Value Judgment: The Silent Driver of Personality and Behavior

Overview

In Value Judgment: The Silent Driver of Personality and Behavior, Malcolm North explores a foundational question in both psychology and axiology: what truly drives personality, emotion, and behavior? While much contemporary research treats emotions, motivations, and traits as primary causes, North argues that these are downstream effects of value judgment — the way individuals assign meaning and worth to themselves, others, and the world.

Grounded in Robert S. Hartman’s formal axiology, the article examines whether value judgment can explain and predict authentic personality, a construct central to humanistic psychology and theories of self-actualization. Using empirical methods, North positions value judgment not as a preference or attitude, but as a structural cognitive process that shapes emotional and behavioral life.

Value Judgment as Meaning

North adopts Hartman’s central axiom that value and meaning are inseparable. To value something is to recognize the degree to which it fulfills the properties appropriate to its kind. In this view:

• • To have meaning is to have value

• • To lack meaning is to lack value

Value judgment, therefore, is the human capacity to recognize goodness or deficiency by evaluating meaning. This framing distinguishes axiological value judgment from psychological notions of desire, preference, or opinion, even while acknowledging overlap in lived experience.

The Three Dimensions of Valuing

The article relies on Hartman’s three fundamental value dimensions:

• • Intrinsic (I): valuing unique persons, inner experience, and human dignity

• • Extrinsic (E): valuing actions, behavior, performance, and function

• • Systemic (S): valuing ideas, rules, logic, and formal structures

North emphasizes that these dimensions are interdependent, not isolated traits. Together, they form a structure through which personality, emotion, and motivation are organized.

Measuring Value Judgment: The Hartman Value Profile

To operationalize value judgment, North uses the Hartman Value Profile (HVP). Unlike self report instruments that ask respondents to describe themselves, the HVP is a task-based assessment. Participants rank items according to their recognition of value, completing the same cognitive task across social and private contexts.

This approach allows the HVP to assess:

• • judgment structure across intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic dimensions

• • emotional valence (positive or negative valuation)

• • distortions and imbalances in valuing

North highlights the HVP’s resistance to common self-report biases and its capacity to reveal evaluative patterns that operate outside conscious awareness.

Personality Through an Axiological Lens

Rather than treating personality as a static type or collection of traits, the article aligns with humanistic and existential psychology, viewing personality as a dynamic, teleological process oriented toward self-actualization.

Emotions are described as powerful drivers of behavior, but North pushes the inquiry further by asking: what drives emotion itself? His hypothesis is that value judgment sits upstream, shaping emotional responses, motivational energy, and behavioral expression over time.

In this framework, personality emerges from how individuals continually evaluate meaning in their lived experience.

Authenticity as Congruence

The study focuses on authentic personality, defined as congruence among:

• • the true self

  • the self as expressed in action and social context

  • the ideal or future-oriented self

This tripartite view closely parallels Hartman’s intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic dimensions. Authenticity is treated not as a binary state, but as a spectrum, ranging from self-alienation to integrated self-expression.

To measure authenticity, North uses the Authenticity Scale, which assesses:

• • self-alienation

  • authentic living

  • resistance to external influence

These dimensions are conceptually mapped to value judgment processes, particularly when examining judgment valence, not merely raw scores.

Key Findings

Using a sample of approximately 200 adults, North conducted correlational, regression, and factor analyses to examine the relationship between value judgment and authenticity.

Key findings include:

• • Consistent, moderate correlations between HVP indices and authenticity measures

  • Individual value judgment indices explaining roughly 26–32% of the variance in authentic personality

  • Composite intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic judgment scores explaining up to 70% of the variance in authenticity

  • Intrinsic value judgment emerging as the strongest predictor of authentic personality

These results support the conclusion that value judgment is structurally related to authenticity, not merely associated with it.

Why This Matters

North’s findings suggest that authenticity is not only a psychological construct, but an axiological one. Emotional and motivational patterns appear to reflect deeper valuation structures, and authentic personality may depend on how individuals assign meaning across intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic domains.

The study also demonstrates the plasticity of the HVP, showing that new composite indices can be developed to examine specific constructs while remaining faithful to Hartman’s theoretical foundations.

Closing Insight

Value judgment operates quietly, but powerfully.

By positioning valuing as a central organizing principle of personality and behavior, North strengthens the case for formal axiology as both a philosophical framework and an empirical research program. The article invites continued inquiry into how meaning, judgment, and value shape who we become.

Further Information

This blog was created from Volume 12, Journal of Formal Axiology (2019) - available here. Members can access the journal free of charge via the member home page.

The blog was put together by a member; Patrick Rice.