education, 27(2), 141–161. Toomela, A., & Valsiner, J. (2010). Methodological thinking in psychology: 60 years gone astray? Charlotte, NC: Information Age. Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. San Francisco, CA: Westview. Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies. New Delhi, India: Sage. Valsiner, J. (2011). Constructing the vanishing present between the future and the past. Infancia y Aprendizaje, 34(2), 141–150. Valsiner, J., Branco, A. U., & Dantas, C. (1997). Socialization as co-construction: Parental belief orientations and heterogeneity of reflection. In J. E. Grusec & L. Kuczynski (Eds.), Parenting and children’s internalization of values (pp. 283– 306). New York, NY: Wiley.

xviii    Values as Culture in Self and Society Valsiner, J., & Cairns, R. B. (1992). Theoretical perspectives on conflict and development. In C. U. Shantz & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent development (pp. 15–35). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Wagoner, B., & Valsiner, J. (2005). Rating tasks in psychology: From static ontology to dialogical synthesis of meaning. In A. Gülerce, A. Hofmeister, I. Staeuble, G. Saunders, & J. Kaye (Eds.), Contemporary theorizing in psychology: Global perspectives (pp. 197–213). Toronto, Canada: Captus. Wertsch, J. W. (1998). Mind as action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Part I Sociocultural Ecology of Values

Introduction Values emerge—in human relating with the immediate culturally structured environments. Hence, a book on values needs to begin with a look at the sociocultural ecological contexts wherein such emergence might happen. Not surprisingly, efforts to understand such social ecology of values have been with occidental thought since the antiquity, as Rosa and González (Chapter 1) eloquently demonstrate. However, ancient concepts need to be productive ones—their historical survival may reflect a stalemate in a given science rather than solid grounds for its further development. In Chapter 1, we can also observe an innovative solution to the problem of value emergence—ethical autopoiesis—that Rosa and González introduce to capture the work of the self at different levels of operation (social, political, ethical; see Table 1.2 in Chapter 1) that lead to hypergeneralized values such as respect and dignity. It is that level of socially relevant phenomena that cultural psychology aspires to investigate, despite the reductionist ethos in most of psychology. In Chapter 2, Branco, Palmieri, and Gomes Pinto provide an overview of a consistent research program at the University of Brasilia that, over 20 years, has been dedicated to the study of cooperative values in human ontogeny. It is a comprehensive program involving multiple levels, from the study of the play activities of preschoolers to the ways of reasoning of teachers and the encoding of values into mass-media messages. The research program has a strong voice for social and educational practices; the promotion of val-

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2    PART I: Sociocultural Ecology of Values

ues of cooperation and nonviolence needs to be holistic, capture the whole life-world of developing children and their parents, and should strategically neutralize the tendencies of contemporary societies to build economic and social gains on an individualistic and competitive value orientation. How the different suggestions for value orientations are actually embedded in children’s life-worlds we learn most about from Tudge and his colleagues (from Rio Grande de Sul in Brazil) in Chapter 3. This chapter is also a result of a long-term research program on children’s life-environments that Jonathan Tudge has pioneered in a number of societies around the world over the past 2 decades. Its roots are in Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theoretical views about social contexts of childhood. The basic argument is to understand values one needs to study the ways in which people deal with one another. In the case of parents’ child-rearing values for relative independence or conformity, it is necessary to examine the ways in which parents provide opportunities for their children to exercise autonomy or try to follow their children’s leads. Children are active explorers of their surroundings, and the social world sets up in these environments different settings that guide them toward values-based conduct well ahead of the time when they begin to reflect upon values themselves. It is precisely in these settings in which the social structure of society is put in place to be accepted by the children in its tacit ways. Their parents are of some social-class origin, and that basis is implicitly brought to their children through performing very ordinary everyday tasks in ways guided by such class values. Thus, middle-class parents are more likely to act according to values of autonomy and self-direction, whereas working-class parents might value their children conforming to previously established rules. The values guard the social-class distinctions. At the same time, such class homogenization direction is simultaneously countered by the heterogeneity of the ways in which parents in any country organize the life spaces for children. This seeming contradiction between homogenization and heterogenization of the contexts of emerging values keeps the socialization system open for further development.

Chapter 1

Values, Virtues, Citizenship, and Self From a Historical and Cultural Approach Alberto Rosa and Fernanda González

La vertu dans la république est l’amour . . . de l’égalité. Ce n’est point une vertu morale, ni une vertu Chrétienne; c’est la vertu politique (Virtue in the republic is love . . . of equality. It is not a moral virtue, not a Christian virtue; it is the political virtue) —Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu: De l’esprit des lois (1758)

This chapter will essay a view on how cultural values get embodied in human individuals. That is, how values get appropriated so they turn into something belonging to the inner structure of the human agent. There are many fields of knowledge involved in the issues to be discussed here: ethics, sociology, politics, and psychology are among them. Our attempt will be to explore how tools of knowledge taken from these different disciplines may be of use to study how individuals experience their involvement in civic life, how they feel about it, how they may think what they ought to do, how they

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may figure out what to do, and eventually how they act. In other words, our concern is about how the knowledge provided by these disciplines may be instrumental in the explanation of individual experience and action. Citizenship—A Scenario for the Exercise of Values What Is Citizenship? Citizenship is one of the shapes sociopolitical identity has taken throughout time (Heater, 2004). Feudal, monarchic, tyrannical, and national are others. What makes citizenship different is that it is an identification of the individual with the state (an institution), rather than with an individual ruler or a cultural community of belonging. Civic identity (citizenship) comes from the state granting rights to individuals in return for the duties they have in conditions of equality. This makes citizenship different from the feudal and monarchic ways of relationship with the political sphere, in which belonging to one class or another provides the individual with a different set of rights and duties. Nevertheless, there is no clear-cut agreed-upon definition of citizenship, so the limits between the abovementioned forms of identity and citizenship itself are rather fuzzy. Whatever the case, citizenship is related to both cives (the city—one kind of environment for social interaction) and polis (the state). In antiquity and the Middle Ages, both entities sometimes coincided in a city-state, in which groups of individuals could enjoy some kinds of political equality (even if different from one class to another; e.g., plebeian versus senatorial class in ancient Rome), beyond the reach of others (slaves and foreigners did not enjoy any sort of privilege). The city is not just a place where a tribe has settled. Cities are not just overgrown villages; they are places for exchanging, for commerce, with people coming and going, with new settlers. Somebody could become a citizen not only because the person was born within the tribe (ius sanguinis) or within the territory of the state (ius solis), but also when welcomed into the city as an equal, even as a foreigner who paid the duties to be granted certain degrees of equality in rights for living in the city. When this happens, the individual is beyond a natural “political animal” (zoon politikon, in Aristotelian terms), the individual now becomes a legal entity, a naturalized citizen as in Roman law. Citizenship is granted through a legal procedure, and birth is not the only way to qualify for it. To be a citizen also means to have some responsibility and loyalty toward the state, which requires the mastering of civic skills and habits of the

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heart (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tiptom, 1985), a paideia, which, according to the ancient Greeks, made a barbarian become cultured (acculturation), enabling him or her to change into being “one of us” (San Martín, 1999). Varieties of Citizenship The city-states of antiquity and the Middle Age had a size and a population that facilitated the direct exercise of civic and political rights and duties. Cives and polis (the social and political realms) were not yet separated. Citizens (only a fraction of the population, which excluded slaves, foreigners, and sometimes women) could and did exercise their civic and political duties not only at military and fiscal levels, but also at administrative and political ones. From such social practices, a moral of virtues evolved, together with a mandatory training of the citizens to master the virtues that empowered them to live a good life (a life worth living) within the city. This kind of citizenship is often characterized as republican citizenship. When the state became wider than the city, the political and the civic realms started to separate, and so too civic and political rights and duties. A new shape then emerged, the so-called liberal citizenship, a typical product of modernity. There is also a third kind of citizenship that started to be claimed by the time of the Hellenistic empires: the cosmopolitan citizenship. To some extent, this is a kind of utopian identity as well as a sort of contradiction in terms. However, such an idea cannot easily be spared. On the one hand, there never was, nor is there, a universal state capable of granting rights, nor demanding duties, to and from everybody. In addition, if citizenship is a kind of identity, how could it be universal? Could it exist without some form of otherness from which it could differentiate? On the other hand, to what realm, other than some kind of cosmopolitan citizenship, could universal human rights belong to? These three spaces for citizenship (Rivero, 2001) were already in operation in Hellenic times, but they took different forms as time moved along. The social, cultural, and economical changes of modernity produced radical transformations. The European religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries ended up producing new kinds of political and legal achievements that started to be implemented in some places from the 18th century onward. Among them were (a) the separation of the private and the public realms—freedom of consciousness; (b) the creation of a sociopolitical rational order—the Rule of Law; (c) the instrumental rationality (economics) under the control of the state; and (d) the fact that political pacts rather than violence became the only legitimate way of settling conflicts

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within the state, since the state had the monopoly on the “legitimate” use of violence. These transformations turned kingdoms into nation-states, which were built taking into account the values of equality, solidarity, and justice—at least in principle. Justice acted as the backbone of the polis by balancing the rights and duties of the new national citizenry. This happened together with the development of representative forms of democracy, which implied the separation of cives from polis, rights and duties from the effective exercise of political office and power. A new triad of values came to the forefront: liberté, égalité, fraternité. Institutions, Law and Rigths: Agencies for the Actualization of Values Social Pact Theories Political theorists legitimized this new state of affairs through social pact theories. These can roughly be divided in two versions, authored by Hobbes and Rousseau, respectively. From them, two rather different approaches developed to what at the time was called moral science—nowadays ethics, but also social sciences including psychology. The Hobbesian version took for granted that the pact made sense because individuals had to preserve their interests—security the first among them. British empiricists and other forefathers of liberalism developed a view according to which individual interests were the fuel for economic progress, a move that turned greed (formerly a vice) into ambition (a new virtue). This egotistic drive was counterbalanced by the existence of (prosocial) feelings of pity, so that one would not completely overrun the weaker without suffering from some guilt. As liberals presented the picture of history at-large, progress went ahead as if driven by the invisible hand of Nature. Adam Smith’s optimistic view could not resist the objections of Malthus and Ricardo’s new contributions to liberal economics, which pointed out that resources were always scarcer than needs, and salaries had to be kept low so that capital could be saved and reinvested. Eventually, utilitarists (Bentham and the Mills) came into the picture, producing a view of politics in which governmental action had to be commanded by a principle of utility that takes common good to be the result of an algorithm capable of offering a positive balance from the addition of “happiness minus unhappiness” of the state total population—a calculus sociological surveys were able to provide in due time. In sum, this approach takes individuals to be driven by their motives and feelings, considers the state as an agency for furthering individual interests, and historical change to be the result of some kind of natural dynamics. Psychological principles,

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the laws of economics, and political techniques come together wrapped within the same package, according to which the moral sciences are no different than natural sciences, and so should work according to principles similar to those of Newtonian mechanics. Rousseau’s social pact provided a more optimistic view of human beings. He believed that humans are prone to cooperation rather than to the tendency to be always at war with each other, as Hobbes seemed to think. This diverse approach makes a big difference in the relationship between the individual and the state. While for Hobbes the state must be a leviathan in which individual’s (natural) sovereignty resigns to preserve peace, for Rousseau, the state must offer resources for cooperation so that a volonté generale (a common will) could emerge. Since that common will is the result of a negotiation, the individual obligation to obey results from an act of freedom, even if one is in disagreement with the outcome. The pact, and the elaboration of the common will, is an exercise of rationality in search of common good. The resulting agreements empower the state as an agency for moral progress (both collective and individual), and moral rules become the result of public deliberation, which ends up in moral imperatives for the direction of individual action. Both the state and the individual collaborate in the development of new rules for the search and development of good, and so they are (one for the other) agencies for moral development. Laws and moral rules result from deliberation as the judgments of the tribunal of reason (both public and individual) are. Individual consciousness is then a space for deliberation, for the production of rules for behavior, for judgment; and it is also an internalization of the public space. Kant and Hegel follow the trail of this argument, as Freud, Kohlberg, Piaget, and Vygotsky also do. The Hobbesian and the Rousseaunian outlooks present rather contrasting views. The former presents a sort of bottom-up view of political life and history. His perspective is presented as a product of the prevalence of the fittest, which rests upon the view of a natural individual autonomy, which conceals a notion of a natural mechanics of needs and desires—a kind of NATURAL Law. The Roussseaunian-Kantian view, in contrast, is constructionist rather than reductionist. It argues that it is cooperation within the civic space that produces new institutions and norms, which in turn, open new spaces for citizenship, and so on and so forth. If a quick contrast between these two views of the social pact had to be made, one could say that in the first case the state is at the service of the individual, while in the second both are a resource to each other in the search and production of good. Or in fewer words, the first considers that everyone knows from the beginning what is his/her own good, while for the second, the good (common and individual) is a product of the history of culture.

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As time went by, these two views evolved, and the boundaries between them started to blur. John Stuart Mill (Essay on Liberty, 1860/1909) offered a sort of third way, according to which liberty cannot be taken as something primordial or natural at all; liberty is not the capability of reaching the object of desire whenever the person wants, or people would be slaves of their own desires. Rather, liberty is the result of freeing oneself from the tyranny of immediacy, opening new possible paths for actions. Liberty is not something natural, but something one can reach by painfully conquering some spaces for autonomy. Rights are a historical product of sociocultural efforts to open new possibilities for acting with lesser degrees of dependency from the existing powers (of nature or society), what creates new spaces for the exercise of autonomy, that is, liberty. That is the reason why the concept of “rights” is so fragile, for rights are not natural properties but cultural realities born from the establishment of social pacts. For rights to prevail, resources and institutions are required, as well as citizens’ willingness to honor their duties. Therefore, rights result from historical acts of creation, which release natural constraints such as submission to brute force, either natural or social. Legal rights (property, justice, vote), social rights (health, education, housing, work), human rights (preservation of life, freedom of thought and speech) are not at all natural, for they could not exist in nature without culture. They result from efforts to open spaces for liberty. They are fully artificial, and a consequence of the creation of norms to order social life in such a way that individuals acquire new properties as subjects, in the double sense of becoming agents and citizens of the state. So, rights create new capabilities for the individual who, as a result, turns into a cultural entity (a person) capable of planning the future and creating new ways to construct him/herself. Rights belong to the ethical domain and provide humans with a very “unnatural” feature, that is, dignity (Marina, 1995). The substantive universalism of law and rights results from these ideas of modernity. Modernity produced a rather utopian view according to which the future would generate a form of state shaped in accordance with the rational order produced by scientific knowledge. However, things have proved not to be so easy, as we will argue below. Otherness in the Pact Both social pact theories are always concerned about one particular group, an I and many you, which altogether make an us; but they both leave aside a third party, meaning the others (they). Hobbesians may admit the others in if they sign the contract in order to come into polis, and in so doing they become a part of cives; but Rousseaunians would want newcomers

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to reach the superior moral stature of seasoned citizens before being admitted to the status of equality, for they have first to be properly educated. There is no doubt that nationhood is a matter between us, the I, and the respective, equal you. The third part (they) is either a threat or, at best, irrelevant. It is to be kept aside, it is outside of the pact. One may even deal with them if they come in one by one, so they could be controlled. But if too many of them come together and occupy our space with the intention of staying with us, then we and they have a problem, and so do cives and polis. When this happens, a new social actor makes itself visible. It is not that it was not there before, in fact it was there from the beginning, but it was disguised as demos, the cultural identity. This is a problem because it is evident that the trinity of polis, cives, and demos cannot be easily contracted in the unity of an idealized nation (ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer). In spite of this idealized view of nationhood, most of the nation-states are not homogeneous, neither in terms of religion nor ethnicity or culture. Also, as is the case in modern states, citizenship rarely implies the need for a direct involvement in political administration. Nationhood, however, does not equal citizenship. Demos, cives, and polis have to be articulated. This requires taking the “Other” into account when revising the pact. It should be remembered that the pact not only founded the polis (it is not easy to establish when that pact actually happened), but it needs to be reenacted everyday (Renan, 1882) if the polis is to be kept in existence. The subject of the pact is not an ethnically homogeneous nationstate anymore. Individuals and the state are not now somehow alloyed in a sort of mystical unity. Rather, the new kind of emerging polis is quite different; it is made up of people of mixed kinds rather than conationals. The utopian universalism of modernity is already in jeopardy. An internal and external third party, the he or she (who are not politically equal to us—they are they), cannot be ignored. They are not conationals, but they may (and do) become co-citizens of some kind. A sort of citizenship gradualism is now in operation. Resident aliens do not have political rights, but they may be entitled to social rights (health, education, etc.) while they are among us. Human rights, in particular, are attributed to all members of the species. No matter how foreign they are to us, we are still committed to them; we recognize their dignity. It is as if an increasing awareness about the Other were in operation. An awareness that is not independent from the development of international institutions and positive law. Individual feelings, moral drives, legal obligations all seem to be increasingly interlinked with sociopolitical institutions and their norms, in a sort of to-and-fro movement. But is this a view shared by everybody? Is this an inevitable change smoothly proceeding ahead?

