How to Understand Hierarchy of Values
May 07, 2022
SUMMARY
What if someone you love knows that stealing is bad, and yet she will vote for an electoral candidate with known ill-gotten wealth? What happened to the alignment of values with the vote decision? In this video, I give you 5 ways to understand her current hierarchy of values which shows a contradiction in values. Sincerely find out more information as to how she sees realities from her perspectives.
- When she tells you the reason for her vote, listen for more information or asks “Tell me more.”
- If she comments on your behavior, repeat the statement with a question mark, and you could know more how you are coming across.
- Check for information gaps, although be careful with the tone of your voice matters as you are not in a debate but in a friendly conversation.
- Reframe her statements in a positive way.
- Expand her realities but helping her to consider other possibilities.
It is important from hereon to improve in training and education methods. Be prudent as well in giving her future assignments that will make people question her integrity, when she upholds one value but still is convinced of a contrary value.
INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES
TRANSCRIPT
Why do some people contradict themselves?
What makes some people say this is what they believe and then …do something that is not consistent with that belief.
The example I want to tackle here is that some people adhere to the 7th commandment which says "You shall not steal" and yet they seem to favor an electoral candidate Mr. Marcos Jr. By the name itself, you will associate the candidate to the family from which the Philippines has recovered P170billion or $3.6B of ill-gotten wealth.
According to the Philippine commission on Good Government, there are still assets worth 32 billion pesos or $673 million dollars that have to be recovered from the Marcoses through 19 civil cases. These 19 cases are still pending before the Sandigan Bayan as of December 2015.
Aside from those amounts, the Bureau of Internal Revenue has sent demands to the Marcos family in December 2021 to pay their estate taxes liability worth P203 billion.
I said some people seem to favor Mr Marcos, because in the end we don’t know what they will write in their ballots. What we can be sure is what we see in the public arena like in social media sites that they are declaring their votes for Mr Marcos Jr to be the next President of the Philippines.
In this live stream essentially I want to help you who is confused with that contradiction not to contradict your Christian charity and "unfriend" immediately these people.
Let’s not add more contradictory values. If we believe in Christian charity, we act charitably. Stay with me until the end of this live stream if you wish to know how to enter their worlds and continue working with them in peace and harmony.
If you are new here, hello. I am Avic Caparas, your decision coach. It is my goal to help people improve their decision-making skills so they can live and work in alignment with their values.
Alignment between decision and values is key to my message and that is central to our topic today. The voter whom we love as a family member, a relative or a friend has values that are contradictory to his or her public vote. (Again in the end we don’t know what her final vote will be). She is publicly going to vote for Mr Marcos Jr.
Remember that May 9 is only a day, after which we will continue to be her family, her relative or her friend. We cannot be enemies now or in the future.
How do we understand the seeming contradiction? How do we understand her hierarchy of values that underlies her public vote?
Hierarchy of values means that there is one value that is more important than another. You might be familiar to the hierarchy of needs by Abraham Maslow which describes how human beings will satisfy first their lower level needs like physiological needs for food and water or security needs before they get into self-actualization which is the highest need in Maslow’s theory of human motivation.
In decision making, our criteria for choosing alternative courses of action do not have equal weights normally. If I decided to eat in one particular restaurant over another, I have given more weight perhaps to the ambience than to the menu. If I decided to buy a particular dress, I could have decided more for comfort than style.
So we decide on the basis of our decision criteria which are not of equal weight. Let’s give some examples of decision criterion on voting preferences. A voter decides on a particular candidate on the basis of party affiliation, family decision, memory recall like the only tarp he sees in his little community is that of one electoral candidate.
We could also decide on the basis of
1. Strategic vision for the country – where he will lead the Philippines in the next 6 years
2. Executive talent. Performance record or actual track record in managing the goals, making them happen in the course of his years in government service
3. Integrity or honesty
This is not going to be the venue to Iscrutinize each of the presidential candidates on these 3 criteria. But I will say that these aforementioned criteria can be trimmed down to two: professional competence on both strategic and executive talents, and moral integrity which for me is simply living an honest life. Of course, it is not that simple to do, but simply said, that hifalutin word of integrity can be understood as honesty.
