Introduction:
Self and World are perceived through the prisms of values and we are prisoners of values. For over a hundred years psychology has consistently failed to develop a science of values. Some regard this as a tragic flaw in the profession of psychology and even civilization itself.
During my post-doctoral internship with Dr. Albert Ellis values replaced Sigmund Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego in my training. It was psychologist Ellis who introduced me to philosopher Robert Hartman’s study of values. Because Hartman failed to publish data supporting his theory, and its foremost application of The Hartman Value Profile (HVP), I lost interest. What follows is an account of what happened seven years later, and how two friends were there when I needed them.
Professional Wilderness Years:
After failing to see in Hartman’s approach to values what Ellis wanted me to see, I continued my quest for a deeper understanding of the clinical relevance of values, beyond academic studies, on my own. Looking back, I view those years as my “professional wilderness years.” It was a period of confusion with Abraham Maslow suggesting the concept of value might be obsolete, and Milton Rokeach asserting the concept of value is the most important, least studied, and least understood concept in all of psychology. No one knew how to approach the study of values from the dual perspectives of clinical relevance and scientific discipline. When I asked Professor Rokeach what he thought of Hartman’s contributions he responded “I don’t understand him.”
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My organizational work with Linus Pauling building the International Academy of Preventive Medicine (IAPM), my interest in issues of patient compliance in preventive medicine, my academic association with Chairman Gilbert who authored Psychology of Dictatorship and Nurenberg Diary following his role as Psychologist at the Nurenberg Trials, and my position as Senior Staff Psychologist at the Brooklyn VA Hospital’s Outpatient Clinic treating World War II Veterans, combined to deepen my interest in values as related to the mental health of individuals and collectives, including failed states and the historic example of the Germany that embraced Hitler’s dilettantish, amateurish, romantic, ideology in numbers sufficient to wage war for the second time in the 20th century. There are lessons to be learned from what ails our society, the German experience, and relation to the evolution of natural science and technology without moral science checks and balances.
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My “professional wilderness years” ended abruptly one September day when my psychiatrist friend Val unexpectedly suggested we spend the weekend on Cape Cod. Val had flunked his road-test for a driver’s license four times and was dependent on his girlfriend and others when it came to road trips. I agreed to go and serendipity followed me that weekend in a manner that rivals Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin in 1928. Is serendipity the right word? I’m told it is among the ten most difficult English words to translate. However, no other word comes close to capturing what happened to me. I met Salvador Roquet, M.D., the Mexican psychiatrist friend of philosopher Robert Hartman…the same Hartman whose approach to values I had rejected seven years earlier.
Roquet’s skill with the Hartman Value Profile (HVP) got my attention. I came to see it as a “merciful empirical handle” to Hartman’s theory of value and a “quick test” of the psychological consequences of how we organize and exercise values. Indeed, it appeared to be a psychological test without psychological testing. Roquet spoke my language. He clarified Hartman’s approach to values in ways Rokeach would have understood, and in ways I understood. He defined Hartman’s Intrinsic, Extrinsic and Systemic dimensions of value and valuation. Later I would more intuitively refer to these dimensions as the Feeler, Doer and Thinker dimensions of value. They are so basic and fundamental they are imprinted on all emotions, motivations, and behavior, and give rise to the Feeler-Self, Doer-Self, and Thinker-Self. They also imprint and modulate associated mental states, mind-sets, frames-of-reference, self-esteem, consciousness and the “spiritual dimensions” of transcendental consciousness. We spoke of how values are the “taproots” of everything psychological and that a science of values is surely the “holy grail” of psychology, and all the social sciences. With Val shaking his head in disagreement or ambivalence, I acknowledged that psychology’s failure to develop a science of values was something we had to think about and do something about, and so far all we had was Hartman’s theory of value which is not a science of values.