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Culture, Identity, Otherness, Experience, and Citizenship What makes somebody equal or different in rights and duties, to be one of us or one of them? This is a tricky question, which is at the core of some of the current discussions in social philosophy. This question can be answered only by first deciding what is the arena in which it should be answered. For some, there is no way in which a political community could exist without sharing cultural values (e.g., MacIntyre, 1984; Taylor, 1989); while for others, political and cultural communities intersect, although not always smoothly (e.g., Kymlicka, 1995). The first view tends to make demos and polis coincide and somehow makes citizenship redundant (or collapse into nationhood), while the second dwells in the intermediate space between the other two (cives and citizenship). Both views acknowledge the importance of culture for the constitution of social identities. Culture is the toolkit of skills and habits, feelings and values that translates into symbols and practices and makes possible for people to have meaningful individual experience. Culture provides artifacts and rules, symbols and grammars, practices and norms, institutions and laws. Particular organization of family and kinship, recreational associations, clubs, structures of leadership, power, and so on are among the social institutions that hold a group together. Language, art, folklore, food, rituals, calendars and organization of time, religion, literature, and history are among the symbolic elements culture provides. These shared elements make it possible for some common meanings to appear, some kind of intersubjectivity to develop, shared goals to be desired (and sometimes reached), and a social and personal identity to be shaped. In sum, culture turns the group into a community and makes the individual human. Each individual and collectivity have final values (beliefs about “what really matters” as goals) as well as means for reaching those ends, which are also valued. Final values are those that provide sense, and make experience—and what experience presents, such as objects, actions, agents, feelings, desires, even oneself—meaningful. Each culture provides final values about what makes a life worth living. That is why these values are so deeply ingrained in personal and cultural identity, because they make possible for one to choose between what is important or dispensable to experience one’s own life in one particular way, and what oneself is and wants to be. The reason for culture to be so conspicuous in current political discussions probably is not so much because, as before, it was thought desirable that states were culturally monolithic—if some of them were, that was more the exception than the rule (Smith, 1991). Neither is it now conspicuous because migrations are now eroding the ethnic predominance of a group within a state. The main issue is that now we are facing problems beyond

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the capabilities of the state to solve. Ecological issues and globalization are putting state sovereignty in jeopardy (Touraine, 1995). Instrumental practices, such as economics and the media, now follow rules operating across national borders, beyond the control of any particular state. When this happens, states are deprived of some of their means to mediate between natural and social orders, and its operational role for the governance of social systems of solidarity diminishes. When this happens, there is no guarantee that a rational Rule of Law will be applied. As a consequence, individuals start to withdraw from participating in political and civil life. Ethnic belonging and cultural identities—old or new, in terms of religion, sects, gender, gangs, and the like—come to the forefront in public life, particularly among those who are left in the margins of society, and have no way of defining themselves otherwise. If culture appears as a tricky issue in political discussions, it’s because that in real life, culture cannot be pronounced as singular. If only one culture did exist, there would be no way in which to tell it apart from nature. So if one speaks of culture, one is talking about an abstraction, while when referring to what is going on in concrete societies, one should better speak of one culture as different from others. For example, one adheres to a religion or a group, loves or hates particular symbols, foods or landscapes, but does not feel strongly committed to the Social Security system or the Internal Revenue Service. If one wants polis, cives, and demos to hold together, both types of values (final and instrumental) have to reach some kind of compromise; they have to come to terms so that one’s own cultural identity is not at odds with the rationality of means governed by the laws of the state. Touraine (1995) suggests that this is possible by being very careful not to impose some cultural values upon others, something that can be done in secular and democratic states. In other words, civic rationality should be restricted to the means, leaving aside references to the ends. For individual citizens to feel committed to the state, the latter has to be felt as a resource rather than an obstacle for reaching one’s own ends. This requires formulae for civic solidarity to be devised so that the social pact does not become ineffective for some. Otherwise, a part of the population becomes instrumentally unequal. The key issue is then to provide some sort of compatibility among different kinds of cultural identity within one particular polis. The old secular democratic state may have the resources for dealing with this situation if it is able to resist, in nonaggressive ways, the blunt pushes of fundamentalists of different kinds. Success in this endeavor may be easier if no particular sociocultural rationality is imposed upon others, no matter how widespread it is within the population. Citizenship is precisely the kind of identity that implies a commitment to instrumental values and to the agencies in charge of promoting them—state laws and institutions.

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Taking the Other into Account in the Social Pact: Values of Citizenship Civic values are instrumental for exercising the cultural values that provide experience characterized by personal and social significance. But they are also instrumental for something else. They keep open the possibility of freeing oneself from the obligation to follow imposed (or received) cultural values; they are a resource for increasing personal freedom. Civic values can exist only because the continuous presence of Otherness. They would cease to exist if the third party (the they) disappeared within the plural you of the social pact. That is the reason why the new social pact requires the Other, and why an active defense of diversity is necessary. Caring for the Other is not only a principle different from that of justice (Gilligan, 1982), but it is also a resource for increasing one’s own freedom. Taking the Other into account is not only a resource for increasing one’s consciousness, but it also provides an indispensable open space for the possibility of liberating oneself from the values of one’s own culture, even from one’s own identity. It is the continuous presence of the Other that keeps freedom of consciousness alive, together with the separation of the private and the public realms. The social pact has then to be reworked within the new scenario of an increasing cultural diversity. The overlapping consensus to be reached (Rawls, 1999) should also include the care for the internal and external Other. This is what makes possible instrumental values to become some sort of final values; values that make possible, for instance, the famous saying, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it” (Hall, 1906, misattributed to Voltaire). Obviously, civil rights can resist and be kept alive only if citizens feel driven to act according to them, namely, to actively practice their civic duties as though they were embodied as traits of character, that is, as virtues of citizenship. Actualization of Values in Action: Virtues Values and Virtues Values are abstract entities, but they become intelligible when they materialize in objects, when actuations are addressed to reach some particular kinds of objects, or when an agent seems to orient his/her actuations toward attaining some particular kind of experiences. No moral is conceivable without values—a moral system is a set of rules for actuations oriented to some valuable ends considered as good for some purpose. So there are good objects, good actions, or good agents, whenever

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they are taken as valuable. Virtue is a term particularly well-suited to gathering the meanings of value for something—good as a goal or moral purpose. This word also has the merit of being a classical term within moral philosophy, in addition to referring to a particular school of thought in ethics. We will also argue that virtue is well-fitted for psychological interpretation. The Meaning of Virtue Virtue is an old term with a rather odd history. It comes from the Latin word vir, which means man. In its origin, the word referred to well-valued traits of manly behavior—courage, strength, endurance, merit, talent. So originally it did not have to do with what today we may consider morally good. Its moral meaning comes from its pragmatic relation with the Greek word areté (comparative form of agazós—good), namely, traits characterizing something at their best, which later referred to the “excellence of something” (in ancient Greek, the equivalent of the Latin virtus was andreia, from aner-andrós—man). In moral philosophy, the meaning virtue acquired is very much that of areté. Therefore, the virtues of something are what better characterize it for what it is, what makes it better in its very existence, for its purpose. So lightness and sharpness are virtues for a fencing sword, but not for a fighting club; physical stature, strength, and weight are virtues for a sumo wrestler but not for a jockey; and a virtuous musician is one who enjoys and plays music very well indeed. Virtue then is a teleological concept, relative to the telos of the thing it qualifies. Virtue is “to be excellent” for some purpose. This makes virtue, at the beginning, devoid of any moral value. Bravado and humility may be considered alternately as virtues and vices in different social groups. The first is a virtue for street gangsters, and the second for Catholic nuns, but never the other way around. This reminds us of one of the features of virtue, in addition to being a teleological term: it is also relative to culture. It should be taken into account that, classically, virtue was treated as a term belonging to ethics, a word that originally meant habits, customs, and also environment (it shares the root of current words such as ethology and ecology). Virtues and the Moral Good For virtue to become a moral term, its telos must be related to attaining the moral good, something that has to be defined. This is what ancient Greek philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics, among others, did. When talking of virtues, moral good is the final end to which any in-

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termediate purpose tends. Good would be the last possible answer one may provide after a chain of many possible intermediate answers to the question “and then, what is that for?” The Greek term that acted as the last response to this questions was eudamony, a word which literally means “good demon,” or being possessed by good spirits—what is often translated as happiness or flourishing. This translation has mainly been contested with the argument that this is a too subjective and individualist interpretation, much influenced by the modern views of neo-epicurean atomists, such as Utilitarian Associationists (e.g., John Stuart Mill, etc.). Good life is another popular translation, judged as less individualist and more open to the social, cultural, and historical entourage of the moral agent. Whatever the case, the latter seemed to be closer to Aristotle’s uses of the word. For him, ethics was to be taught to aristocratic students who would have to participate in political life. Eudamony was not only a state of mind, it was also related to social life. It also had to do with having friends, being economically well-off, and worthy of respect by fellow citizens. It referred to everything fulfilling the telos of human nature, like enjoying what is pleasurable, exercising one’s capabilities to their best, reaching knowledge, and wisely putting it into use. It also meant to enjoy what one does, so that one does it as well as possible, taking it seriously, but also enjoying it, and not just feeling amused by a trivial activity. In other words, eudamony means to make human functions (faculties) develop at their best, and to produce the best possible satisfactory results for oneself and for the community. In sum, eudamony means to live a life worthy of being lived, from both a personal and a collective point of view. Death and Resurrection of Virtue Here is where the problem lies: how can one define what eudamony exactly is? Where would one find the rule for reaching such a thing? To answer these questions, a sort of search for the Holy Grail was called for. To provide some answers, medieval philosophers looked beyond the celestial spheres. To follow God’s will would make one happy: all one had to do was to obey the divine law and the universal moral norms. The result was that social norms became transcendental and so the idea of some kind of universal natural law. To be virtuous, then, was to have the skills that made the person follow the religiously received rules or, at the best, to choose well which was the best rule to be applied in each circumstance. When theocentrism relaxed during Renaissance, Machiavelli proposed a more earthly approach. Virtú referred to the abilities the prince must have in order to reach his political ends. Later on, modern philosophy tended to leave aside the concept of virtues, favoring instead the role of moral feel-

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ings (associationists) or the duties derived from exercising reason (Kant) for the direction of action. The result was the development of the utilitarian and deontic approaches to moral thought. The first tended toward reducing morals to feelings and motivation, while the second attempted to leave aside, as much as it was possible, the blurring effect that fleeting feelings and passions may exert upon our rational minds. Classical liberals seemed to have freed us all from this agonic pilgrimage by separating happiness from good life. They understood that each individual knows what happiness is for him/herself, a totally private matter. It was the job of politicians to make them feel happy by devising utilitarian policies and taking upon themselves the heavy burden of government. The population only had to accept some duties, like paying taxes and, sometimes, engaging in national military service, as signs of their loyalty toward the state. One could vote (or not) now and again, but in any case, politicians and the state were viewed as managers of subcontracted services for keeping public services working. Eventually, they offered good life to the majority of people, and often hard luck for minorities. Efficiency was all that should have been expected from them. Everything else was negotiable, as the very social pact was. Each person was the better judge of what happiness was for him/herself. This view makes ethics foreign to public life. If one takes this view to the extreme, solidarity or patriotism would be either a fake, or a naïve belief; justice would be a matter of bargaining; and reason, responsibility, and respect for the law, just a result of forced compliance. This was what leviathan stood for. There is little doubt that there are quite a few people who believe so, some may also act accordingly, and even be elected to public office. But there is also little doubt that in order to be elected, candidates have to pretend to claim the need of some shared values that could hold the population together. This happens even if they do so only as a persuasive advertising strategy directed at the populace, because otherwise, they would not be trusted. If these values become widely understood only as a belief to be instilled into others, while one places oneself above their reach and feels no commitment toward them, then few would doubt that morality has been alien to public life, and democracy is in jeopardy. This may happen even if the social pact apparently keeps going in operation. It was the dissatisfaction with this state of affairs that made MacIntyre (1984) call for the need of a return to an ethic of virtue at the cost of renouncing the universalism of modernity. For him, the culture of the community was to supply the shared values that make life worth living for that people. Communitarians argued that political life depends on cultural values, since they inform and shape the habits and skills of the population. Each community, then, should develop its values, together with the virtues of their members, along a historical process.

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This view had two effects. On the one hand, values, virtues, and institutions were considered to be good and to operate only locally; but on the other, the ethics of virtue were called to come back to the stage again. Ethics of Virtue There are some features of virtue ethics different from the ethics of duty that are worthy highlighting. To start with, there is no moral sphere separated from everyday life. Rather, the moral realm belongs to practical life. This has a consequence: moral does not refer to pursuing some abstract transcendental rational good by following rationally elaborated norms based on general principles. What is taken as good results from practical necessity—in particular circumstances, some things are considered more valuable than others, and so values are derived. There is no transcendental good; it is always a matter of historical and sociocultural domains. If one were to take into account the psychological aspects of morals, one would see that while the ethics of duty is concerned about actions and judgments, about “what should be done,” the ethics of virtue is concerned about “how should I live,” and even “how should I be.” Rather than focusing upon learning rules (“what to do”), in reasoning about which rule to apply, or in devising new general rules, one should also be concerned with “how to become good,” and indeed with “how to always improve myself.” The self appears then on the forefront; it becomes a relevant ethical tool. Virtues are seen as traits of character. But a set of questions immediately arise: how do virtues and character relate to the self (or the agent, or both)? Are virtues to be taught, learned, or both? Can one build oneself as virtuous? What are virtues and character made of? Before attempting to answer these questions, something more about our understanding of virtues needs to be developed. There are many classifications of virtues. Aristotle divided them into two groups: virtues of character (ethical) and virtues of practical reason (dianoethical). The second result from teaching, and the first from training and habit. It may be true that bodily features may have something to do with virtue—being thin and long-legged may favor one to run fast, or being strongly built may be an advantage for lifting weights; but diligence and endurance do not evolve from physical features; they result from being trained, from habits of action. One first gets trained in a habit without knowing it is a virtue, and then acquires the disposition to act virtuously. But there is something else: to be virtuous, one must also enjoy what one is doing, and do it on purpose and for its own sake, not because of any praise. This means that one important part of being virtuous is to learn to desire well, in addition

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to having a purposive disposition, something that requires more than having a disposition to perform purposive actuations in situations in which one may feel concerned. It also calls for this disposition to be guided by rational principles as well as being adjusted to the particular circumstances of the situation. The latter is what usually is called practical wisdom—prudence, which can be exercised only by putting into play the virtues of intelligence. But wisdom and prudence do not collapse into each other. For Aristotle, wisdom is concerned with the general and universal; it is the highest virtue resulting from a contemplative attitude. In contrast, prudence results from calculation—how sensitive to be before a situation, what ethical salience it may have for oneself and others, and how to adjust one’s actuations. Given that prudence and wisdom illuminate each other, it results that being prudent is a necessary condition for being good, and it is also a sufficient reason. Anyone who is prudent is also good. A prudent person would implicitly know what is good for human beings, and also acts intelligently in accordance with their (his/her own) fulfillment—eudaimonia (van Hooft, 2006). What is Virtue For? This question takes us back to the elucidation of what eudamony is. With this purpose in mind, we will retake the story of the resurrection of virtue after its death. Eudamony is not to be confused with desire and even less with pleasure. It would be foolish to fall into such a trap. It is not that individual pleasure is not morally good, it certainly is, but not when it is unreasonably (imprudently) searched for as the central aim of one’s life. As discussed above, eudamony is in developing one’s capabilities and aims to their best and enjoying it. This fits very well Nietzsche’s will of self-affirmation and self-realization throughout the fulfilling of a life as a project, as a work of art. But there must be something more than this, otherwise the virtuous individual should be as solitary as the Little Prince in his tiny planet. Is eudamony a solitary business, or might other people be of some use? Answers vary, not because the others were ignored, but because they are attributed different roles. For some, they are a source of satisfaction. Aristotle himself would say that one needs other people, because without them, one neither would have friends nor could feel honored. For Sartre, in contrast, other people are a burden. He feels overwhelmed by their presence. As he said, they invade my experience of the world, they have their own view about who and how I am, and so they are a threat to my sense of identity and authenticity—they can be Hell for me. These ways of considering the others—either as a positive or negative resource for one’s happiness, but

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nevertheless as external, foreign to one’s inner self—have a strong counterpoint. According to other views, fellow humans appear within the very psychological structures that make any kind of inner comfort possible. This is the case for Hume, for whom feelings of sympathy, or concern for others, are a cornerstone for morality. As he claims, moral sentiments, and not reason, are central for directing human life. Reason is only a tool instrumental for attaining one’s desires. Emmanuel Lévinas goes a step further: we are ethical creatures because we are social; we are continuously communicating with others, not only speaking to them in order to affirm ourselves, but also listening to them. The others are an appealing mystery that cannot be exhausted, no matter how intimate we may get with them. I cannot help but feel the calling of the other, to listen to him or her, to feel responsible for how they feel, for their well-being. This shows in the use of courtesy formulae, and in the deep discomfort felt when seeing other people suffering. The others are not just behavioral contingencies, but a part belonging to the very structure of our being. Whatever the case, the others cannot be ignored neither for good, nor bad. Paul Ricoeur (1990) had the ability of putting together a sort of synthesis between the Nietzschean self-affirmative view and the need and concern for others. The very title of his book, The Self as Another, is very illustrative. Two of his points are that individual fulfillment includes forming interpersonal bonds with particular others, and that the inclination toward living in a society bears the three marks of justice: equality before the law, treatment according to merit, and a fair distribution of social and material goods. So to be virtuous is related to the capacity of reaching three kinds of good: selffulfillment, the development of mutually satisfactory bonds with particular others, and the action as a political agent with a view to justice for all. It seems, then, that ethics of virtue nowadays cannot be conceived in an individualistic way. It requires not only taking into account the others, but also the external others, the ones who do not belong to our own demos. Van Hooft (2006), whose arguments we revisited in this section, nicely relates the individual search for eudemonia to the current needs in contemporary polis: Modern societies are not communities in the sense of groupings bound by widening forms of philia. They are pluralistic aggregations bound by general norms backed by the force of law. These norms are the product of public debate that is ideally structured by the norms of justice and impartiality rather than feelings of caring or sympathy. The discourse of liberal, pluralist politics prescinds from relations of philia precisely because it requires a negotiable public realm in which everyone is subject to law irrespective of bonds of love, membership of communities or relationships of caring. In this discourse, the moral status of an individual does not depend on the community of which she is a member or on the relationships she enjoys with others. It depends on her having rights before the law: rights that should be available equally to every-