For the voters who will decide on the basis of these criteria I mentioned and there are two candidates that are tied, then the voter could break the tie by giving more weight to one criterion:
She could say okay I prefer a sure performer and I put less weight on the candidate’s emotional intelligence. You say you won't mind if the candidate has said in public that he does not know why he loses his temper. So you could predict already her vote.
If the voter says I prefer a good father regardless of no diploma, no track record, no platform, okay you can also predict her vote.
The weight she gives on each of her criterion gives rise to her hierarchy of values. There could be several combinations like skills may rank higher than moral integrity, in which case we have to be more careful if her candidate wins because the voted president that lacks low in integrity could use his skills to defraud the country, if his character is not anchored on good moral values.
In one's hierarchy of values, the family decision is higher so there is less conversation on whether the candidate is skilled or he is honest. What is important is what the patriarch or matriarch has decided that the family should vote for.
It could also happen that in the voter's hierarchy of values, the “goodness” is more important than skills. So in that sense, if the others vote like that, we might have a good yet incompetent leader.
So the hierarchy of values is important as it determines the final decision (of one voter that is), But if you have a majority of people voting more for one specific criterion, it could give you an idea who could emerge as winner. But of course, it is difficult to predict that.
The hierarchy of values change. It is expected. For instance, at a younger age, you would prefer to travel far and wide so your travel decisions could be determined by your energy and interest. Yet later your personal interest could play second to where the other family members want to go, or your health condition will determine your travel decisions. Again, the hierarchy of values change.
Going specifically to the key example of hierarchy of values.
For example, as friends you both were in the supermarket once, and both of you saw a young boy stealing a bag of chocolate and your voter friend went out of her way to whisper to the boy, "That’s not good if you are hiding the chocolates. Will you pay for them, give it to your mommy so she can pay for them. It’s not good to steal, okay?" And the amount of theft is worth P300 or $3 for a package of a chocolate brand chocnut. And now she is going to vote for a member of the Marcos family with ill-gotten wealth from the Philippines still pending to answer for $673M worth of wealth.
Why the change of values? I would say it is a change as the weight must have shifted to some things that we have to find out. Hence, my main advice is to know and understand that hierarchy of values.
Focus on her. Control what you are feeling because your friend is your friend and not simply a voter for Marcos. Sincerely try to enter her world and see how she is seeing realities from her perspective.
I remember the couple of bird watching trips I did with some friends, the most recent one was in a nearby Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center. Almost at the end of the trip, my friend said look there’s a black crowned night heron. "There!" I asked "where?" And she told me to position myself where she is and to look at a group of rocks and I found it. Because I shifted from my initial position to where her position is, I saw the heron. That kind of shifting position is crucial in understanding the vote and the hierarchy of values that is determining her vote.
What will that shifting position entail? I give five concrete steps.
a. Ask questions from a sincere place of wanting to be in a better company. Don’t ask like a 3rd person reporter. If your friend says, my entire family has been voting for the Marcoses ever since… wait for her to say more. After a long silence, asks "Tell me more." Keep the focus on her rather than waiting to jump on her with all our fact-checking data. Your reality is obviously different from here, so focus on her and keep your attention outside of yourself.
b. Zoom out of yourself in cases when she might say that you are judging the Marcos, Jr. I am judging Mr Marcos? Ask that with the intention of knowing more her world. In the end, you might learn something about yourself, how you look when you speak and you could improve when you really want to enter into a friendly conversation. And you can say, you are right, I am not conscious that I raise my eyebrows when they talk about Mr Marcos, Jr.’s accomplishments. Thank you for telling me that
c. Check for information gaps, If she says the Marcoses have built all the roads and highways that you use everyday when you go to work, ask "how do you know the Marcoses built all those? " Again the tone matters, because you are not in a debate. You are seeking more information to understand her world, to understand better what has surpassed the moral issues in her hierarchy of values.
d. Try reframing her statements in a more positive way. If she says, I can’t get it why these people can’t accept that the Marcoses built all those 10,000 bridges. Acknowledge what she is feeling and say, I know I can feel bad if after all the research, I realize people don’t believe what I have found out. You want them to accept that the Marcoses built 10,000 bridges. So what does it mean for you if the people accept your research data. What’s important for you about those 10,000 bridges the Marcoses built?
e. You could also expand her realities and try to consider other possibilities and you can ask: What would be like if indeed the Marcoses did not build those bridges? You could add a similar story when you discovered something contrary to your belief.
