Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Culture and values

How do we get our values? Personal experiences, culture, and environment seem central to value development. As argued earlier, personality is shaped by both biological and environmental influences. Among the most important of the latter are cultural influences. Culture is transmitted through language and the modeling of behavior when conditions permit humans to communicate through shared language, by living in the same historic period, and when they are sufficiently proximal to influence each other. Although biological factors have an important role in shaping personality, they do not account for most of the variance.

The definition of culture is neither easy nor straightforward. Some have suggested that culture is to society what memory is to individuals.³³ It includes what has worked in the long history of a society, so that it was worth conveying to future generations. Others describe the propagation or spread of culture much as an epidemic might spread.³⁴ Some ideas, like cooking recipes, religious beliefs, or musical tastes, propagate so contagiously that they end up “infecting” an entire population. Culture, in this conception, is composed of such contagious ideas.

In the crucible that is childhood, individuals are exposed to the actions and beliefs of parents and other caretakers early on. They also observe the behaviors and responses of their schoolmates and neighbors as well as the customs, rituals, and traditions of the communities in which they live. ...