Values, Virtues, Citizenship, and Self From a Historical and Cultural Approach    19 one within that political society. It is definitive of justice that everyone should enjoy equality before the law, obtain what is theirs by right, and be treated in accordance with their deserts. (pp. 111–112)

Moral Character as Embodiment of Values Character is a central concept for the ethics of virtue. As Blasi (2005) puts it “moral character is typically identified with a person’s set of virtues and vices . . . predispositions to experience certain emotions and to engage in ethically significant kinds of behaviors in response to more or less specific situations” (p. 69). And more specifically, from the perspective of psychology, we can speak of moral character both if there is evidence of relatively general tendency to behave in ways that the agent considers to be moral and if this tendency is related to relatively permanent characteristics of the agent’s personality, assessed independently of moral actions. (p. 72)

This view makes character very much related to two dimensions: feelings (and the derivate moral desires) and willpower. To these dimensions Blasi adds a third one: integrity. It is hardly questionable that when acting, one sometimes feels competing desires, so that one has to decide which one to pursue. When this happens, the person’s will comes into operation, leaving aside some desires and releasing others. But there is also a possibility worthy of examination because of its connection to moral behavior. It may happen that some desires are totally rejected as unworthy, bad, or foreign to one’s will, so that they cannot be an option for one’s action under any circumstances. But the reverse could also happen. One may care so much about some particular desires that one may want to be guided by them not only now but also in the future. When this happens, these desires become a commitment, and may be added to the core of one’s identity, so that “it becomes unthinkable to intentionally engage in actions and projects that contradict the essence of one’s will and identity” (Blasi, 2005, p. 80). These commitments have no special authority unless they are founded on a value system. The subjective side of these commitments to values (and desires) lies in feelings of what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly; something that reminds us of the importance of a sentimental education, if not of an education in aesthetics (Broncano, 2001). Commitments are like a kind of promise, a way of reducing the indeterminacy of the future, of constraining what could be done in the time to come. Promises are a way of making the future as foreseeable as the past—a way of tying oneself to a course of action; a way of reducing spontaneity,

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but also of increasing the capability for keeping a steady course of action. As José Antonio Marina said, “a promise is to the will what a notebook is to memory: a way of making it more efficient” (1997, p. 145). All this would be true if (and this is a big if) we are speaking of somebody reliable, responsible, committed to the care of his/her own sense of self, who governs her/himself in such a way as to deserve respect from the others and oneself. In other words, what used to be called an honorable person. Commitment to values, then, is only possible if one cares to educate moral feelings in accordance with aesthetic and moral values, to cultivate intelligence so as to prudently judge when to be concerned about what is happening, and to develop the will to choose the best way to act in situated practical circumstances. In other words, one has to be educated, but also put quite a bit of awareness and determination into cultivating one’s self. Beyond being a responsive agent, the person has to build oneself as a responsible, accountable individual—a citizen. Moral Identity: The Self as an Agency for Moral Actuation From the argument so far developed, it follows that there is no moral behavior without the self being involved, and so becoming an agency for moral actuations. This means that the agent (a biological entity) needs to create a belief about its own agentic capabilities so that it can achieve some form of self-responsible autonomy. The self is such a belief. It is no entity, but a tool for self-government, a set of abilities, of capabilities for action, of virtues with the potential of making one be virtuous as an agent—a person of excellence. What are, then, the key features the self may require to become a resource for a virtuous person? Hardy and Carlo’s (2005) review of the research on moral motivation, following Augusto Blasi’s theory, points toward some features whose relevance can hardly be currently disputed, in spite of their sociocultural and historical anchorage. As they present it, there are three key components in this model: 1. Before moral judgment can lead to moral action, it must take into account moral responsibility. As Blasi (2005) puts it, Responsibility refers to a special relation a person has with oneself as having appropriated norms and relations, and the norms and duties deriving from them. When a person’s desire of the moral good is extended beyond situational decisions, when he wants to continue to want in the future what is morally good (though not necessarily above everything else) and wants to make it sure he will, then the person makes himself re-

Values, Virtues, Citizenship, and Self From a Historical and Cultural Approach    21 sponsible for behaving morally, within the limits of his understanding. To make oneself responsible is to operate on the self and not simply on one’s concrete, situation-bound desires and actions; it means to constrain the self and create a kind of permanent necessity for oneself in relation to certain norms and actions. . . . responsibility is not a concept . . . and cannot be explained cognitively. Rather, it is primarily a desire about oneself which must be manifested in action. (pp. 91–92)

2. Self-consistency refers to the motivation to be consistent with one’s sense of self. However, Blasi (2005) seemed to have changed his mind, and changed his earlier preferred term “consistency” (2004) for a more morally tinted term: “integrity.” The psychological basis of integrity lies in the human capacity to construct the sense of the self by appropriating one’s desires and actions, and then, reflecting on the processes, to relate to and care for not only the objects of one’s desires, but also the desiring and acting self. One aspect of caring for one’s self is to be concerned about its wholeness and inner consistency. The first step in this process is the construction of the sense of self through appropriation. (p. 90)

3. Finally, moral identity brings together two different meanings: individual differences of how being moral is more or less central to one’s sense of self; and the highest form of moral integrity. In Blasi’s own words, There is one kind of identity . . . that is intrinsically related to the highest integrity. This occurs when a person so identifies with his or her commitments, cherishes values and ideals, that he or she constructs around them the sense of a central, essential self. This sort of appropriation determines what “really matters” to the person; it establishes such a hierarchy among the person’s goals and concerns as to create a sense of subjective unity and lifelong direction, and provides one with a sense of depth and necessity in his being. . . . under these subjective conditions, behaving in ways that contradict and negate one’s central values is no longer felt to be a choice. Compromising one’s identity is felt to be unthinkable; it would be experienced as the most serious self-betrayal and as the total loss of one’s self or soul. (2005, p. 92)

Blasi’s view of self is rather sophisticated. On the one hand, it allows distinguishing between the values around which the sense of the self is built, and the way in which identity is subjectively experienced. On the other hand, it takes into account a gradation of senses of the self from its periphery to its inner core. This makes possible the self, and one’s actions, to become objects for appraisal, so that one produces feelings about one’s own self, which in turn become resources for monitoring one’s own actuations. Identity develops not only in terms of contents, but also in its subjective structure. As it matures, values and goals become more central, making

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other aspects such as physical characteristics move toward the periphery, and the contents one cares about the most are increasingly appropriated by the core self. Thus, the self becomes more organized and unified, at the same time that a higher feeling of agency develops together with a sense of ownership of one’s self. This makes one to feel responsible for the care of the self, so producing a greater desire for self-consistency. Obviously, there are very wide individual differences in this respect, not only in the moral content of identity, but also in the centrality moral values may have for the self, what values may be more central than others, as well as in the very integration of identity and its various components. This is one more example of the complex nature of human development. Whatever the case, our purpose here is to highlight the centrality of the self for the direction of acts. The Mutual Development of Virtues and the Person Virtues, character, and the very sense of the self result first from training and education, and then from one’s own effort of self-construction. This is nothing other than the continuation of the autopoietic process that life is, that now moves into creating a new domain of moral goals and ethical ideals, of rights and dignity, all of which used to be called the domain of the spirit. This is a process of knowledge construction, development of social institutions, and the creation anew of rights and duties. In sum, the mutual transformation of reality and humanity that usually is named history. Such a process produces the simultaneous appearance of the objective and subjective realms, resulting from the development of mediational means of varied nature, such as affective and cognitive processes, behavioral skills, and sociocultural products like norms and institutions. The parallel development of different forms of identity, agency, and otherness is sketched in Figure 1.1. Rows in this figure show successive steps in the development of psychological processes and the construction of entities in consciousness, which are also a prerequisite for the moral development of individual and groups. However, this does not mean that such development is a teleological process addressed to any kind of transcendental telos. We believe that teloi are indispensable for actuations (and the ethical realm) to exist, but any telos to be produced is also a local historical creation searching for adaptation. This does not deny the performative capacity of human beings, which are capable of imagining things, and sometimes even capable of making them real. Aristotle said that human virtues result from the development of habits, that is, behavioral and cognitive skills and dispositions toward actuating.

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Figure 1.1  Mutual creation of identities and alterities throughout time. Each row subsumes the elements of the earlier.

These skills and dispositions also make possible conceiving in different ways the world and oneself. Figure 1.2 attempts to graphically represent the mutual development of virtues, the world, and the sense of oneself. Figure 1.3 offers an example of how one particular virtue of citizenship (respect) arises from social interaction and the mediation of social norms and values, following the development of particular kinds of affections and cognitive skills. Social skills, moral virtues, cognitive skills, and knowledge are always acquired within the particular society and culture in which one lives. This could suggest that virtues are relative to culture, as moral and legal codes are—as the given example of bravado and humility well demonstrates. However, in spite of many variations and peculiarities, there also is much communality among cultures. Courage, discipline, willpower, resolution, endurance, cheerfulness, wisdom, and prudence are virtues appreciated

Figure 1.2  Circular reactions for the creation of virtues as habits and the shaping of character.

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Values, Virtues, Citizenship, and Self From a Historical and Cultural Approach    25

Figure 1.3  A sketch of the process of construction of respect as one of the virtues of citizenship.

practically everywhere. The existence of these communalities and differences has raised the issue of psychological (and moral) universals versus cultural peculiarities. But we will not go further into such an examination. Rather, our point is to stress that such coexistence of agreements and differences is in itself a source of change. If dignity is a moral consequence of holding rights, if rights are granted by laws, and laws result from conventionalization of social norms, it follows that dignity is relative to culture and society. When one is living in a polis where many cultures intersect, where a civic space develops as an umbrella upon many different cultural groups, the civic rights developed in such an environment are not less a result of conventionalization than whatever norms developed within any other kind of group; they cannot be taken to be more universal than others. They are simply a result of an evolutionary process. We leave to the reader the interpretation of whether such rights (such as rights of the citizen, rights of man, or human rights) are of a higher moral rank than those of a local code. Our position is already implicit when we present in Figure 1.1 the person after the author, the latter coming after the social actor that plays by the social norms of his/her particular group. To be taken as a subject, as a national (of some particular nation), as a citizen, or a person perhaps does not simply result from a random choice between more or less synonymous words; these are also categories that evoke different rights and virtues, and perhaps also hint of different levels of human dignity.

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Dignity and rights are historical and cultural products, but the more culture is conjugated in plural, the greater are the possibilities for wider spaces for freedom and dignity. But there is neither a guarantee for that to be always the case, nor could one take for granted that historical change will produce progress. Too many counterexamples are shown for making one so optimistic as to believe that drawbacks would not happen again. In any case, one may believe that, in spite of many of its disadvantages, globalization may be an opportunity for moral development, at least if diversity and democracy survive and do not suffocate along the way. Concluding Remarks The picture here presented cannot pretend to be a depiction of how the bulk of the population conceives morality, or themselves as moral agents, much less can it be taken as an explanation of usual daily behavior in relation to citizenship. Nevertheless, this picture is no idle speculation. There are some people who behave in exemplary ways in the most extreme circumstances, as well as many other people who do not conform to these standards. The sources of diversity could be various, and some of them have already been mentioned in the chapter. In any case, our concern has been to figure out how a citizen of excellence in the current globalized modern societies should be. The image so far has been shaped following recent empirical research on what has been termed morally exemplary individuals (for a review, see Hardy & Carlo, 2005), and so it reflects the highest ethical standards up to now. In addition, we believe that this image could be taken as a sort of ethical ideal for our historical time. Why do we think so? There are reasons that could be placed in the individual and social poles of eudamony. The first calls for a higher individuation, with increasing agency and responsibility, while the second refers to a process of production of new cultural resources and institutional developments for the canalization of acts. This could empower one with new rights and an increasing dignity. In addition, the perspective here presented offers a developmental telos for education, without suggesting that it is the transcendental and universal telos of personhood. It is simply the telos we can now imagine in order to have the kind of excellence that fits the functions and desires we may have within the current conditions of our lives. In sum, the kind of eudamony our moral ideals are built upon cannot be but historically situated. Different ecological and sociocultural conditions open different possibilities of living, and of course of feeling fulfilled. This makes excellence (and virtue) also historically contingent. We have not gone into what might have been taken as virtues in other kinds of political conditions, such as feu-

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dal or tyrannical societies. There is little doubt that values, virtues, and the very way of structuring the self in those cases would be different from that of a modern nation-state. This difference will be even greater if we were to refer to a multicultural state immersed in a process of globalization, having its own political structures intermingled with those of novel suprastate political organizations. It is often argued that the deep transformation of social stratification and the increasing possibilities for social mobility following modernity have produced new kinds of subjectivities (for a case study, see Rosa, Castro, & Blanco, 2006), enhancing individualism and creating increasingly saturated selves (Gergen, 1991). Some scholars claim that if one were to attempt to live a fulfilled life nowadays, one should better relax customary ideas about the integrity of the self in order to cope with the variety of scenarios out there (Fierro, 2008). In order to figure out how people living in different sociocultural and politically organized groups experience their lives, set their own goals and values, devise their peculiar ways of conceiving excellence, and as a consequence, train their youth accordingly, one should consider the revival of the old concept of mentality, so popular in late 19th and early 20th century (e.g., Fèvre, 1952; Lazarus & Steinthal, 1860; Taine, 1866). Some of the issues here raised have caused some to claim that ethics of virtue comes from an aristocratic attitude, aiming at the development of an elite striving for excellence. But we believe that in a democracy, the aim should be to empower everyone. We believe there is a need for an active citizenry involved in the development of cives and polis, rather than being concerned only about the well-being of a mass of inhabitants that participate in public matters only as workers, consumers, or voters. We believe individuals should be empowered rather than excellence be leveled. The state, instead of being primarily concerned with granting happiness to the majority, should keep open the door for the negotiation of values, so that within the law, one could have both the autonomy and the resources for building a shared future viewed as more hospitable. Otherwise, either there would be no incentive for individual development, or/and people would believe neither in their responsibility nor in their authorship in the construction of each one’s version of eudamony, nor in one’s own biography and future. If this happens, individuals would be just actors playing roles in ready-made scripts of an ongoing drama, and no ethical responsibility would exist, even if an individual could be made accountable before the law. The reader may have gotten startled by the too-frequent use of the word believe in the last few paragraphs. So have we, until we realized that such beliefs refer to a commitment with values (a kind of faith), which also includes believing in a better future to come (hope). A future in which caring for the others, and oneself, will be a right, as well as a duty. Perhaps that is why faith,

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hope, and love have been also considered to be virtues—resources for living a life worthy of being lived. The argument of this chapter is difficult to pigeonhole within one particular discipline. Rather than starting from the knowledge of our professional discipline—psychology—we chose to fare throughout diverse disciplinary realms so that the knots of a network of concepts connecting issues belonging to different fields could get highlighted. This has been done following Bloor’s (1976) principle of symmetry, that is, making sure that each discipline acts as a resource for the others rather than privileging one professional perspective over others. We believe such a dialogue is not only instrumental for a better definition of social problems but also necessary for the development of social sciences to be capable of a cross-disciplinary collaboration. There is no doubt that much finer grained elaborations are needed, but we also think that the approach here presented may be of help for choosing which theories, within each of the disciplines, have higher potential for the production of collaborative knowledge with neighboring sciences. Social sciences evolved from what used to be called moral sciences— knowledge concerned with the government of human behavior. It is rather paradoxical that for a long time they have gone to the pains of reducing human agency to natural laws so that both social and historical change and human behavior could ideally be pictured as blind mechanisms explaining what is done beyond freedom and dignity (Skinner, 1971). Besides the issue that it is hard to think of any viable view of moral accountability under such a banner, one may also ponder what kind of political identity could be compatible with such a view—certainly not that of a democratic citizenship. If science is a product of human labor, and scientific knowledge offers the means for improving human agency in the world, it follows that this knowledge can actually be a resource for human liberation—for searching out good. This is the moral endeavor. A social science that claims to be morally neutral is a contradiction in terms. References Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tiptom, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart: A revolutionary approach to man’s understanding of himself. New York, NY: Ballantine. Blasi, A. (2004). Moral functioning: Moral understanding and personality. In D. K. Lapsley & D. Narvaez (Eds.), Moral development, self and identity (pp. 189–212). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Blasi, A. (2005). Moral character: A psychological approach. In D. K. Lapsley & F. C. Power (Eds.), Character psychology and character education. Notre Dame: Indiana University Press.

Values, Virtues, Citizenship, and Self From a Historical and Cultural Approach    29 Bloor, D. (1976). Knowledge and social imagery. London, England: Routledge. Broncano, F. (2001). La educación sentimental. O la difícil cohabitación de razones y emociones. Isegoría, 25, 41–61. Fèvre, L. (1952). Combats pour l’histoire. Paris, France: Armand Colin. Fierro, A. (2008). Conocimiento contra infelicidad: Por una psicología epicúrea. Escritos de Psicología, 2(1), 7–23. Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York, NY: Basic Books. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, E. B. (1906). The friends of Voltaire. [Written under the pseudonym Stephen G. Tallentyre]. London, England: Smith, Elder & Co. Hardy, S., & Carlo, G. (2005) Identity as a source of moral motivation. Human Development, 48, 232–256 Heater, D. (2004). A brief history of citizenship. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995). Multicultural citizenship: A liberal theory of minority rights. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Lazarus, M., & Steinthal, H. (1860). Einletende gedanke über völkerpsychologie als einladung zu einer Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenchaft. Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenchaft, 1, 1–72. Lévinas, E. (1974). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. La Haye: M.Nijhoff. Lévinas, E. (1991). Entre nous. Ecrits sur le penser à l’autre. Paris: Grasset. MacIntyre, A. (1984). Beyond virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Marina, J. A. (1995). Ética para náufragos. Madrid, Spain: Anagrama. Marina, J. A. (1997). El misterio de la voluntad perdida. Madrid, Spain: Anagrama. Mill, J. S. (1860/1909). Essay on liberty. Cambridge, MA: P.F. Collier & Son. Retrieved from http://www.constitution.org/jsm/liberty.txt Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Renan, E. (1882). Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Lecture given at the Sorbonne. Retrieved from http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Qu’est-ce_qu’une_nation? Ricoeur, P. (1990). Soi-même comme un autre. Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil. Rivero, A. (2001). Tres espacios de la ciudadanía. Isegoría, 24, 51–76. Rosa, A., Castro, J., & Blanco, F. (2006). Otherness in historic situated self-experiences. In L. Simao & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Otherness in question: Development of the self (pp. 229–255). Charlotte, NC: Information Age. San Martín, J. (1999). Teoría de la cultura. Madrid, Spain: Stesis. Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Smith, A. (1991). National identity. London, England: Penguin. Taine, H. (1866). Histoire de la litterature anglaise. Paris, France: Hachette. Taylor, C. (1989). The sources of the self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Touraine, A. (1995 ). ¿Qué es una sociedad multicultural? Claves de Razón Práctica, 56, 14–25. van Hooft, S. (2006). Understanding virtue ethics. Chesham, England: Acumen.

