Value System – Emotional Currency

Mental values are fundamental building blocks of our behavior and thinking. They are assigned, reinforced, and modified within various psychological systems in the gray wobble inside our heads we call brain. This article explores the processes and mechanisms leading to the formation and adjustment of values we assign to things, how the emotional currency of our value system works and attempts to highlight their impact on decisions and beliefs from different perspectives.

Instinctive Values (Danger/Reward)

The first values arise from our instincts, enabling quick risk and reward assessments. These primitive mechanisms are designed to ensure survival and reproduction. Instinctively, situations and stimuli are immediately categorized as danger or rewarding, leading to a rapid and intense focus on these elements. The well-known “fight-or-flight” mechanism is a prime example of this.

Primarily, the ego plays a particularly strong role in mental value formation. Essentially, we first weigh all things based on personal benefit. If something benefits us, it gains significant value, and we are willing to invest energy in it. The term ego here does not represent selfishness but rather self-preservation, our primal drive for pleasure, and the energy source for motivation. It is a combination of danger avoidance with the goal not only to survive but to look forward and seek rewards and pleasure. The types of rewards we respond to largely depend on how strong our needs are.

📜 Upcoming CyberZadi Article: The Ego – Dearest Friend, Worst Enemy

Values Through Needs

Mental values are significantly shaped by our needs. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs categorizes these from the most basic physiological needs to safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization needs. Interestingly, higher needs such as self-actualization or aesthetics can often trump basic survival needs, especially with low self-esteem and strong societal influence. Factors like self-image, feelings of shame, and social norms play a crucial role here.

An example is the pursuit of transcendence in religions. Depending on personal conditioning, the need for transcendence can create values so strong that basic survival needs are significantly neglected. Sometimes societal influences have a worryingly strong impact on our social needs. Neglecting our basic or safety needs due to fear of social disadvantages can ultimately affect our fundamental needs and, consequently, our mental and even physical health.

Our instincts always scream from the background for danger avoidance and seek pleasure and rewards with the hope of dopamine release, hence some needs receive higher priorities than they should. The greatest regulating factor here is our critical judgment. The critical mind has much work in prioritizing our needs against the ego, requiring significant effort and conscious investment in time and energy, our pathos groschen to pay the critical mind. It helps recognize misguided needs triggered by artificially created values or needs triggered by external influence.

Focus Shift Through Emotions

Instinctive reactions lead to the emergence of basic emotions such as fear, disgust, surprise, joy, anger, and sadness. These rudimentary emotions and their variants act as amplifiers or suppressors of our thoughts and direct focus through corresponding value modifications to thoughts with the greatest emotional value.

Emotions are not just instinctive reactions, but also complex psychological phenomena modulated by emotional intelligence. The ability to recognize, understand, and influence one’s own and others’ emotions plays a crucial role in value formation and decision-making. For instance, the fear of social rejection can enhance the need for social belonging and favor certain behaviors. Many decisions are made not out of reason or logic but because they give us a good or bad feeling. They gain corresponding value through emotions triggered by instinctive evaluation of danger or reward.

Reinterpretation of Values Through Mindset Framing

The ego shapes our desired self, the idealized self-image, and its instinctive pursuits. Our needs are heavily influenced by our fantasy ego, driving us and creating corresponding motivations – if it weren’t for our framing.
Social norms and cultural values significantly influence our framing. The need for social acceptance and the influence of social role models contribute to how we internalize and modify values. Shame and guilt are emotional reactions strongly shaped by cultural contexts, affecting our value orientation.

Through our mindset, the learned attitudes toward various topics, we limit and sort the final thoughts and actions we express and interpret them accordingly through framing. Framing filters and potentially reinterprets our original “free” and uncensored thoughts and viewpoints through the definitions anchored in the mindset. Only thoughts that align with our mindset are allowed through.

Early Value Development Through Authority

While the values of our thoughts may still have the same value assignment, depending on the extent of our self-confidence, the mindset ignores or modifies these values in favor of morality, social norms, economic benefits, and sometimes even based on reason. The rest of the thoughts are discarded by our framing into the “landfill of psychoses.” There is sometimes a chance that we might later sift through and process this mental waste, but often the psychoses arising from repression prevail.
The mindset is rarely flexible, being shaped and influenced throughout life. The most crucial regulating instance of the mindset is our critical mind, which, with its critical thinking ability, acts as a gatekeeper to the subconscious, responsible for protecting the mindset from harmful thought patterns and behaviors, questioning and possibly rectifying existing attitudes.

Emotional Currency as a Motivation Incentive

Decisions and beliefs are always weighed through a complex of values. The metaphorical question “What am I willing to pay for this?” is central to understanding our decision-making behavior. Factors such as incentives and the value we assign to certain things are crucial for motivations to arise. We often tend to choose the path of least resistance – the shortest, fastest, and easiest way to avoid obstacles, as our brain and body aim to expend as little energy as possible and to use our pathos pennies as sparingly as possible.

However, being too frugal with energy can result in a lack of motivation. Only through a conscious effort to invest in mental energy, recognize and pursue incentives that creates mental motivation and physical action. We must constantly fight against the energy-saving plan in our subconscious to avoid falling into the trap of quick dopamine rewards.

Mental Processing Limitations, Cognitive Biases, and Prejudices

The human brain is capable of almost superhuman feats but naturally has its limits. It employs countless optimization systems designed to support or bypass limited mental processing capacity. Unfortunately, these optimizations leave much room for cognitive biases and misinterpretations, often leading to prejudices.

For instance, confirmation bias can lead us to prefer and process information that supports our existing values and beliefs. This reinforces focus on certain thoughts and can lead to a distorted value perception.

These mental mechanisms serve not only optimization but also as decision aids in demanding or overwhelming situations. Here again, the critical mind’s regulatory role is crucial, requiring sufficient mental energy to ensure that thoughts and perceptions are not too easily misinterpreted by automatism.

Awareness of Mental Values

Understanding the complex processes leading to the formation and modification of mental values is essential for comprehending human behavior. Instincts, needs, emotions, framing, and social influences work together to form a dynamic value complex that governs our decisions and beliefs. By recognizing and reflecting on these mechanisms, we can make more conscious and informed decisions.

Our critical mind is crucial in appropriately assessing values to prevent mental inflation or deflation. A healthy balance of our values depends on extensive experience and, importantly, comprehensive processing of these experiences through self-reflection, interaction with others, humor, and self-criticism. It curbs the ego, boosts self-confidence, and helps develop a well-trained critical mind and a clear view of mental values.

BTW, if se english is not up to Cambridge levels, blame A.I. and my rotten brain 😉

What values drive you and why?

    ✎ Patrick