The Reunion:
Once upon a time Richard Bishop and I were doctoral students at the University of Texas at Austin. His major was biomedical engineering and mine was psychology. We bonded over dissertations studying brain waves (i.e., EEGs) using different methods. I recorded them at the Clayton Foundation and we analyzed them in biomedical engineering labs equipped with the latest equipment and computers. I used statistical methods. Richard used decision theory. Our data processing included a special computer available to students between midnight and sunrise. It converted (i.e., digitized) brain waves into numbers understood by the main frame computers in an air conditioned, underground building across campus. In those days it filled a room, and today the same computer is found in portable digital cameras and cell phones.
My research took place under Sputnik. It was generously funded by my government at the time. Richard went on to become Professor and a Dean of Engineering at a Southern University, and I became Professor of Psychology at a Northern University, then Staff Psychologist at a VA Hospital and licensed clinical psychologist in private practice on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Getting Started:
Returning to Manhattan, I obtained copies of the Standard HVP and Manual of Interpretation with the help of John Davis, Chairman of the Philosophy Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It was there Hartman taught for six months a year when not teaching at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. I began testing new patients in my practice and monitoring the progress of others. In doing so, I discovered how tedious and time consuming the hand scoring of The Hartman Value Profile (HVP) was. I called Richard for help developing the software needed to computer score the HVP as outlined in the Manual of Interpretation available to qualified individuals engaged in clinical practice, research, consulting and coaching. I developed a “green thumb” interpreting test results guided by Hartman’s philosophical and existential discussions appearing in the manual. I believed the test and theory behind the HVP “seeded” the world with the promise of a science of values if only I could prove it from the perspective of science as an elegant combination reason plus empiricism, something Hartman and some of his students ignored in their single minded focus on logic, reason and mathematics which resulted in a testable hypothesis and theory that I was now about to examine with the best tests and measures of my chosen profession.
Gathering data, I became increasingly convinced that Hartman’s revolutionary, operational definition “good,” without using examples of good, worked. I thought his contributions had to be taken seriously when few in my profession did. In my early thirties, and fired up over examining Hartman’s theoretical work, I sensed I was walking down memory lane with Richard. I began examining the HVP from many angles as often as my busy professional life, my life as a Manhattan bachelor, vital pursuit of photography and travel, and my frequent trips to be with my extended Massachusetts family would allow.
I recall how one of my senior colleagues during my professor days warned and pontificated with the proverb that goes: “he who rides two horses falls between the horses.” I suppose my various activities slowed me down, for it took some twenty years for me to gather data and then another five years to summarized it in the pages of The New Science of Axiological Psychology (Rodopi Press, 2005). I never “fell between the horses,” but in the end some would suggest I had become Hartman’s bulldog,” much as T. H. Huxley was seen as “Charles Darwin’s bulldog” in the 19th century. I mean to compare Hartman to Darwin, even though I’m no Huxley.
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Test Construction:
I discovered the Hartman Value Profile (HVP) was constructed in Mexico by philosopher Robert S. Hartman in collaboration with his student and psychologist Mario Cardenas, whom I met on two occasions. Cardenas told me he had been a post-doc under psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, at about the time I was a post-doc under Albert Ellis. The theoretical differences in our training never came between us in the way Fromm’s psychoanalysis and Hartman’s philosophy came between them. Dr. Cardenas was also a student of philosopher Robert Hartman when Hartman and Fromm were neighbors at Cuernevaca, the land of “eternal spring” outside Mexico City. Cardenas kept his association with Hartman a secret from Fromm who had nothing good to say about Hartman’s approach to values. Cardenas confirmed how they constructed the HVP without empirical guidance or testing along the way.
While my psychoanalyst friend Val, like psychoanalyst Eric Fromm, wasn’t on friendly terms with my pursuit of a science of values and morals, my engineering friend Richard was supportive. He always wanted to know more. The fact that Hartman’s test defied the test construction guidelines of the APA aroused his interest as did its purely theoretical origin.