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Chapter 2

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions The Development of Competition and Individualism Within Societies Angela Branco, Marilicia Palmieri, and Raquel Gomes Pinto University of Brasília, Brazil

The study of the mutual constitution of cultural practices and value constructions decisively contributes to better understand the developmental courses of individuals and society. Values and beliefs, traditional research objects of a quantitatively oriented social psychology (Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz et al., 2001; Tamayo, 2007) have increasingly been investigated within the realms of developmental psychology from a qualitative perspective (Branco, 2006; Grusec & Kuczynski, 1997; Ratner, 2002; Reykowski, 1989; Santos & Silva, 2002). From a sociocultural approach that brings meaning construction to the forefront of investigative efforts in social and psychological sciences (Bruner, 1997; Shweder & Much, 1987; Valsiner & Rosa, 2007), meanings definitely are the key to making sense of the codevelopment of human be-

Cultural Psychology of Human Values, pages 31–62 Copyright © 2012 by Information Age Publishing All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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ings and their societies along the time dimensions of phylogeny, history, ontogenesis, and microgenesis. Also, the reality of living systems existing in irreversible time sets the conditions that make human psychological development oriented toward the future. This prospective view on time opens a promising venue to an optimistic view of change and development for those unhappy with the quality of life and social interactions and relations in the present-day so-called civilized world. The prevalence of individualism and competition in the contemporary globalized world—economically, culturally, and historically constructed along decades and centuries—has been analyzed by philosophers and social scientists (Dumont, 1985; Kohn, 1986; Lash, 1987; Maturana, 2002; Morin & Prigogine, 2000; Sennett, 1999), in contrast with the timid approach taken by psychologists (Branco, 2003, 2009; Saraiva; 2000). While evaluating the present guidelines and practices observed in early childhood institutional contexts, Branco (2009) denounced the preponderance of competitive and individualistic practices and values along childhood educational experiences, and alerts for their dangerous impact on human development. In this chapter, our goal is to elaborate on this relevant issue and provide the reader with empirical research examples that supply a solid ground for our claim about the need to further investigate and think about the consequences of hidden curricula in schools. Hidden curricula and their subtle mechanisms (Giroux & Purpel, 1988) are usually oriented to promote competition and individualism among both children and adolescents, consequently, efficient implementations of social objectives in school education are definitely necessary. According to a sociocultural constructivist approach, namely, our version of cultural psychology (Branco & Valsiner, 2010; Valsiner, 2007), social interactions and human values emerge from a dialogical, reciprocal constitution of social practices and meaning-construction processes. Therefore, individualistic and competitive cultural practices and values are mutually constructed, or generated, and ultimately lead to a false sense of self-sufficiency and isolation, as well as to the escalation of competition among people in everyday life activities, from work to family to daily interaction. This scenario then creates increasingly difficult social relations in which frustration is the rule rather than the exception. We intend to show that cultural canalization processes, although powerful in determining practices and values, can also be changed by intentional shifts toward the construction of a more balanced, realistic, and pleasantto-live-in world, where cooperation can be nurtured by active forces, such as family, school, media, and other relevant developmental contexts. The idea is to encourage people to take a critical and constructive role in relation to their future and the future of coming generations, making better decisions concerning their lives based on permanent and democratic negotiations. Happiness and quality of life cannot be conceived of without provid-

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    33

ing perspectives for the reconstruction of meanings and activities in order to grant economic, political, and social relations characterized by justice, freedom, and solidarity. With this introduction, it is clear that we do not believe in the neutrality of science, particularly concerning human values. Values stem from philosophical, epistemological, and culturally constructed roots, which historically guide scientific development. Hence, scientific knowledge about the sociogenesis and ontogenesis of cultural and subjective values is needed to empower people and institutions with the necessary agency to exert significant changes regarding the future. First, we will theoretically elaborate on conceptual issues that provide the basic assumptions and interpretative frame of the sociocultural constructive approach we take to investigate and explain issues like values and belief constructions. We argue for the codeveloping nature of social practices and values along time, with a special emphasis on the ontogenesis of human values within culturally structured contexts. Second, we will illustrate our arguments with research data drawn from four studies carried out in the Laboratory of Microgenesis in Social Interactions (University of Brasilia), one by Branco and Valsiner (1998) and the other three under the guidance of this chapter’s first author. Last, but not least, we invite the reader to think about the far-reaching consequences of our findings, since they open, together with other precious research evidence and theoretical elaboration (e.g., Baggio, 2009; Galán, 2005; Jares, 2002; Staub, 1991, 1992, 2003), a positive perspective on the future of human relations at both micro- and macrolevels. Culture and Self-Development Cultural canalization processes (Valsiner, 1987, 2007) occur with the support of natural and symbolic constraints, the latter following the same processes of internalization proposed by Vygotsky (1984). Vygotsky suggests that interindividual psychological processes are internalized along ontogeny into intraindividual processes, namely, superior psychological functions, among which language and cognition first happen at interpersonal levels, and only then are actively internalized by individuals. Our claim is that the same inter-to-intra dynamics, typical of cognitive dimensions, take place when practices and semiotic co-constructions involve affect-laden meanings, often designated as human motivation. Embedded in powerful emotions, motives encompass beliefs, goal orientations, and values, but even though individual motivational systems systematically may change (or develop), some particular meanings (here conceptualized as values) do keep some stability. This relative stability is then importantly linked with the development of the self system and grants the sense of continuity along

34   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO

the life span (Branco & Freire, 2010; Branco & Madureira, 2008; Hermans, 2001; Salgado & Hermans, 2005). Motivation System: Values, Beliefs, and Goal Orientations We have designated as “goal orientations” (Branco & Valsiner, 1997) those directions we can infer from observed actions. They are hierarchically organized in motivational systems that, according to the context and subjective appraisal of the moment, activate the goals that better fit the individual in a specific context. This process does not necessarily happen according to the person’s awareness, but the fact is that goal orientations do constrain and push forward particular actions/interactions within specific contexts. Persons can exist only within a universe of meanings (Lotman, 1990), which weave together those mainly pertaining to the developing self to those mostly related to the world—collective culture—within which one lives. Meanings constitute each other through intentional and nonintentional communication and metacommunication (Branco, 2012; Branco & Valsiner 2004), and they are actively internalized by the subject. Some become central for the individual, while some remain at the semiotic periphery (or cultural background) of the person. Personal meanings give a purpose to human life. In the case of ambivalence or uncertainty, it becomes difficult for the individual to bring forth the psychological resources to construct, or abide by, one’s own life projects. Human values arise from meanings co-constructed along life experiences in ontogeny, and they define the moral dimension of human interactions regarding family, work, and everyday interactions. Values also help to build the sense of self and identity of each person along a range of social responsibility, social belonging, and citizenship. The study of beliefs and values from a cultural psychology framework utilizes concepts that stand for the two major principles adopted by the approach, namely, cultural canalization and active internalization, as mentioned before. Concerning cultural canalization, the notion of external, and internalized, constraints plays a central role, for they refer to the numerous barriers that push developmental processes in certain directions instead of others. Frequently, the more subtle and affect-laden they are, the more efficiently they work, since strong or coercive impositions usually generate resistance (Baumrind, 1991; Branco & Valsiner, 2004). Together with constraints, cultural canalization processes happen by the active guidance by implicit and explicit social suggestions and sociocultural affective encouragements that lead values-construction processes toward culturally acceptable directions. However, as the person is active and social suggestions are various and complex, the individual may end up internalizing values in

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    35

singular ways, sometimes in nonacceptable sociocultural directions. As the individual’s motivation system is oriented in specific directions, the person then searches to participate more and more actively in cultural practices compatible with such values, therefore creating circular feedback-feedforward processes that tend to increase the strength of particular values. Those values then may favor the development of particular goal orientations and also guide meaning construction and interpretation processes accordingly. Depending on the context, though, the hierarchical organization of the motivational system consisting of values and goal orientations may dynamically change due to particular needs and situational circumstances, which puts in motion negotiation processes at both inter- and intrapersonal levels. As for the interpersonal level, communication and metacommunication allows for new meaning constructions that may lead to change (Branco & Valsiner, 2004; Fatigante, Fasulo, & Pontecorvo, 2004; Rommetveit, 1992); as for the intrapersonal level, internal dialogues between different I-Positions, proposed by the Dialogical Self Theory (e.g., Hermans, 2001; Salgado & Hermans, 2005), may also participate in the hierarchical change within the motivational system. This change may be temporary, but it may also promote actual developmental change along ontogeny. Self-Other Relations: Values, Ethics, and Moral Development To focus on the issue of values necessarily entails a discussion on ethics and moral development. Morality and ethics denote a human concern, at least since Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The subject directly addresses how human beings should or should not interact and deal with each other within society. In other words, the very existence of a social group demands the establishment of rules and norms to set up the basis for constructing a rather stable social structure composed of individuals who minimally abide by basic regulations. From the predominant social consent of such cultural regulations emerges the notions of “good” and “wrong,” namely, ideas of morality and social conventions. Historically, bad moral behaviors are sanctioned or punished in more extreme ways than other sorts of bad behaviors or conventional transgressions. Socrates and Plato were among the first to discuss the subject of ethics as a fundamental topic for human lives and society. They conceptualized ethics to be a set of principles of universal scope and significance, which gave rise to formal patterns of moral judgment extensive to all humans. According to them, moral philosophy was a universal principle to guide everyone everywhere, and it derives from rational arguments in which truthful quality cannot be contested. Along history, this universalistic tendency

36   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO

prevailed—the best representative being Immanuel Kant—and many present-day authors still follow this call. In psychology, names linked to the constructivist tradition of Piaget and Kolhberg, such as Augusto Blasi (2004), Orlando Lourenço (1998) and many others (e.g., Lapsley & Narvaez, 2006) still adopt a theoretical framework compatible with a cognitive, rationalist orientation. In our understanding, it is important to differentiate ethics from morality, even though such concepts are like the two sides of the same coin (Branco, 2012; Freitag, 1997). According to Freitag (1997), who takes Hegel’s perspective, ethics refers to the urbes, the collective aspect of principles and norms to be followed by a group, while morality denotes the subjective aspect of “right versus wrong” phenomena concerning human actions. She draws on the tale of Antigone, a Greek play by Sophocles, in which the female protagonist, Antigone, goes against the sociopolitical norms of the urbes (defended by Creon, the king), and buries the body of her defeated brother, abiding by the moral standards of family and customs (óikos). In fact, from a cultural psychology approach, there is a mutual constitution between sociocultural and personal traditions, but it is interesting for analytical purposes to distinguish the pole of society from that of subjectivity. It is this notion of inclusive separation (Valsiner & Cairns, 1992) that applies here, for even though the phenomena is conceived as a whole, it is worth identifying the specific characteristics of each component of the duality (culture–individual), and their reciprocal influences. In line with Valsiner’s (2007) terminology, ethics is closer to the notion of collective culture, while morality suggests the domain of personal culture. In psychology, the cognitive perspective of Kohlberg (1984) and Piaget (1977) is still prominent, but there also are authors who address the issue from a social learning perspective (Bandura, 1991), psychoanalysis (Costa, 2000; Freud, 1968) and from a cultural perspective (e.g., Branco, 2012; Ratner, 2002; Shweder & Much, 1987). This chapter takes on a cultural psychology perspective. From a radical cultural perspective, and also from a social learning approach, theorists insist that there is no such a thing as universal principles, like those that inspired Kant’s categorical imperative. Depending on culturally relative values, developing individuals will be reinforced or punished for showing particular behaviors. Lourenço (1998) criticizes moral relativity, and affirms that indeed there is a universal condition common to all human beings, and denies the loose flexibility of a cultural relativism. He asserts that “the acceptance of ethical relativism on the grounds of a cultural relativism, for instance, would lead us to accept the violation of fundamental human rights” (p. 34). In other words, what would happen to the Human Rights Declaration, backed up by so many different countries in 1949?

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    37

Cultural psychology does not necessarily wipe out the possibilities for the existence of a few universal principles for human sociability, even though it highlights cultural relativity along history (Branco, 2012). It acknowledges the role of history and culture as major influences over what is assumed as right or wrong in particular contexts. However, it is not theoretically contradictory to acknowledge a few universal principles related to the very survival of human existence, such as the preservation of human life and dignity. After all, humans are biologically social, and this necessarily requires basic regulations regarding the species’ own survival encoded in genes themselves. It is regarding such basic or so-called universal regulatory principles that different cultures need to negotiate to come up with general ethical rights that recognize human diversity and mutual respect as the two major survival principles for our present time. Among other culturalists, Shweder and Much (1987) present data and theoretical arguments that wisely question Kohlberg’s (1984) cognitively oriented models and methodologies. The authors interview and analyze participants from India, and show evidence demonstrating that respect for life may, under certain circumstances, be redefined as a consequence of religious values and beliefs. Babaji, the main subject selected to illustrate their point, does not admit stealing to save his own wife’s life. When researchers presented to Babaji the Heinz’s dilemma, used by Kohlberg (1984) to determine levels of moral development, he answered that saving his wife’s life was not granted anyway, and to do that for his own benefit (she was the man’s wife!) was wrong. Stealing was wrong because it was against dharma, and in the next life, the character would have to pay for his previous life’s shameful conduct. The perspective of successive lives predicted by reincarnation beliefs completely undermines Western elaborations on the value of current life as worth saving at any cost. The authors, therefore, unveil the prevalence of ethnocentrism found in Western theories about human development, a tendency found in traditional anthropological studies. Shweder (1991), Tappan (1997, 1998), Ratner (2002), and other culturally oriented theorists well demonstrate the role of the everyday life kind of moral canalization within culturally structured contexts. As Shweder and Much (1987) put it, children as young as 5 years old are able to tell the difference between moral and social convention norms. What studies show, then, is that only some core moral values tend to be kind of similar among cultures, for they relate to those fundamental principles related to the viability of human social lives. In our work, we adopt the concept of value proposed by Valsiner, Branco, and Dantas (1997). Values can be distinguished from beliefs due to the stronger affective roots that are constructed along ontogeny. Therefore, values are more resistant to developmental changes, but this does not mean

38   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO

that they cannot take, along time and as a result of affect-laden experiences, different positionings in the hierarchy of values, beliefs, and goal orientations that characterize the dynamic configuration of human motivational systems. The dynamics and complexity of the motivation system may empower some values over others depending on time, context, and the characteristics of the specific situations in which individuals are embedded at a certain moment. However, some values seem to be more deeply internalized, therefore playing a significant role in personal identity and self-development processes. Values Development Within Structured Contexts: Research and Knowledge Construction Knowledge concerning values is essential to make sense of people’s motivation and actions. Consequently, psychological science should definitely aim at identifying and understanding the dynamics of active personal internalization processes, which result from the mutual constitution between sociocultural practices and the affect-laden semiotic meanings people coconstruct concerning their identities and lives. The complexities of such processes do not mean they cannot be investigated and analyzed with rigorous and systematic procedures conducive to plausible, communicable, and productive theories to make sense of the phenomena. To decipher and create workable models, though, demands a dynamic, developmental, and systemic approach to better understand the network of meanings created by the numerous cultural practices within which individuals and groups actively participate. From such qualitative studies, then, some regularity may emerge concerning processes and principles that can eventually be generalizable, consequently constructing scientific knowledge about the emergence and development of particular human social values. As promised before, our path toward this goal will involve providing, analyzing, and discussing research data on cooperation, competition, and individualism in relation to both values and cultural practices. Notwithstanding, our aim is not to present a review of the literature on the subject, for example on the predominance of individualism and competition in contemporary globalized societies (Sloan, 2005). Here, we draw on a cultural psychology theoretical approach, oriented with a sociocultural constructivist perspective. We bring to the reader information and theoretical discussion based on research projects carried out at the Laboratory of Microgenesis in Social Interaction at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. At the laboratory, our major goal is to produce and interpret data related to human development according to a cultural psychology perspective. Our aim is also to demonstrate the value of microgenetic stud-

