Tradition

Maintaining and preserving cultural, family and/or religious traditions

You value protecting the traditions of your family, community, and/or culture. You likely take pride in this commitment.

As a person, you care deeply about humility and accepting your place in the world. Most likely you are a religious person and find following your faith to be very important.

Value items

respect for tradition, humble, devout, accepting my portion in life, moderate, spiritual life

Defining goal

respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that one's culture or religion provides. Groups everywhere develop practices, symbols, ideas, and beliefs that represent their shared experience and fate. These become sanctioned as valued group customs and traditions. They symbolize the group's solidarity, express its unique worth, and contribute to its survival (Durkheim, 1912/1954; Parsons, 1951). They often take the form of religious rites, beliefs, and norms of behaviour.

Tradition and conformity values are especially close motivationally; they share the goal of subordinating the self to socially imposed expectations. They differ primarily in the objects to which one subordinates the self. Conformity entails subordination to persons with whom one frequently interactsโ€”parents, teachers, and bosses. Tradition entails subordination to more abstract objectsโ€”religious and cultural customs and ideas. As a corollary, conformity values exhort responsiveness to current, possibly changing expectations. Tradition values demand responsiveness to immutable expectations from the past.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116

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