I tell you when I entered the university I used to think that professors don’t know how to write clearly and legibly on the blackboards compared to my high school teachers. I realized later on that I have an impaired vision which I was not aware of since in high school I would always sit in front. Of course, I changed my belief when I started wearing eyeglasses and I could read well anything on the blackboard. It took a doubt about my own vision and some headaches that made me want to have my eyes checked. So help your friend actively instead of she discovering it for a longer period. "What would it be like if the Marcoses did not do as you believed it. Will it matter to you?"
I don’t want to make assumptions about the possible results of these conversations. There could be a thousand and one possible question and answer results. I have proposed questions to help you enter her world if you wish to understand her current hierarchy of values.
It matters to do it now, because after the May 9 elections you will still be part of the same family, part of the same organization, part of the same network, so it matters to know more her world. You have gotten out of your way, out of your own fact-checking, out of your own strong beliefs to listen to her, to give her time, and that has improved you as a person.
And even if she does not change her vote (which I pray she does), you would have known her more. You can help her in her sources of information, in giving her training possibilities that will surface her beliefs more than give her one-way information, in getting her a mentor that will help her minimize any contradiction between her decisions and her values.
Surely the entire family or organization can benefit from a re-study of the education methods, of the style of conversation, etc. If any, the May 9 election has revealed that there are formation gaps and also ineffective training methodology. There could be blind loyalty that prevents one to maximize her potential for critical thinking skills.
Hence this election has given us a learning point that we are unconsciously ignorant of some training ineffectiveness, and now at this stage we already know, we are already aware of what we lack.
What could have surface is this. Training for skills is insufficient if we don’t train people to think well, to improve people’s motivations to act rather than focusing only on external actions. For instance, we might judge a worker who is punctual to meetings and we cannot distinguish the quality of motivations between a worker who is punctual because he wants to get a better seat and another who is punctual because he respect other people’s time. We cannot go deeper if we are not focusing on the goal of education at a deeper level, to help people know why they do what they do.
An author said: The person who does not do anything wrong because he realizes it is wrong is better than the person who does not do anything wrong. What good is it for me that you did not vote for Mr Marcos because I told you he still has to return the ill-gotten wealth and pay the excise tax due him, but in the final analysis you don’t know why. You voted like a robot. You voted for blind obedience or “friendship” sake.
So I would rather take pains when we meet face to face or online directly to you not to a convo that could be read by everyone to explain to you why professional competence and integrity must go together in any manager of a small business or an entire country.
And these two they are built in time, you cannot say Mr Marcos will do better when he is elected, he was just out of job for 6 years as Imee Marcos said in an interview with Karen Davila. The skills and habits are built in time and with consistency. why would I expect a miracle when God has given me observation skills to know the track record.
Hence, a primary training gap is there where people must detect the existence of real problems. Nostalgia from a supposedly glorious past under a Marcos Sr presidency is an enemy for training people to improve in realism, focusing on the present, the challenges of the present moment. Nostalgia massages our memory, but it does not help our intelligence. And the will to make changes come from an intelligent evaluation of the present realities.
Definitely the teaching methodology that gives information alone is not going to work. Rather, using real cases and the Socratic approach to asking questions will develop ones’ ability to distinguish what is real and what is imagined, to ground the person to the facts of the case and not to an imagined story, to overcome a pessimistic attitude towards the future that is different from any nostalgic past. With the case method you can draw several alternatives for action. You are not just going to bewail the past that is not coming back to the present. You move forward with alternatives for actions.
Finally, I would advise you as managers to be charitable as not to put these people with these contradictory situations of values in a situation of public doubt, where people can doubt their message and will deter them from listening. Concretely, don’t put them as trainors teaching people about honesty or justice or respect for people and their ownership when there is no closure yet about their values and their vote.
If they have publicized their vote, they can also make public any rectification or any correction, any conclusion drawn from critical thinking.
Without these measures, you as manager are putting them in a situation that they can be internally criticized, "why is she talking about reparation or giving back what is not rightfully your property and she voted for a family that stole millions from the Philippines?"
Do your homework as manager, know your people, know their values, find out their inner worlds, enter into their worlds, expand their worlds, before giving them these assignments.