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    39

ies to yield information regarding the sociogenesis of human values and the key role played by affection on active internalization processes. We also stress the importance of taking into account macro- and microdevelopmental contexts, and how powerful everyday lived-through experiences are in producing a significant impact on human values ontogenesis. Four different empirical research projects were selected for presentation: Branco and Valsiner (1998), Palmieri and Branco (2008), Gomes Pinto (2006), and Branco, Parada, and Alves (2006). The projects were carried out to investigate how psychological processes concerning the emergence and development of values and practices related to cooperation, competition, and individualism can be analyzed in the everyday life contexts of children, adolescents, and young people, as well as within structured situations in preschool contexts. Cooperation, Competition, and Individualism in Preschool Contexts: Cultural Practices and Teachers’ Beliefs The Londrina Experiment Previous studies have suggested the heuristic value of methodologies that unveil, at a microgenetic level (Siegler & Crowley, 1991), the dynamic features and strategies found in communication and metacommunication processes taking place in human interactions, and therefore, in meaning constructions (Branco, 2001; Branco, Pessina, Flores, & Salomão, 2004). This project goal (Palmieri & Branco, 2008) was to investigate meaningconstruction processes by analyzing key conceptual and theoretical issues related to social motivation and interactive patterns, such as cooperation, competition, and individualism, within preschool contexts. It was carried out in the city of Londrina, located in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. The study provides examples of how often conflicting messages populate educational contexts, among them how a preschool teacher-planned activity designed to “promote cooperation” among peers did, in fact, promote competition. The Educational Contexts Two different private preschools were selected in the city of Londrina to investigate the social structure and dynamics of the activities promoted by two teachers (Palmieri, 2003; Palmieri & Branco, 2008). Both classes, at each school, were composed of 13 children between four and six years old, who were under the supervision of one female teacher. The investigation was conducted to identify and analyze indicators of promotion and inhibi-

40   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO

tion of cooperation, competition, and individualism among children from a microgenetic perspective (Branco & Valsiner, 1997; Lavelli, Pantoja, Hsu, Messinger, & Fogel, 2005; Siegler & Crowley, 1991). The study was oriented to unravel communication and metacommunication processes and strategies taking place along the flux of interactions (e.g., Barrios & Branco, 2008; Branco, 2003, 2006, 2012; Neves-Pereira, 2005; Palmieri, 2003). It also intended to identify teacher’s conceptualizations, beliefs, and values in young child education (e.g., Barreto, 2004; Oliveira & Branco, 1999; Valsiner et al., 1997), daily routines, as well as general practices and activities related to promoting or minimizing the development of cooperation, competition, and individualism among children. Methodology The methodology to attain the goals particularly relied upon the microgenetic analysis of videotaped sessions planned by each teacher to “encourage cooperation” among her students. The teacher was asked to structure the session herself with an activity to specifically promote cooperation among children. The project’s methodology also included an initial ethnographic approach, and 15 naturalistic observation sessions aiming at recording the kind and duration of the activities developed along the daily routine (we used a previously elaborated instrument, the Activity Observation Protocol, Branco & Mettel, 1995). The sessions were spread along a full school semester. Semistructured interviews were carried out with the teachers to allow for a qualitative analysis of their narratives concerning concepts, beliefs, and values vis-àvis human social interactions and social motivation (Staub, 1992, 2003), as well as the activities they developed with children in the classroom. Results Table 2.1 shows the main activity categories observed along the daily routine, their abbreviated definition, and the relative duration of each. The total time spent in naturalistic observations was 30 hours in each preschool. Figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 make it easier to compare the results on data from the naturalistic observations and the prevalence of individualistic activities (individual plus individual in group activities; see definitions) in both preschools. We were stunned by the minute amount of time spent in cooperative activities—between 4% and 5 % of total observation time—in both preschools. Most time was spent in individual, individual in group, and snack activities. In preschool A, approximately the same amount of time was spent in snack and in competition activities; this figure represented the double amount of time spent in competitive activities in preschool B. Indeed, during the structured session, this push toward competition was clearly observed in the quality of teacher–student interactions occurring at Preschool A.

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    41 Table 2.1  Activity Categories in Each Preschool Activity categories

Abreviatted definitions

%Time %Time Preschool A Preschool B

Free

Children can play freely in the classroom or in the playground. Teachers supervise from a distance, interfering only when needed.

10.47

12.10

Individual

Children are expected to do a certain task by themselves without help or interference of anybody else.

30.22

29.47

Individual in group

Even being together in a group, children are expected to pay attention and to interact only with the teacher. No child-child interactions are expected or allowed

15.72

22.15

Competition

Children are expected to struggle to attain a goal against each other (winner × loser). It includes intra- and intergroup competitions

15.77

8.03

Cooperation

Children are expected to collaborate with each other to attain a joint goal

4.02

4.75

Snack

Children have their meals individually in the classroom, being told not to talk to each other

16.05

22.17

Transition

The group of children have finished doing something, and they expect the teacher to tell them what to do next

0.33

0.78

Concepts such as cooperation, competition, and individualism were particularly investigated during the interviews. Two interviews were conducted with each teacher. One took place right after naturalistic observations to address values and conceptualization issues; at that moment, they were asked to plan the activity (the special structured session) to encourage cooperation among children. The second interview was carried out after the structured videotaped session in order to know teacher’s own evaluation and analysis of the session she structured to promote cooperation. The analysis of the videotaped session, and the structure plus dynamics of the daily routine and activities, revealed that competition prevailed at Preschool A, at both structural and dynamic (meaning, teacher’s interactions with children) levels. In addition, during both interviews Sandra (teacher A’s fictitious name) said she felt at ease with the competition among children. In Preschool B, individualism was prevalent at the level of activities, but not in the discourse of the teacher (Lisa), who valued cooperation in her discourse. However, in both preschools, cooperative activities were almost nonexistent, as mentioned before: individualistic activities dominated in both contexts, frequently leading to different forms of competitive interactions among children.

42   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO

Figure 2.1  Relative duration of different activity categories.

It is noteworthy to mention, though, the notable differences between Sandra and Lisa concerning the way individual activities were carried out. Their goal orientations and ways of interacting with children differed as they supervised child–child interactions: In Preschool A, Sandra stressed more competition, whereas in Preschool B, Lisa encouraged more individualism. Both were very much concerned with and oriented toward keeping control over the children in order to have a quiet and organized group. This can be part of the explanation why both actively tried to prevent students from interacting and negotiating with each other for most of the time they were in the classroom. What Sandra did not understand, though, was that her incentive toward competition ended up promoting a lot of loud talk, undiscipline, screaming, and difficulties in controlling disputes in her classroom. Competition was mostly promoted in Preschool A, but it became remarkable during the session specially planned by Sandra to encourage cooperation. She proposed to her students a kind of intergroup competition. They

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    43

Figure 2.2  Preschool A’s activities.

Figure 2.3  Preschool B’s activities.

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were organized in three groups of three children and one group of four children. The children had balloons tied to their ankles, and the first group to blow up (pop) their own ballons with their feet would be the winner. Obviously, the activity was basically competitive, but it gave some room for intragroup cooperation. However, the way Sandra explained the activity for the kids left it open to their interpretation about how the balloons should be popped. What happened was that they immediately understood the rules as fierce competition, and when she timidly suggested to them that they could help each other (could, and not should, as in a rule to be followed), they vigorously reacted against the idea of helping the others in their own group, or getting any help from any peer! The following transcription excerpt nicely demonstrates the co-construction of competition within an activity supposedly structured by the teacher to promote cooperation: Preschool A: Episode 2—Suggesting a competitive activity! Time: 15:30:50 to 15:32:03; Duration: 1:53 Sandra addresses the group, using a kind of threatening tone in her voice: “Look, I am gonna start an activity . . . but if you don’t pay attention now, you can’t complain to me later about losing. You pay attention, this is a group activity, and it is for real!” One of the boys asks her, “Are we gonna pop them?” (he refers to the balloons) She responds with enthusiasm in her voice (she had finally caught some attention from the unruly group), “The group that blows all balloons first will be the winner, it’s going to win!” Some kids excitedly clap their hands and shout, “Wow! Boohoo!!” Children go back to their seats, now paying attention and listening to what Sandra has to say. When they all sit, she speaks seriously, explaining to them what they are supposed to do: “Look, I have already figured the groups out [her emphasis], and the activity goes like, it is like this, you . . . I’ll tie balloons to your ankles.” Bruna smiles and claps her hands, then says aloud with a lot of enthusiasm, “Yeeeeeeees!” (she actually uses the English word “yes”!), and she goes on nonverbally celebrating, but still sits on a chair. Sandra notices Bruna’s enthusiasm, and talks friendly to her: “Cool down, let the auntie explain.” Putting on a serious face, Sandra goes on explaining the rules of the activity: “You’ll have to hold your peers’ hands in each group, alright?” While speaking, Sandra’s gestures demonstrate how to hold hands. Bruna yells, still celebrating the proposed activity. Again Sandra talks to

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    45

her, but this time she disapproves of Bruna’s excessive enthusiasm: “Bruna, pay attention, will you?!” Bruna obediently replies, “OK.” The teacher goes on: “Each group, now, hold hands. When I give you the sign.” She is interrupted by Lucas. He asks her in a suggestive tone, “Julian and I?” Sandra looks at him, gestures “no’” with her finger, and says with authority, “No, I’ve already chosen the group members!” Ignoring Lucas’ suggestion, she speaks loudly, explaining her words with gestures: “When I give you the sign . . . when I give you the sign, the group, always holding hands, won’t let them go, will blow up the balloons using your feet. A friend may help the other to blow it up in the same group, OK?” (her emphasis) Lucas immediately replies using an angry voice, “I don’t need help!” Sandra looks at him, points at him, and asks with surprise and curiosity, “You don’t need help? Why?” Many children now cry out at the same time, shouting, “Neither do I! Neither do I! Neither do I!” Children are again agitated, and all scream at the same time. They are very excited, they stand up, leave their seats, climb on tables and jump, as though reinforcing with their active behavior their power and self-sufficiency, their absence of need to be helped by anyone to do anything. Sandra stands still in front of the children and seems to be weary as she tries to convince them to accept some help from each other. Looking disappointed, she hesitantly says,“But you . . . but you . . . but you will be in a group!” Lucas pretends to brutally crash a balloon with his foot. Andrew and Joseph do exactly the same. Lucas angrily shouts,“Because I get the balloon and blow it up like this!!!”

Considering the above transcripted interactions, it is obvious that Sandra uses competition as a strategy to gain the attention of the disrupted classroom. By stressing the competitive rules, she succeeds in having children highly motivated to pay attention and participate in the activity she selected to promote cooperation. It seems children are very much used to participating in competitions, and they appreciate it. So, when she threatens those who are not paying attention with the possibility of losing (“it’s for serious now!”), she maximizes their attentiveness. Later on in the session, she uses similar strategies, when, for example, she says “but if you don’t pay attention now, you can’t complain to me later about losing.” All along the session, Sandra emphasizes, both by verbal and nonverbal communication and metacommunication, the value of competition (the contest between winners versus losers). She does that—proposes competi-

46   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO

tion—even when asked to promote cooperation. The excerpt from the session consists of the only piece of the interactive flow where she timidly suggests a sort of cooperation. When she suggested they could help each other within the same group, it clearly sounded like “a friend may help you if you need it.” This message gave rise to rejection and indignation. The kids interpreted that as possibly a declaration of incompetence, as an admittance of weakness or failure to be self-sufficient; and self-confidence is, afterall, a “winner’s quality.” The interesting thing here is that she seemed quite surprised by their reaction (“But you . . . but you . . . but you will be in a group!”). It is very likely that she was expecting them to take that message as a welcome opportunity to cooperate with each other within the group. However, the words “may” and “help,” and the way she said it (paralinguistic and nonverbal metacommunication) only had the effect of stressing the absence of competence of those who could eventually “need” some help to perform such an easy task, namely, blowing up balloons. The chorus of “I don’t need help! I don’t need help!” well illustrates their individualistic motivation, which goes hand in hand with competitive frames of interaction. The way she put it, “helping” the other sounded like an exception that was permitted during the activity, rather than a rule to be followed, or a desirable initiative to take. The short-lived conflict between helping and competing generated a moment of misunderstanding that, along the sequence of interactions, completely disappeared. Sandra did not insist on “helping” as a possibility, and easily surrendered to the children’s competitive excitement. Lisa, on the other hand, carried out and handled the structured situation differently. She oriented children toward individual performance and, to a certain extent, during the structured session, implicitly suggested a “noninteractive kind of cooperation,” better conceptualized as a coordination of actions in a sequence (Branco et al., 2004). In the context of the structured activity, they did not have to actually do anything together with a classmate, that is, to interact with each other. They only had to coordinate their individual participations so that the final product of such coordination would be a big poster to be put up on the school wall. Extracts of the social interactions that occurred during the session could be presented to make this point, but due to present limitations, those are presented elsewhere (Palmieri, 2003. The methodology adopted in this study entailed the integration of observation and interview data. During the interviews, Sandra and Lisa revealed difficulties in conceptualizing cooperation. For both teachers, the concept seemed to apply only to children’s obedience and willingness to collaborate with them (teachers). They never mentioned in the interviews the possibility of cooperation among children, that is, child–child cooperative interactions. In sum, observations and interviews showed teachers’ total

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unfamiliarity with an analysis of the social participation structures of specific activities (Ericsson, 1984) and their lack of knowledge about the meaning and impact of cooperation, competition, and individualism on children’s socialization and development (Davidson & Harrington, 2002; Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Slavin, 1991). Also evident in the structured sessions and interviews was their ignorance regarding how cooperative activities can be planned and supervised to promote actual child–child cooperation. The use and integration of methods—initial ethnographic approach, naturalistic observations, microgenetic analysis of a structured activity plus semistructured interviews—proved to be very effective and productive in providing relevant information concerning the issue of social motivation in educational contexts. Next, we present a research that interviewed preschool teachers about child development and the social objectives of early childhood education. Teacher’s Narratives on Cooperation, Competition, and Individualism This investigation (Gomes Pinto, 2006, supervised by the first author) aimed at promoting teachers’ narratives of their values or beliefs related to the development of social objectives among preschool children. A total of 16 teachers from public preschools in the city of Brasilia, Brazil, were interviewed. We used a semistructured list of topics to promote interviewee’s narratives, which were then analyzed according to an interpretive qualitative approach (Gaskins, Miller, & Corsaro, 1992). After the teachers were interviewed, they were invited to participate of four focus-group sessions on how to promote positive child–child interactions within educational contexts. Next, we selected some excerpts from teachers’ narratives that showed how far they were from being able to conceptualize fundamental constructs such as socialization, cooperation, individualism, and autonomy. Results also showed their difficulties in analyzing the everyday activities they promoted in terms of what sort of social interactions they were promoting. Cooperation was mostly identified with helping the teacher, although a few did mention child–child mutual help. Socialization often meant working in groups, even when the group was following teacher’s commands or answering questions posed by her. The intermingled nature of child development, that is, the relevance of social experiences for the development of language and cognition, was surprisingly unknown to them. Some examples of their narratives can clarify what we mean by teachers’difficulties with issues related to social development:

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Ana (fictitious name) “To cooperate is being available to respect the other . . . respect is cooperation . . . You must know up to where your space is or the other’s space is . . . In early childhood education, we see that a lot, children like to cooperate with the teacher . . . also with a friend with difficulty, the child helps in a very innocent way. I think cooperation does not imply requesting anything from the other, not even being aware of what one is doing . . . For example, a child is helping me to distribute materials, and also to control peers’ behavior, he goes there and says ‘it’s not time to play now!’ This responsibility I give him is cooperation, isn’t it?” For Ana, to be individualistic is synonymous with competive, autonomous and independent, all adjectives mean the same.

Gabriela Gabriela answers to the interviewer, after she herself mentioned cooperation: Interviewer: “Why do you think cooperation is important?” Gabriela: “Exactly because of that, to help the other to overcome his difficulties, his limitations . . . He receives the help he needs to be able to do what what he was not able to do by himself.” For this teacher, as the world is very competitive, the society is soaked by competition, this is why it is necessary to develop it within the classroom.

Manuela Manuela answers the first question by saying, “Human development . . . ? I guess . . . Technically, I don’t know how to define this term.” Then she defines socialization as harmony in the group and the acceptance of norms and rules. Her example of cooperation comes next: “In the organization of a line with the students, if they are all organized, they will be able to have their snack faster; they want to go to the playground, to have more free play time . . . Then they have to stay together to go out for snack time, they go hand in hand, a line of two.”

Mirela For Mirela, to cooperate is to help, as most teachers agree. She explicitly says, “Help. It is help. There are also cooperative games; group games, beyond being competitive, they have to figure out that if one does not cooperate, no one can win the game. So . . . is is a group that helps, cooperates.” Then the researcher asks, “Do you think that it’s important to encourage cooperation among children?” Mirela answers, “Very, very important!” The researcher asks,“Why?” Mirela answers, “Because it is very good for competition, so that in the future, they will be better persons, who cooperate, help, and won’t be isolated.”