Applications:
My clinical use of the HVP and initial validity studies convinced me I was on to something big. The “awe factor” was how the test performed like a psychological test without psychological testing. I thought of it as the tip of an “alternative psychology.” Richard at New Orleans and John Davis at Knoxville extended access to their university computers before personal computers existed and computer time was expensive. I was having fun without deadlines or supervisors. I could afford the significant costs involved which included trips abroad. It was made possible by income derived from that of a career psychologist with the government and a successful private practice on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
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With the arrival of personal computers, I bought one and began running data at my office. I lectured on my findings. I published data in journals and chapters of books edited by others. Richard observed from the perspective of an engineer into precision and details and comfortable with my scientist-clinician orientation. He was familiar with the test and how it possessed two lists of eighteen items (i.e., phrases and quotations) that one ranked from good to bad. You might say, the exercise of serial value choices “spilled one’s axiological beans” revealing one’s habitual evaluative habits across some thirty scales of the HVP having considerable psychological relevance. Relevance because everything psychological is grounded in the “taproots” of values and valuations. The psychological relevance of valuational-styles enabling thought-styles was something I easily demonstrated by correlating HVP scales with the corresponding personality and clinical scales of objective tests like the MMPI and Cattell CAQ. The HVP test items are “linguistic proxies” that “tag” or “flag” underlying combinations of Feeler, Doer, and Thinker value dimensions. Ranking these flags (i.e., phrases and quotations) ranks the underlying value dimensions. There are two versions of the test or parallel forms. One is the Research Version and the other is the Standard Version. I validated the Standard Version.
The Hartman Value Profile (HVP):
The following is a parallel form of the Standard HVP. It is known as The Research Version of the HVP.
Part I
A new car
A scientific experiment
A foolish thought
A blunder
A wreck
A citation for a good deed
Poisoning the city water
Imprison an innocent person
A false coin
A token of love
A lover’s embrace
Raping a child
A life of adventure
An idiot
A telephone
Prostitution
Justice
A decoration for bravery
Part II
My health is good and that makes me feel well
My mind is clear and makes me understand things
My mind is not very clear and I don’t understand things too well
When I think badly, I actually get sick
My health is poor
I am thinking clearly and that makes me happy
I am so unhappy, I’m actually sick
I am so unhappy, I can ‘t think straight
My health is poor and hampers my thinking
I am healthy and that makes me happy
I love to be myself
I hate to be myself
My good spirits keep me in good health
I don’t understand things very well and that makes me unhappy
The more clearly I think the healthier I feel
My poor health makes me unhappy
My good spirits keep my mind clear
My good health helps me to think straight
The two versions of the HVP appear different because the test items (i.e., the phrases and quotations) are different. This flexibility allows the construction of parallel forms of the HVP dedicated to different applications. Even so, the value combinations defining each of the eighteen test items are common to all parallel forms of the HVP. By “value combination” I refer to the coming together of Feeler, Doer, Thinker dimensions of value taken two at a time. In addition to parallel forms of the test, some entrepreneurs construct derivative instruments, but that’s another story.
Richard’s software worked well. His engineer-self was interested in the mathematical modeling of values embedded in the HVP. I told him the math was “set theory” which neither of us studied in college. He would then tease me about my apparent quest for a “moral mathematics” to help me with my concept of “moral insanity” as a precursor to “clinical insanities” diagnosed and treated by psychologists.” (By “insanity” I mean to imply significant self-defeating as opposed to self-benefiting behavior. Another way to look at the meaning of insanity is to imagine a continuum going from pro-self, pro-social behavior to anti-self, anti-social behavior; where “insanity” breaks out at the anti-self, anti-social end and is amplified by the absence or failure of psychological and social coping skills).
The irony of three dimensions of value replacing Freud’s three dimensions of Id, Ego, and Superego intrigued Richard. Was this meaningful? He speculated the three value dimensions were a response to the laws of physics and especially the law of conservation of energy. After all, the continued development of values is something one could “choke on” if they weren’t organized in some fashion. The existence of three dimensions of value might reflect the amount of energy we spend on Feeling, Doing and Thinking, and in that order. Testing these dimensions produces a measure of one’s General Capacity to Value (GCV) while measuring the sensitivity, balance, order of importance, and plasticity of the Feeler, Doer and Thinker dimensions of value which contain “fluid” and “crystalized” values plus more superficial attitudes; all of which enables the thought-styles and belief-systems that lurk beneath emotions and behavior, including complex behaviors like identity and self-esteem. Considering that values are the “taproots” of everything psychological, it isn’t surprising that the Feeler, Doer, Thinker dimensions are imprinted on all behavior.
