Week2 Reading

Common Cause
The Case for Working with our Cultural Values

It is inescapably the case that any communication or campaign will inevitably serve to convey particular values, intentionally or otherwise.
Moreover, in conveying these values, the communication or campaign will help to further strengthen those values culturally.
People’s decisions are driven importantly by the values they hold – frequently unconsciously, and sometimes to the virtual exclusion of a rational assessment of the facts. In particular, some values provide a better source of motivation for engaging bigger-than-self problems than other values.
The conjunction of these two insights – that communications and campaigns inevitably serve to strengthen particular values, and that a person’s values have a profound and usually unconscious effect on the behavioural choices that they make –raises profound ethical questions [see Section 1.6].
The practical response to this ethical challenge cannot be to strive for value-neutral communications (this would be impossible). Rather, it is to strive for transparency, communicating to an audience not just what values a particular communication or campaign is intended to convey, but also why those values are considered important.
In the light of this, if one accepts that there are ethical imperatives for addressing bigger-than-self problems, one is presumably also likely to accept that there are ethical imperatives for conveying some values
rather than others – provided that these are conveyed with a high degree of transparency.

Values and behaviour are intimately connected

There is a large body of evidence about the way in which people’s values are organised across cultural contexts, and this report reviews some of these results.
In particular, two research findings are of importance: First, people’s values tend to cluster in remarkably similar ways across cultures; second, the relationship between different values is such that some sets of valuecan easily be held simultaneously while others oppose one another.