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The general results of this study revealed a lot of confusion between concepts, contradictory arguments, cooperation defined as help (and not as mutual help), and also a tendency to consider social development as something that in fact blooms with time, naturally, spontaneously, without particular needs to be guided or oriented by teachers. In other words, early childhood education is constrained to promote language and cognitive development, and socialization will take its natural way if discipline, good manners, obedience, and politeness are granted within the school context. Cultural Canalization of Competition and Cooperation: An Experiment Since culture provides the individuals with social suggestions that, if redundant, may strongly contribute to internalization of beliefs and values, Branco and Valsiner (1992, 1993) carried out an experiment to verify the power of cooperatively versus competitively organized contexts in preschool children’s social interactions. Both contexts were organized to provide structural and semiotic guidance (rules plus verbal and nonverbal adults’ incentives), coherence toward cooperative or individualistic/competitive social interactive frames (Branco et al., 2004; Lavelli et al., 2005). The experiment goal was to investigate the microgenetic development of social interactions among 3-year-old children along six sessions minutely designed to trigger and encourage either cooperation or competition. Six children were divided into two triads (two boys and one girl), each triad designated to one specific condition. The six experimental sessions (about 25 minutes each) were followed by a test situation (seventh session) that served as a test context for assessing significant changes in children’s conduct. Baseline observations during the free-play context before the experiment allowed us to discard previous bias or tendencies by the children selected for the triads. The sessions were videotaped and then microgenetically analyzed. The kind of activity proposed by the young female assistant was compatible with the type of social interdependence we wanted to promote, like wooden blocks for joint construction, family dolls for playhouse versus competitive games (bowling, etc.), and puzzles to test children’s abilities. Also, some sessions used natural materials such as stones, but the rules for using them consisted of either “let’s build something together” versus “let’s see who does the most beautiful job.” In short, the cooperation context invited children to interact with each other in order to build a unique structure— or story, like in fantasy play—from small objects or toys. In the competitive context, children were invited to compete or to play alone, so their performances could be compared at the end. For example, during competitive games, the adult marked their performances on a card. During individual

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tasks, the adult took pictures of their work so people could later choose which one was the “best.” The seventh session, or test situation, consisted of the same task for each triad: to move a big doll around, and the story was that the doll was ill, and needed to see a doctor. Therefore, the three children had to undress her, to pretend to bathe her, to dry her, to dress her again, to carry her to the “hospital,” to examine and medicate her, and to finally bring her back “home.” The results showed the power of canalization processes over only six structured sessions. The group that experienced cooperation during six consecutive sessions showed a general pattern of affiliative social interactions—such as talk, cooperation, and help—during 95% of the test session time, 81% defined as cooperation. On the other hand, the group that was submitted to successive competitively structured situations spent 12% of the test session time in affiliative social interactions, only 8% being cooperative. Observing the videos, children who experienced competition regulated their behaviors in order to avoid social exchanges with stunning ability. One child, for example, repeatedly waited for the others to finish a certain activity before engaging in it. The differences detected in the seventh session were strong enough to demonstrate the canalizing tendencies of specifically structured contexts. That is, the results show how powerful the structure and the semiotic frame of cultural activities over individuals can be. Even though we cannot directly generalize the findings of this experimental study, it does suggest the existence, and the impact, of cultural canalization not only at microlevels, but also reinforces its likely participation at ontogenetic levels. Taking the school environment as the principal focus of theory and research, many authors (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1989) stress the tremendous impact that cooperative goal structures, when contrasted with competitive and individualistic goal structures, have on students’ performances, social interactions, self-esteem, and such. Once the impact of the structure and quality of social interactions each cultural practice over child development is well demonstrated, educators should better analyze the “hidden curriculum” (Giroux & Purpel, 1988) embedded in everyday school activities, and evaluate possible cultural canalization processes that may be driving the students toward the development of specific social interactions and relations, as well as the internalization of particular values. If ethnic integration, solidarity, constructive conflict resolution, and collaboration are worthy values, all developmental contexts such as family, schools, and so on need to be aware of scientific findings. Central to educational efforts is the promotion of the individual’s ability and motivation to take into account other people’s needs, feelings, and interests (Staub, 2003). Nevertheless, the complexities of human social interactions do not recommend a dualistic positioning toward cooperation

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and against competition, since what actually matters is the quality of the social frame within which point-like interactions take place.Within a collaborative, constructive frame, productive conflicts and eventual competitions can be welcome for human and social development. In other words, we have to keep in mind the dynamic and complex nature of communication and other psychological processes. In short, parents and teachers should draw on scientific knowledge to provide activities for children and adolescents, and apply the available information to better conceptualize and effectively implement social objectives by endorsing cultural practices and cultivating cooperative values within family and school contexts. Cooperative, Competitive, and Individualist Values in Children and Adolescent Narratives This research project’s goal was to investigate children’s and adolescents’ possible values regarding social interdependence in general (Branco, 2008; Branco, Parada, & Alves, 2006; Oliveira Silva, 2005). In order to facilitate their narratives, obtained during individual interviews and focus groups with similar-aged peers, we developed a methodology to bring to the forefront of discussion some selected scenes of a very popular soap opera that had been recently aired by the omnipresent Brazilian TV station named Rede Globo de TV. To give a pale idea of the popularity of such Brazilian soap operas, they are reported to be watched by the majority of TV owners in Brazil, and by a significant amount of people in Cuba, Portugal, and other foreign countries throughtout the world. We developed this study with six different categories of subjects: working-class and upper middle-class children, adolescents, and young students. The young students category was composed of a group in their first year at the University of Brasilia and a group of young working-class adults attending an alternative school program to help them graduate at either middle or high school levels (Branco, 2008; Oliveira & Branco, 200?). The number of participants was 60, and all lived in the city of Brasilia, except for the working-class adolescents who lived in a poor city not far from Brazil’s capital. Together with our goals to investigate cooperative, competitive, and individualistic values, and exactly because we believe such values are related to moral values and beliefs, we explored the participants’ moral judgments and ideas concerning justice, friendship, violence, prosocial behaviors, and similar issues. Each participant was first individually interviewed, and after others were interviewed in the group, they participated in a focus group session. During both procedures—individual interview and focus group session—the experi-

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menter presented selected videotaped scenes from the soap opera, chosen by their potential power to elicit debate and arguments concerning “right” versus “wrong” evaluations. In addition to this semistructured procedure design, the interviewer posed to participants key questions chosen to explore and promote as many arguments and elaborations as possible concerning the topic under investigation. A total of seven scenes were selected: 1. A physical fight between a homosexual teen girl and the girl who bullied her and her girlfriend; 2. A conversation between the female school principal and the fighters, which occurred after that episode; 3. The insistence by the main character, an apparently good-hearted wife, in putting at risk the survival of her husband’s ex-mistress within an IC facility, just to satisfy her curiosity; 4. An argument between a poor pregnant girl (the maid’s daughter), the rich boy who impregnated her, and his snobbish mother; 5. A father brutally beating up and humiliating his daughter in front of a crowd after he found her in bed with a man for money; 6. An altruistic young man who actually killed himself and the exhusband wife beater—and potential assassin—of his beloved older girlfriend; and finally 7. A situation where a young woman comes across her stepmother passionately kissing her fiancé. All individual interviews were audiotaped and focus-group sessions were videotaped, which allowed for later in-detail analysis of communication and metacommunication among participants. Results differ much more according to social class than to age or sex, although we could identify a couple of preconventional moral judgments à la Kohlberg (1984) within the younger group (children). No particular difference was shown between male and female participants. The noteworthy differences, though, were related to social class, particularly for the older groups (adolescents and young adults). Middle-class participants tended to be more competitive than working-class subjects, and the latter group showed more propensity toward social isolation and individualism than competition. But the major, striking result was the clear, obvious difficulty found in all groups to provide accurate definitions of cooperation and to give examples of cooperative experiences of their own, either in school or family contexts. All participants defined cooperation as “helping the other,” in similar ways to teachers, as seen in the studies presented before, and many others (see Barreto, 2004; Oliveira, 1999; Salomão, 2001). The notion of cooperation as co-operation, collaboration—all participants benefiting from the joint work—was almost alien to the group. To cooperate “is to help,” and

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reasons given for engaging in cooperation were closer to altruism (Staub, 2003) than to the joint achievement of a common goal, benefiting everyone. Moreover, contradictions were not rare: when asked about what could change to make the world a better place to live, there was unanimity toward the construction of a peaceful, solid, and cooperative society. However, when asked about what they would do if they were in the shoes of the soap opera characters, or in particular real-life situations, their narratives suggested strong tendencies toward self-centeredness and individualism. Competition was observed in the narrative—particularly in middle-class participants—but it was not stressed as often as individualism. Arguments in favor of competition were more frequent along the lines of “the world is like this . . . therefore people need to learn to compete,” and such. But individualism was found in most examples of everyday life experiences. In the following subsections, we present some specific results concerning the working-class adolescents who attended the high school in Brasilia’s poor neighbor city, where people live their lives in a very violent context. Family For these participants, family meant private space as opposed to public space. They also stressed how they could trust only in their family, but as they talked about it, we found out they were talking mostly about the mother. None of the participants complained about their mother, and maybe here we can say there was a sort of idealization of the mother figure as well. The others “out there” were seen as the big menace for children and adolescents, while the family is the only safe place to be. As a male participant put it, “when parents go to work and leave their children with other people or home alone, they [children, adolescents] go hang out with others with no family, homeless kids; then they will follow their way and will do a lot of wrongdoing.” Three other adolescents said that “mother’s advice is for your best, what she says you bet she’s right!” (S); “Our parents know what is right or wrong for us, we are fools if we don’t admit they’re right” (R); and “Parents raise you to be a good person . . . they never wish you to get hurt, even when they call you names, all they do is for your own good” (C). Here it is important to say that fathers are usually absent in many of the families in this poor context: “Mother, we only have one, father can be many!”(J); “I was raised without a father, but for sure I never missed it, my Mom does everything”(S); and, as M puts it, “A father you can find at each corner, a mother, no way.” In short, they have their mothers for them, so they may tend to generalize and represent the mother as an ideal according to the collective culture, social expectation of the “nurturing” mother. Some, though, narrate an awareness of how a problematic family dynamic may generate problems (“bad” behavior and troublesome values): “[What is most influential] for kids is watching their parents fighting with each oth-

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er, they get stressed out and go to the street to find something to do, they look for drugs” (J). S complements by saying, “the mother arguing with the father, he sees the father beating up the mother, then he’ll grow up and will beat up his wife.” In short, they seem to know the learning mechanisms involved in human development and socialization. What surprised us, however, is how they conceived of the father (or mother) as the owner of the child or adolescents, totally approving the beating by the soap opera scene when the father physically and violently beats his young daughter, humiliating her. According to them, “He was in his own right, his father’s right to do that . . . he might have exaggerated a little, but she deserved that, didn’t she?” (C); or “He acted all right. He gave her a lesson, to be beaten up in front of everybody as a child, so everyone could see who is still in charge!” (S). In short, they criticize violence, but approve of it within the family when a son or daughter deserved it. Autonomy, peace, or dialogues, thus, only apply as abstract wishes and remains alien to real-life situations. Friendship The adolescents found friendship mostly dangerous and even nonexistent. According to them, friends can be extremely influential on their values development. Family being their major support, they attributed to peers the power of twisting and ruining an adolescent’s life. H, a boy, said that “Friendship, the environment where the person meet his friends, that’s what actually builds the person.” In the particular case of these adolescents, all reported a strong fear concerning friends, usually seen as the source of temptations and bad behavior (drugs, criminal activities). H also said that “What they do, they will force you to do, otherwise you’ll be kicked out of the group, and no one wants to be left alone.” Some other narratives from different participants go, “Very few people can find real friends who are not involved in wrongdoing”; “Many people try to approach you to make you use and deal with drugs . . . bad students, who try to win you to go their way”; and so on. One girl goes further and concludes, “Nowadays, in my view, actually there are no friends at all. Because today people only get together when they need something, when there is a real need to be together . . . true friends cannot be found anymore”; and a boy completes, “Out of ten of your so-called friends, nine will try to get you into trouble or drugs.” Their pessimistic perception of reality starts to make sense in view of the increasing violence (harsh bullying, murder, robbery) and lack of perspective of many young people in that poor context, who become protagonists of criminal actions. Disbelief and fear prevail in this community, and we guess this can also be the case in other communities where poverty and lack

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of education, together with the absence of civic and community efforts to provide better living conditions for their citizens prevail. Many participants also pointed out that adolescents are easy prey to bad company: “Friends have this capacity to take you [in Portuguese “jogar,” maybe better translated as to “toss” you around] to the good or to the bad side” (R); “I think peers influence too much. But of course depends on the person . . . I think they influence a lot, certain peers” (W). “[Peers] force people to be what they are not!” (L). In short, many participants associated the word “adolescence” with negative developmental perspectives, drugs, criminality, and prostitution. When asked about what can be most influential during adolescence, one girl answered without hesitation, “Drugs, for sure, this drug issue, you know? Also the issue of prostitution, because this is something that makes money” (S). When asked about positive influences, she said, “Positive influences, well, I do not know . . . maybe a youth group, like, an AA.” Conflict Resolution Most soap opera scenes involved some sort of conflict. What was particularly noteworthy in this group was their firm will to avoid any kind of conflict. All conflicts were seen as leading to violence, as though no other conflict resolution strategy was possible, or known, to them (“arguments can generate death, violence,” L). That avoidance goes as far as giving up rights or standing up for justice: “If I were her, I’d avoid it, I would let that go, I’d do nothing . . . ” (J); “We should not go all-out for problems. Otherwise . . . that’s why Brazil is like this, everybody goes violent instead of stopping, and talking about what one dislikes” (L). Also, they use a lot verbal expressions equivalent to “lose one’s mind,” “despair,” “extreme distress,” suggesting the degree of stress and fear they face in their everyday life. Prejudice Two of the soap opera scenes concerned homophobia. But most participants insisted on other forms of prejudice, saying, “[the author] referred to homophobia, but there are prejudices concerning everything, all sorts of prejudice . . . racial, religion, sexual orientation, also opinion” (L). M was positive regarding the genetic quality of prejudices: “Humans are all born with prejudices.” C said that “since you are a kid, you have prejudice. The person, the adolescent with prejudice, will become an adult with prejudice,” and M goes on with, “because there is a difference, and when there is a difference, there is no other way, there will be prejudice.” Although their deterministic view on prejudice was seen as something innate, they were all against prejudice: “There should not be prejudices anywhere . . . we should not have prejudices against anyone, neither races, colors, people from other countries, other religions, nor other sexual op-

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tions” (J); “We should not exclude other people because they were born that way” (H). Media Influence For these participants, media is so powerful today that it may affect children and adolescents: “Nowadays, what is most influential, even more than the parents, is the TV itself” (H); “People learn to do a lot of things just watching TV” (J). All adolescents stressed the negative impact of TV, especially for the encouragement of violence and pornography. According to W, “Just a few [programs] show something positive, the majority of the stuff is negative!”; R said that “I think the TV encourages people to compete with each other and to act for their own benefit.” Even though critical about TV’s contents, none of the participants showed a critical analysis of the scenes themselves when asked “What do you think the show’s author is trying to induce in the audience with this scene?” Certainly, we are aware of the limitations of the present study, for an ethonographic approach plus direct observations could provide and enrich the quality of data here constructed. Often, as for example, in the case of their speaking against prejudice, or their insistence on the presence of “all-caring” mothers, the participants may easily be just repeating socially desirable jargons as answers to our questions. However, as a general conclusion of this study, we can in a way demonstrate a major impact of poor and violent living conditions, as well as cultural practices and experiences, over the narrative elaborations of the adolescents. The narrated beliefs and possible values related to family, friendships, adolescence, and particularly their negative evaluation and fear concerning social interactions outside the family niche—what may lead to isolation and conformity—were indeed quite striking and worrisome. After all, in Brazil there are millions of adolescents and young people living in very similar conditions as those we investigated. Being aware of generalization pitfalls from qualitative studies, we can still say that results undoubtly raise questions that need further investigation vis-à-vis population health and the construction of a culture of peace in our society, this being valid for other contexts as well. Conclusions and Future Perspectives The results of the empirical studies presented in this chapter suggest that further investigations should be carried out in order to advance our scientific knowledge concerning the dynamics between practices and values’ reciprocal contructions. Some convergences found in the projects above and elsewhere regarding human interactions, socialization, and values (Morin & Prigogine, 2000; Saraiva, 2000; Sennet, 1999 and many others)

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show how individualism and competition do prevail in our societies. We also found that conflicts, involving children, adolescents, young adults, or teachers, are usually considered as negative (Bunker & Rudin, 2000). To conceive the positive potential of divergence and conflict to advance human development is rarely acknowledged by educators, and this poses a tremendous problem for the encouragement of new, pacific forms of conflict resolutions (Piaget, 1987, Valsiner & Cairns, 1992). Conflicts are constructive when dealt with within a context permeated by a culture of peace. This holds true from individuals’ to nations’ interactions and relations. Social isolation and conformity, as suggested by the poor adolescents living in a violent context near Brasilia, can only worsen violence, power abuse, and injustice. The promotion of effective social changes toward democracy certainly demands cooperation and joint efforts among peole, for individualism and competition will only perpetuate unfair power relations at both intra- and intersociocultural levels. Citzenship means autonomy with responsibility, and it cannot be built on individualistic or competitive values, since it can only be sustained by justice, inclusion, and solidarity. Unfortunately, we still witness an increase in violence translated into domestic and public aggressions, associated with conservative values that build on people’s increasing fear of each other. Media plays an important role in this state of affairs as well. But if we want to overcome social inequalities and promote positive changes, we can no longer hide the sociohistorical origins of competition and individualism (Dumont, 1985; Lash, 1987), and move on to concentrate our energy and transformative actions in the construction of cooperative values and practices. Developmental psychology has, additionally, the social duty to collaborate with educators in general, to create interactive contexts or activities that encourage positive social interactions among people. Such a cooperative effort may facilitate in different ways the internalization of values coherent with prosocial objectives regarding individuals and cultural institutions. The ambiguities and contradictions found at the levels of both structure and interaction dynamics in developmental contexts demonstrate the complexity of meaning construction processes (Valsiner, 2007). The evidence and arguments presented in this chapter also call for people’s awareness regarding the role of communication, metacommunication, and the organization of activities in promoting human development in particular directions. It is up to adults and/or people in charge of institutional contexts to create and provide activities compatible with those values our societies find important to promote. When viewed from a cultural perspective, meaning-construction processes related to social values intertwine with each other in extremely complex ways. They depend on history, culture, and specific practices taking place in numerous developmental contexts (family, school, media), and occur with-