I came to know that the test items, the phrases and quotations, are carefully chosen to represent the eighteen underlying value combinations in Parts I and II of the HVP. These in turn are made up of nine positive compositions and nine negative transpositions. Here’s what I mean. Chocolate on ice cream is an example of a composition. Sawdust on ice cream is an example of a transposition. We are “hard wired” to quickly respond to transpositions. This has survival value. Consider the sound of a twig snapping in the forest at night. This experiential transposition commands our immediate attention. “What was that?” A good night kiss is an experiential composition that “washes” over us more slowly. Life is full of perceptual compositions and transpositions and so the test is constructed to detect how effectively we discriminate them.
No one taking the HVP is expected to rank order the value combinations themselves. They’re too abstract. It’s easier to rank the phrases and quotations (i.e., linguistic proxies) representing them. That’s why we “tag” or “flag” the value combinations of the test with simple phrases and quotations. In ranking them we “drag” the underlying value combinations along with them such that they too get ranked from good to bad. This procedure generates scores, deviation scores reflecting how much one’s ranking deviates from the test’s “norm.” The smaller the score the better for this reflects a ranking closer to the “norm” of the test. This begs the question of what the “norm” is, and where the “norm” comes from. It is derived from the mathematical model embedded in Hartman’s theory of value.
Conclusion:
I tested patients presenting all sorts of problems, doctors, professors, high achievers, students, and foreign students from countries like Japan, Russia, Mexico, and Indonesia to harvest cross-national or cross-cultural data. I lectured in those countries and in return they gave me students to test. I witnessed how the incredible “dance of value dimensions” identified students from different countries. In this regard, the Japanese were most like the Russians. It also differentiated students from patients and students from doctors and high achieving adults.
The serial value choices are executed by the “puppeteer mind” pulling the strings of the “puppet brain;” although the puppet brain has a few strings of its own as revealed by psychosomatic signs and symptoms. Today’s MRI inspired neuroscience need not steal the show at the expense of studying the deep, habitual evaluative habits of the mind. With the emergence of value science (i.e., mind science) to compliment natural science (i.e., brain science), we have a chance to strike a better balance between the allocation of funding and the study of mind and brain.
Richard’s development of software to score the HVP left him aware of the fact that the obtained HVP scores are deviation scores. He wanted to know more about the “norm” against which one’s results are compared. I mentioned the test “norm” is derived from Hartman’s definition of “good” and the logic and mathematics of his theory of value. The concept of a disembodied “norm” against which individual performances are measure troubled him. Like most of us, he thought of test “norms” as being generated from reference populations as when patients are compared to “normal” populations. Thus, the “norm” of Hartman’s HVP is counter-intuitive, but my research proves it works. Albert Ellis thought enough of Hartman’s work to quote it when writing about the value of the human being in his discussions of self-esteem. Richard, the engineer, found all this amazing. He wondered how a mathematical model of values and valuations could produce a “norm” against which to judge behavior, including moral behavior. Could it be that “moral mathematics” was possible, and that it leads to a deeper understanding of “moral insanity,” and “moral education” as tomorrow’s preventive psychology today.
It troubled Richard that Hartman had managed to construct a test of values without empirical tests and measures along the way. How could an operational definition of good, logic, mathematics, and reason produce a science of values? This is a great question and one I postponed responding to in order to by the time I needed to read sections of Hartman’s book entitled The Structure of Value. Given I’m running out of “blog space” at the moment, I must postpone discussion of the test’s “norm” for another time. In the meantime, I leave you with an abbreviated tour of Hartman horizons and the birth of a science of value without which there can never be a science of psychology in years to come.
© Dr. Leon Pomeroy, Ph.D.
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