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in and throughout different levels of an open-ended systemic organization (e.g., Branco, 2003, 2009; Ford & Lerner, 1992; Valsiner, 1998, 2007). Aspects such as cultural-historical frameworks, culturally structured contexts, specific social interactions, communication dynamics, situational characteristics, individuals’ subjectivities, and goal orientations, in sum, all such aspects, play a fundamental role in the co-construction of the values that emerge within particular contexts. To understand why competition and individualism dominate contemporary globalized scenarios demands, therefore, a permanent struggle to make sense of the ontogenesis of social values at both macro- and microlevels. This is certainly the wiser way to come up with productive suggestions and interventions aiming at the promotion of humanistic values and cooperation for a better world for everyone, and not just for the winners of the historically unfair life game. In fact, the game analogy is bad and should be abolished, for ultimately, we are speaking of the quality of human beings’ lives and about the urgent need to peacefully share this beautiful planet. References Baggio, A. (2009). O princípio esquecido. São Paulo, Brazil: Cidade Nova. Bandura, A . (1991). Social cognitive theory of self-regulation. Organization Behavior and Human Decisions Processes, 50, 248–287. Barreto, A. M. (2004). Educação infantil: Crenças e valores sobre as relações entre práticas pedagógicas específicas e o desenvolvimento da criança. (PhD thesis) Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade de Brasília. Barrios, A., & Branco, A. U. (2008). Desenvolvimento moral: Novas perspectivas de análise. Revista Psicologia Argumento (PUCPR), 25(51), 413–424. Baumrind, D. (1991). Parenting styles and adolescent development. Im J. BrooksGunn, R. Lerner, & A.C. Peterson (orgs.), The encyclopedia of adolescence. New York, NY: Garland. Blasi, A. (2004). Moral functioning: Moral understanding and personality. In K. Daniel, D. K. Lapsey, & D. Narvaez (Eds.), Moral development, self, and identity (pp. 335–347). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Branco, A. U. (2003). Social development in social contexts: Cooperative and competitive interaction patterns in peer interactions. In J. Valsiner & K. Connolly (Eds.), Handbook of developmental psychology (pp. 238–256). London, England: Sage. Branco, A. U. (2006). Crenças e práticas culturais: Co-construção e ontogênese de valores sociais. Revista Pro-Posições (UNICAMP), 17(1), 139–155. Branco, A. U. (2008). Mídia e desenvolvimento humano: Crenças e valores sociais entre jovens de diferentes categorias sociais. Report to CNPq. Branco, A. U. (2009). Cultural practices, social values, and childhood education. In M. Fleer, M. Hedegaard, & J. Tudge (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2009—

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    59 Childhood studies and the impact of globalization: Policies and practices at global and local levels (pp. 44–66). London, England: Routledge. Branco, A. U. (2012). Values and socio-cultural practices: Pathways to moral development. In J. Valsiner (Ed.), Oxford handbook of cultural psychology (pp. 1833– 1880). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Branco, A. U., & Madureira, A. F. (2008). Dialogical self in action: The emergence of self-positions among complex emotional and cultural dimensions. Estudios de Psicología, 29, 319–332. Branco, A.U., & Mettel, T. P. L. (1995) O processo de canalização cultural das interações criança-criança na pré-escola. Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa, 11(1), 13–22. Branco, A.U., Parada, P., & Alves, C. (2006). Crenças, valores e relações interpessoais em adolescentes de baixa renda: isolamento e exclusão social. Paper presented at the XXXVI Annual Meetings of the Brazilian Psychology Society, Salvador, Brazil. Branco, A.U, Pessina, L., Flores, A., & Salomão, S. (2004). A sociocultural constructivist approach to metacommunication in child development. In A.U. Branco & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Communication and metacommunication in human development (pp. 3–31). Greenwood, CT: Information Age. Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (1997). Changing methodologies: A co-constructivist study of goal orientations in social interactions. Psychology and Developing Societies, 9 (1), 35–64 Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (1998). Cooperation, competition and related issues: A co-constructive approach. In M. C. Lyra & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Child development within culturally structured environments. Vol. 4. Construction of psychological processes in interpersonal communication. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (2004). Communication and metacommunication in human development. Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Branco, A. U., & Valsiner, J. (2010). Towards cultural psychology of affective processes: semiotic regulation of dynamic fields. Estudios de Psicología, 31, 243–251. Bruner, J. (1997). Atos de significação. Porto Alegre, Brazil: Artes Médicas. Bunker, B. B., & Rudin, J. Z. (2000). Conflict, cooperation, and justice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Costa, J. F. (2000). A ética e o espelho da cultura. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Rocco. Dumont, L. (1985). O individualismo: Uma perspectiva antropológica da ideologia moderna. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Rocco. Fatigante, M., Fasulo, A., & Pontecorvo, C. (2004). This is not a dinner: Metacommunication in family dinnertime conversations. In A. U. Branco & J. Valsiner (Eds.), Communication and metacommunication in human development (pp. 33– 82). Greenwich, CT: Information Age. Freire, S., & Branco, A.U. (2010). Dynamic self conceptions new perspectives to study children’s self development. Paper presented at the 6th Dialogical Self Conference, October, Athens, Greece. Freitag, B. (1997). Itinerários de Antígona: A questão da moralidade. Campinas, Brazil: Papirus. Freud, S. (1968). New introductory lectures in psychoanalysis. London: Hogart. Galán, P. C. (2005). Democracia y virtudes cívicas. Madrid, Spain: Biblioteca Nueva. Gaskins, S., Miller, P. J., & Corsaro,W. A. (1992). Theoretical and methodological perspectives in the interpretive study of children. In W. A. Corsaro & P. J.

60   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO Miller (Orgs.), Interpretive approaches to children’s socialization (New Directions for Child Development, no. 58) (pp. 5–24). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Giroux, H., & Purpel, D. (1988). The hidden curriculum and moral education: Deception or discovery? Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Gomes Pinto, R. (2006). Educação Infantil: Desenvolvimento social na perspectiva de professores. Master Dissertation, University of Brasilia. Grusec, J. E., & Kuczynski, L. (1997). Parenting and children’s internalization of values. New York, NY: Wiley. Hermans, H. J. (2001). The dialogical self: Toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning. Culture & Psychology, 7(3), 243–282. Jares, J. (2002). Educação para a paz: Sua teoria e prática. Porto Alegre, Brazil. ArtMed. Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1989). Cooperation and competition: Theory and research. Minnesota: Interaction Book Company. Kohlberg, L. (1984). The psychology of moral development: Moral stages, their nature and validation. New York, NY: Haper & Row. Kohn, A. (1986). No contest: The case against competition. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Lapsley, D. K., & Narvaez, D. (2004). A social-cognitive approach to the moral personality. In K. Daniel, D. K. Lapsey, & D. Narvaez (Eds.), Moral development, self, and identity (pp. 189–212). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lash, C. (1987). O mínimo eu: A sobrevivência psíquica em tempos difíceis. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Brasiliense. Lavelli, M., Pantoja, A. P. F., Hsu, H., Messinger, D., & Fogel, A. (2005). Using microgenetic designs to study change processes. In D. M. Teti (Ed.), Handbook of research methods in developmental science (pp. 40–65). Baltimore, MD: Blackwell Publishers. Lotman, Y. (1990). Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lourenço, O. M. (1998). Psicologia do desenvolvimento moral: Teoria, dados e implicações. Coimbra, Portugal: Livraria Almedina. Maturana, H. (2002). Emoções e linguagem na educação e na política. Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Editora UFMG. Morin, E., & Prigogine, I. (2000). A sociedade em busca de valores. Lisbon, Portugal: Instituto Piaget. Neves-Pereira, M. (2005). Criatividade na pré-escola: Um estudo sociocultural construtivista de concepções e práticas de educadores. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Brasilia. Oliveira Silva, M. (2005). Crenças e valores sociais no discurso de jovens da classe média: midia e socialização. Master Dissertation, University of Brasilia. Palmieri, M. W. (2003). Cooperação,competição e individualismo na pré-escola: Análise de contextos de desenvolvimento. (PhD thesis) Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade de Brasília. Palmieri, M., & Branco, A. U. (2008). Educação infantil, cooperação e competição: Análise microgenética sob uma perspectiva sociocultural. Psicologia Escolar e Educacional, 11, 365–378. Piaget, J. (1977). O julgamento moral na criança. São Paulo, Brazil: Mestre Jou.

Cultural Practices and Value Constructions    61 Ratner, C. (2002). Cultural psychology: Theory and method. New York, NY: Plenum. Reykowski, J. (1989). Dimensions of development in moral values. In N. Eisenberg, J. Reykowski, & E. Staub (Eds.), Social and moral values: Individual and societal perspectives (pp. 131–146). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum. Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York, NY: Free Press. Rommetveit, R. (1992). Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication. In A. H. Vold (Ed.), The dialogical alternative: Toward a theory of language and mind (pp. 19–44). Oslo, Norway: Scandinavian University Press. Salgado, J., & Hermans, H. (2005). The return of subjectivity: From a multiplicity of selves to the dialogical self. Electronic Journal of Applied Psychology, 1, 3–13. Salomão, S.J. (2001). Motivação social: Comunicação e metacomunicação na co-construção de crenças e valores no contexto de interações professora-alunos. Master Dissertation, University of Brasília. Santos, G., & Silva, D. (2002). Estudos sobre ética: A construção de valores na sociedade e na educação. São Paulo, Brazil: Casa do Psicólogo. Saraiva, J. E. M. (2000). Do individualismo moderno ao narcisismo contemporâneo: A produção da subjetividade na cultura do consumo. In S. J. Souza (Ed.), Subjetividade em questão: A infância como crítica da cultura (pp. 47–64). Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 7 Letras. Schwartz, S. H., Melech, G., Lehmann, A., Burgess, S., Harris, M., & Owens, V. (2001). Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human values with a different method of measurement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(5), 519–542. Sennett, R. (1999). A corrosão do caráter: Consequências pessoais do trabalho no novo capitalismo. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Record. Shweder, R. (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shweder, R. A., & Much, N. C. (1987). Determinations of meaning: Discourse and moral socialization. In W. M. Kurtines & J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Moral development through social interaction (pp. 197–244). New York, NY: Wiley. Siegler, R.S. & Crowley, K. (1991). The microgenetic method. American Psychologist, 46(6), 606–620. Slavin, R. (1991). Synthesis of research on cooperative learning. Educational Leadership, February, 71–82. Sloan, T. (2005). Globalization, poverty, and social justice. In G. Nelson & I. Prilleltensky (Eds.), Community psychology: In pursuit of liberation and well-being. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Staub, E. (1991). A conception of the determinants and development of altruism and aggression: Motives, the self, and the environment. In C. Zahan-Waxler, E. M. Cummings, & R. Iannotti (Eds.), Altruism and aggression: Biological and social origins (pp.135–164). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Staub, E. (1992). The origins of caring, helping and non-aggression: Parental socialization, the family system, schools, and cultural influence. In P. Oliner, S. Oliner, L. Baron, L. Blum, D. Krebs, & M. Smolenska (Eds.), Embracing the other: Philosophical psychological, and historical perspectives on altruism (pp. 390– 412). New York: New York University Press.

62   A. BRANCO, M. PALMIERI, and R. G. PINTO Staub, E. (2003). The psychology of good and evil: Why children, adults, and groups help and harm others. Cambridge, England: C ambridge University Press. Tamayo, A. (2007). Hierarquia de valores transculturais e brasileiros. Psicologia: Teoria e Pesquisa, 23, 7–15. Tappan, M. (1997). Language, culture, and moral development: A Vygotskian perspective. Developmental Review, 17, 78–100. Tappan, M. (1998). Moral education in the zone of proximal development. Journal of Moral Education, 27(2), 141–161. Valsiner, J. (1987). Culture and the development of children’s action. Chichester, England: Wiley. Valsiner, J. (2007). Culture in minds and societies. New Delhi, India: Sage. Valsiner, J., Branco, A. U., & Dantas, C. (1997). Socialization as coconstruction: Parental belief orientations and heterogeneity of reflection. In J. E. Grusec & L. Kuczynski (Eds.), Parenting and children’s internalization of values (pp. 283– 306). New York, NY: Wiley. Valsiner, J., & Cairns, R. (1992). Theoretical perspectives on conflict and development. In C. V. Shantz & W. W. Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent development. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Valsiner, J., & Rosa, A. (2007). The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1984). A formação social da mente. São Paulo, Brazil: Martins Fontes.

Chapter 3

The Cultural Ecology of Human Value Jonathan R. H. Tudge, Cesar A. Piccinini, Rita S. Lopez, Tania M. Sperb, Selma C. Dansokho, and Lia B. L. Freitas

The study of values has rarely appeared in the cultural psychological literature. In this chapter, our aim is to redress the balance by focusing on one aspect—parents’ child-rearing values—as one example of human values considered more broadly. Traditionally, parents’ values have been viewed as based on their sociostructural context. Thus, cross-cultural psychologists have shown clearly how parental child-rearing values vary across different societies. Similarly, many sociologists and psychologists have argued that parents’ values are linked to their social-class background. For example, scholars such as Hofstede (2001), Schwartz (1994), and Triandis (1995) have argued that the extent to which parents value their child’s autonomy is largely dependent on the extent to which their society values independence rather than interdependence (or individualism vs. collectivism), and authors such as Kohn (1977, 1995), Luster, Rhoades, and Haas (1989), and Spade (1991) have made the same case for social-class differences within society; middleclass parents are more likely to value autonomy in their offspring than are working-class parents, who are more likely to encourage their children to follow the rules that they, the parents or other adults, have established.

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In other words, the mainstream literature, whether in the cross-cultural domain or in the fields of sociology or psychology, provides a unidirectional view of the direction of effects: from sociostructural phenomena (society, culture, race/ethnicity, or social class) to parents and from them to their children, who then grow up to fit into their context by internalizing the values to which they have been exposed. Such an argument makes perfect sense from the mainstream mechanist or neopositivist paradigm within which most cross-culturalists, sociologists, and psychologists work (Tudge, 2008). However, there are alternative paradigms, and cultural psychology fits clearly within a different paradigm (see Shweder, 1990), one that has been termed sociogenetic (see Branco & Valsiner, this volume), sociocultural, or contextual (Tudge, 2008). Paradigms and the Study of Human Development To understand the differences between paradigms, the work of Pepper (1942) is most helpful as a starting point, although others have built on Pepper’s insights (Eckensberger, 1979, 2002; Goldhaber, 2000; Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Kuczynski & Daly, 2003; Overton, 1984; Overton & Reese, 1973; Winegar, 1997). Pepper wrote about four paradigms (“world hypotheses”): mechanism, organicism, contextualism, and formism, although it is the first three that received the most attention and will be discussed in this chapter. The clearest differences are between mechanism and contextualism. Specifically, those who fall within the mechanist paradigm accept the view that a single reality exists, that appropriate methods allow researchers to at least disprove falsifiable realities, that variables have independent effects, that the influences of the researcher and those who are the objects of research can be kept separate, and that careful control (particularly within laboratory settings or by using questionnaires with forced-choice responses) can provide clear evidence of cause–effect relations among variables. Mechanism is a neopositivist paradigm with tight ontological, epistemological, and methodological links (Guba & Lincoln, 1994). Contextualism, by contrast, has a set of ontological and epistemological underpinnings that are quite different from those of mechanism; not surprisingly, its methodological approaches also differ (Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Tudge, 2008; Winegar, 1997). Of most relevance is the fact that contextualists view the relations among facets of development as interdependent, exercising mutual and synergistic impact. Rather than attempt to describe cause–effect relations, contextualists discuss the emergent properties resulting from the interrelations among two or more variables. The methods that are used by contextualists do not therefore aim for a clear separation of researcher and participants (as is the case for mechanists), but are built on

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the idea that the most valid data are those which are a co-construction of the two. According to Pepper (1942), organicism shares the belief in emergent properties; the characteristic of contextualism that distinguishes it most from organicism is the latter’s acceptance of final causes (the belief that development works toward a specific end point, as is true of organicism). Contextualism’s root metaphor is the “historic event,” defined in a way that clearly demonstrates its fundamental unwillingness to separate organism from environment: By historic event . . . the contextualist means . . . the event alive in its present. The real historic event, the event in its actuality, is when it is going on now, the dynamic dramatic active event. . . . To give instances of this root metaphor . . . we should use only verbs. It is doing, and enduring, and enjoying: making a boat, running a race, laughing at a joke, communicating with a friend. . . . These acts or events are all intrinsically complex, composed of interconnected activities with continuously changing patterns. They are like incidents in the plot of a novel or drama. They are literally the incidents of life. (Pepper, 1942, pp. 232–233, emphasis in original)

The systemic and holistic nature of human development has been understood for more than a century, stretching back to James Mark Baldwin’s work (Magnusson & Cairns, 1996). Nonetheless, despite the presence of systemic theories that take account of the complexity of developmental phenomena, the field of human development has been dominated by its mechanistic belief that “the adaptation of persons [can] be partitioned into separate variables and elementary units of behavior or biology, and removed from the whole for independent analysis” (CCHD, 1996, p. 5). Instead, contextualism requires an approach to developmental processes that takes into account their systemic and interrelated nature, involving concepts and measures of development “that permit the description of persons-in-context through time and space. We see individuals as integrated and integrating units that are dynamic and change over time” (CCHD, 1996, p. 5). Contextualist Theories Given these metatheoretical underpinnings of contextualism, what are the key elements of contextualist theories, of which the best known examples are those of Lev Vygotsky and Urie Bronfenbrenner? The first author of this chapter has written about both (see, e.g., Tudge, Mokrova, Hatfield, & Karnik, 2009; Tudge & Scrimsher, 2003), explaining how they are clearly contextualist theories. However, neither Vygotsky nor Bronfenbrenner showed clearly the ways in which culture influences (and is influenced by)

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human development, particularly in the case of within-society cultural variations, and the former paid minimal attention to what the individual brings to any situation (Cole & Gajdamascho, 2006; Tudge et al., 2008). Culturalecological theory (Tudge, 2008), built on the ideas of both Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner, was therefore developed as a way of redressing the balance. In each of these theories, activities and interactions are of central importance, but the nature of the activities and interactions varies both because of the context and because of the characteristics of the individuals involved. In brief, the context can be conceptualized in various ways, including the local contexts in which activities and interactions occur, more distal contexts (sociostructural or cultural groups, consisting of different social classes, ethnic/racial groups, or societies), and temporal context (the historical period of the activities and interactions of interest). Individual characteristics, by contrast, are those such as age, temperament, past experiences in the activities or interactions of interest, motivation, and so on. Activities and Interactions Central to Vygotsky’s thinking is the notion that activity (including mental activity) is mediated by tools or signs such as language and other symbol systems. Thus, human cognition, memory, or perception (examples of what he termed “higher mental processes”) and human development can only be understood with reference to the tools or sign systems that distinguish these activities from what he believed were the nonmediated equivalents in nonhuman species (see, for example, Wertsch, 2007). A concept that has received much attention is that of the zone of proximal development. The zone may be created in the course of interaction between a child and a more competent person, peer or adult, and helps the less competent individual acquire greater skill or understanding than he or she had previously (Vygotsky, 1987). For Vygotsky, in other words, interactions are important to the extent to which they are likely to lead to greater competence, with competence defined in cultural and historical terms. For Bronfenbrenner, proximal processes are the heart of the theory; they are conceptualized as the engines of development. Bronfenbrenner defined proximal processes as regularly occurring activities and interactions that take place, with increasing complexity, over extended periods of time between developing individuals and the people, symbols, and objects with whom they come into regular contact (Bronfenbrenner, 2001/2005; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998, 2006). Bronfenbrenner, like Vygotsky, also had in mind the types of activities and interactions that are likely to lead to healthy or optimal development. Unfortunately, at least from the first author’s point of view, Bronfenbrenner never included in the mature form of

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the theory the sense that what qualifies as optimal development is likely to vary from culture to culture (see Tudge, 2008; Tudge et al., 2009). In cultural-ecological theory, typically occurring everyday practices, or the activities and interactions that frequently occur, are the most important things to know about if one wishes to understand development. These typically occurring activities and interactions help to determine how development will occur but do not imply any particular direction to that development. From the point of view of studying some aspect of human values, the clear focus of attention should clearly be on the ways in which individuals deal with one another. In the case of parents’ child-rearing values for relative independence or conformity, for example, it makes sense to examine the extent to which parents actually provide opportunities for their children to exercise autonomy or try to follow their children’s leads. For this reason, in the Cultural Ecology of Young Children project (which will be described in more detail below), we observe young children and their common partners in activities, paying particular attention to how activities and interactions start, and how children become drawn into those activities and interactions (Tudge, 2008). We also interview the children’s parents so as to get a different window into their values and how they view their children. Context A second major factor in any contextualist theory is that of context, which can be subdivided into local context, social and cultural context, and historical context. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory stresses that culture, as developed over historical time, is central for understanding the ways in which people develop. However, he paid little attention to subcultural or local contextual variations (Tudge, 2008). Bronfenbrenner, by contrast, is best known for his differing levels of context, discussed in greatest detail in his early writings (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Two of these levels directly involve the developing person of interest—microsystems (such as homes or schools), where activities and interactions occur in the daily lives of the developing individuals of interest, and mesosystems, or the interrelations among two or more of those individuals’ microsystems. Three other levels have indirect influence on the developing person of interest. Exosystems are essentially microsystems in which the developing individual is not situated, such as the place where a child’s father works. The impact of what happens in the work place influences the child indirectly, as when, for example, the father is stressed because of what has happened at work and therefore deals with less patience with his child. The macrosystem, equivalent to society or a withinsociety cultural group for Bronfenbrenner, also has an indirect influence

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on developing individuals, because of the values, beliefs, practices, and access to resources that the group holds in common. Bronfenbrenner used the concept of chronosystem to indicate that the macrosystem changes over historical time (Tudge, 2008). Cultural-ecological theory also takes into account varying layers of context but, compared to the theoretical positions of both Vygotsky and Bronfenbrenner, pays more attention to the possible tensions that exist within any single society because of variations in values, beliefs, and practices of groups that differ in terms of racial/ethnic identity, social class, and region. To take a single example of a human value, many scholars have argued that societies can be distinguished in terms of the extent to which parents encourage interdependence rather than independence in their children (see, for example, Hofstede, 2001; Kim, Triandis, Kagitçibasi, Choi, & Yoon, 1994; Schwartz, 1994; Schwartz & Sagiv, 1995; Triandis, 1995). The distinction is too simplistic, given that societies are far from homogeneous, and there is good evidence of within-society variation on this dimension, particularly as a function of race/ethnicity (Coon & Kemmelmeier, 2001; McLoyd, 2004; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002) and social class (Kohn, 1977; Strauss, 2000). The situation is yet more complex, given that values, whether considered at the level of society or related to within-society cultural groups, do not remain static, but change over time, partly in response to political and economic changes (Elliott & Tudge, 2007; Freitas, Shelton, & Tudge, 2008; Tudge, Piccinini et al., in press). However, education (or more specifically the type and extent of education that parents receive) seems particularly relevant (Cole, 2005; Edwards & Whiting, 2004; Greenfield, Maynard, & Childs, 2000; Kağitçibaşi, 2007; Kohn, 1995; LeVine, Miller, Richman, & LeVine, 1996). Parents who have had more years of schooling, particularly involving education that has encouraged a degree of thinking for oneself, tend to value independence and autonomy in their children more than do parents with less education or education that has encouraged the memorizing and then regurgitating of facts. As societies have provided more opportunities for schooling, or have changed the manner in which children are educated, so one can see modifications of values. It is one thing to argue that social, spatial, and temporal contexts influence human values, but quite another to explain the processes involved. To do this, it is necessary to return to everyday activities and interactions, for here one can find not only the ways in which members of the older generation try to pass on groupwide values to younger generations but, as I will describe later, the ways in which the younger generation changes the values of the group itself. One compelling example of the former process is provided by Shweder, Jensen, and Goldstein (1995). They studied the sleeping arrangements of families in India and in the United States, in part

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by describing for parents a hypothetical family consisting of two parents and several children of different ages and genders. The parents were asked to say which individuals could sleep in the same room, varying the number of rooms to which the hypothetical family had access. What the authors found was that although there were some sleeping arrangements that both Indian and American parents never allowed (father sleeping in the same room as his adolescent daughter, for example), and some arrangements that both sets of parents allowed (an infant sleeping in the same room as the parents), other arrangements were clearly favored by one group of parents but not by the other. These different patterns clearly reflect different values; for example, Indian parents never allowed a young child to sleep alone, and American parents always ensured that the married couple slept together. Moving from the purely hypothetical realm to discussions with the parents about their own personal sleeping arrangements, it is clear that these individual sets of parents did not consult with the group at-large, but they instantiated the group-level values in the course of their own activities around going to bed and their interactions with other family members as they did so. The same argument can be made for any group-wide value. For instance, one cultural group may strongly value interdependence among the group. How this value is passed on to members of the younger generation is through the ways in which the young are encouraged to pay attention to the needs and wishes of others, and discouraged from satisfying their own needs or desires when these might conflict with those of other members of the group, particularly older members. However, given that no cultural groups, even when considered at a single point of historical time, are homogeneous, and given that individual development and cultural change are necessarily interdependent (as is true for any sociogenetic and cultural-ecological perspective), it is clear that neither context alone nor everyday activities and interactions is sufficient to make sense of human development. The third important aspect has to do with the individual and, as we wrote earlier, individuals are never simple recipients of values transmitted from others, but are actively involved in the “interpretive reproduction” (Corsaro, 1992) of those values. Individual Characteristics How can reproduction of human values be interpretive, and why do interactions occur in the ways in which they do? One important factor, in each of these three theories, is the individual characteristics of the people involved. Vygotsky wrote very little about these individual characteristics, although he is clear that any given context will be experienced differently according to the nature of the individuals within (Tudge & Scrimsher, 2003;

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Vygotsky, 1994). Bronfenbrenner, far from being the theorist of context, as he is so often portrayed (Tudge et al., 2009), became increasingly explicit, as his theory developed, about the varying ways in which individuals change the proximal processes in which they are involved. Cultural-ecological theory takes a similar position to Bronfenbrenner’s theory with regard to the active role individuals play in transforming their own contexts (Tudge, 2008). Parents, by virtue of having grown up in a particular context (society, racial/ethnic group, or social class) at some given historical time are likely to have taken on the values that are prevailing in that sociocultural group, in the way that we described above. However, homogeneity of values is never found within any group; whether considered at the level of society as a whole, or an entire cultural group, one is at least as likely to find tensions (resulting, for example, from unequal access to power, wealth, and status) as shared interests and harmonious relations. And at the individual level, we have to take seriously differences of biology, temperament, affect, experience, motivation, and so on. The group may attempt to transmit a single set of messages about appropriate values. However, individuals, by virtue of actively transforming their own contexts, will appropriate the prevailing values to a greater or lesser extent, or may reject or actively fight against such appropriation. For instance, parents may be raising their children in a sociocultural group that values autonomy more than conformity. However, some parents may view the exercise of their own autonomy as being more important than allowing their children autonomy (thereby encouraging their children to conform to what they, the parents, want), whereas others may see their children’s success as being more likely if the children themselves are allowed greater autonomy. By the same token, children themselves arrive into their world as anything but blank slates; even when born to the same parents, they are relatively active or passive, are more or less likely to cry, have different patterns of feeding, and so on. Even before birth, they change the preexisting typical patterns of activities and interactions of their parents-to-be, and this continues apace after birth. Some parents might value developing autonomy in their children, but this might be discouraged if they have children who are already highly active. From the opposite point of view, parents who believe that their children will do better to learn to conform to the views and demands of the group might be more encouraging of independence among children who are viewed as particularly passive. To summarize the cultural-ecological contextual position that we have laid out here, understanding any human value requires examining the synergistic relations among context (cultural, social, and temporal), individual characteristics, and most important, the everyday activities and interactions that are the crucible within which members of one generation try to pass

The Cultural Ecology of Human Value    71

on their values to the young and the young transform, to a greater or lesser extent, those values. Clearly, one cannot investigate human values from a cultural-ecological perspective by treating them as though they are influenced solely by context (for example, the position that values are solely influenced by culture) or by viewing them simply as a personal characteristic. Instead, at a minimum, a cultural-ecological researcher must take seriously the mutual influence of context and individual. Research Example: The Porto Alegre Longitudinal Study The Porto Alegre Longitudinal Study (PALS) was designed as part of the Cultural Ecology of Young Children (CEYC) project, which is a longitudinal project that examines the everyday activities and interactions of children from a variety of different cultural contexts (Tudge, 2008). The Porto Alegre part of the project (PALS, the Porto Alegre Longitudinal Study, Piccinini, Tudge, Lopes, & Sperb, 1998) expanded the CEYC project by starting data collection when first-time mothers-to-be were in their third trimester of pregnancy. Our study of values focused on a subset of the PALS participants who matched those who participated in the larger CEYC study in terms of family social-class background. Specifically, parents from the middle-class group had, at a minimum, a college degree and, if they worked outside the home, a professional occupation. Parents from the working-class group did not have any college education and, if they worked outside the home, had traditional working-class occupations. One of the aims of the PALS study was to test Kohn’s hypothesis regarding the relation between social class and parental child-rearing values. He and his colleagues had found that in a variety of different societies (including the United States, Italy, Poland, and Japan), parents, who by virtue of their educational background and current occupation, were considered middle class, were more likely to value autonomy and self-direction for their children; by contrast, those who were working class were more likely to value conformity to others’ rules (Kohn, 1977, 1995; Kohn, Slomczynski, & Schoenbach, 1986; Kohn et al., 2001). The PALS study included short observations and interviews with the parents during the first 8 years of the child’s life. During these interviews, they answered questions about their own childhood experiences, their current occupation, their parenting style, their perceptions about their children’s behavior and characteristics, and their aspirations for their children. Moreover, those PALS children who matched the other CEYC participants were observed for the equivalent of a complete day in their life when they were 3 years of age.

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As part of the interview process, we also asked parents to complete the same instrument that Kohn and his colleagues had used (the parental values Q-sort; see Kohn, 1977) when the children were aged 3, 36, and 72 months. The measure consists of 13 items. Five items are indicative of selfdirection values such as “I want my child to exercise good sense and sound judgment” and “I want my child to be interested in how and why things happen.” Four items are indicative of conformity values such as “I want my child to have good manners” and “I want my child to obey his/her parents.” The remaining four items are “filler” items that do not relate to self-direction or to conformity. Parents were asked to select the three most valued items and the three least valued items, and to identify which of the three valued items was most important of all and which of the three least valued items was least important of all. The top-ranked item received a score of 5, and the two next-ranked items each were scored 4. The bottom-ranked item was scored 1, and the other two low-ranked items each were scored 2. Conformity items were reverse-scored, and all filler items and those that were not selected as important or unimportant were scored 3. Based on this scoring, we derived three measures. One was of the overall Q-sort score, computed by summing across all six selected items, in which a higher score meant a greater valuation of autonomy and a lower score a greater valuation of conformity. A second measure was purely a self-direction score, computed by adding the rankings of the five self-direction items (whether selected or not) and a third was a conformity score, computed by adding the rankings of the four conformity items. We were thus able to test Kohn’s hypothesis about the relations between social class and parental values, the first aim of our analyses. However, it should be apparent that such an approach is in no way culturally ecological; it simply assumes a unidirectional top-down flow from some measure of context (in this case, social-class differences among parents from a southern Brazilian city) to the parents and implicitly, from them to their children. By contrast, from any contextualist perspective, one should expect to see that individual characteristics also have an influence on parents’ values. In the case of this study, we hoped to be able to see this influence. Our assumption was that soon after birth the children’s individual characteristics would not influence their parents’ stated values, but that by the time the children had reached 3 years of age, their characteristics might have modified their parents’ values. For example, a parent (regardless of social-class background) might indicate an overall preference for a child to conform to external rules, but if the child by the age of 3 seemed particularly passive, the parent might encourage more self-direction. On the other hand, a parent who valued autonomy, faced by a particularly strong-willed child, might well start to prefer more conformity to his or her wishes.

The Cultural Ecology of Human Value    73

A second aim of the study was therefore to test the hypothesis that the parents’ values for autonomy or conformity would be influenced as a result of their children’s own developing characteristics. Our hypothesis was that parents (whether from working-class or middle-class backgrounds) would be more likely to value obedience and less likely to value autonomy as their children gained the ability to express their own likes and dislikes. However, to fully test this hypothesis, it would be important to determine if parents were modifying their values under the influence of their children’s specific characteristics and not as a general response to developing children. Regarding our initial hypothesis, data from Tudge, Lopes et al. (in press) revealed clear evidence that across time (i.e., when the children were 3, 36, and 72 months of age), middle-class parents were more likely to value autonomy and less likely to value conformity than were their working-class counterparts (see Figure 3.1). This finding supported Kohn’s position of a link between social class, as measured by education and occupation, and autonomy or conformity. In addition, our results showed a clear U-shaped change in parental values over time. As seen in Figure 3.1, both middle- and working-class parents in our sample valued autonomy more highly when their children were 3 months, and did so again when their children were 72 months, but their

Figure 3.1  Middle- and working-class parents’ child-rearing values when the children were 3, 36, and 72 months.

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positive valuation of autonomy showed a marked decline when the children were 36 months. This was the case both when looking at the Q-sort score for overall autonomy and examining specifically their values for self-direction. Middle-class parents were far more likely to value conformity when their children were 36 months than when the children were either 3 months or 72 months. Working-class parents also were more likely to value conformity in their 36-month-old children, although this change was far less noticeable than was the case for the middle-class parents. To test the hypothesis that the observed change was a response to the individual child’s characteristics and not simply a generic change, we examined the correlations among parental values at each of the three ages. We anticipated that there would be high correlations between these values at any one age (negatively in the case of conformity). After all, parents who highly valued autonomy (as measured by the overall Q-sort score) and self-direction should value conformity much lower, and vice versa. Of most interest, however, were the correlations between the values at 3 and 36 months. If the effects of having a 3-year-old were generic (all parents decreasing their valuation of self-direction and increasing their valuation of conformity to a similar extent), the correlations between 3 months and 36 months would be high and significant. By contrast, if some parents modified their values greatly and others not at all (because of variations in the individual characteristics of the children themselves), the correlations between the values at 3 and 36 months should be low and nonsignificant. Of course, low and nonsignificant correlations could simply be due to unreliability in the measure itself. To test this, we also needed to examine the correlations between the values at 36 and 72 months. If these correlations were high and significant, this would mean that unreliability of the measure could not have explained low correlations between 3 and 36 months. This should be true regardless of social class, and so for these analyses we included all parents. As can be seen in Table 3.1, all the within-age correlations were high and significant, as expected. More important, as hypothesized, none of the correlations between 3 and 36 months were significant, implying either that the parents’ changes in values were not systematic (i.e., most likely relating to the children’s own characteristics) or that our Q-sort measure was unreliable. The latter is unlikely however, as the correlations between 36 and 72 months were also significant in seven of the nine possible cases, which leaves as the most likely possibility the fact that many parents shifted their values in light of their children’s particular characteristics. Further evidence in support of this hypothesis was the data derived from our qualitative analyses of the interviews. As mentioned earlier, all parents were interviewed about their own experiences of being parented, their approaches to parenting, their perceptions of their children’s characteristics,

The Cultural Ecology of Human Value    75 Table 3.1  Significant Correlations Among Overall Autonomy (Aut), Self-Direction (SD), and Conformity (Conf), at 3, 36, and 72 Months 3 Months Aut Autonomy 3 Self-Direction 3 Conformity 3 Autonomy 36 Self-Direction 36 Conformity 36 Autonomy 72 Self-Direction 72 Conformity 72

SD

— — .78*** –.84*** –.59**

36 Months Conf

SD

Conf

Aut

SD

Conf

—

–.50* –.44*

Aut

72 Months

.52*

— .92*** — –.66*** –.42* .64*** .55** .63*** .65*** –.59** –.45*

—

.43*

— .91*** — –.90*** –.72***

—