Milton Rokeach

Milton Rokeach (1918-1988) was a Professor of social psychology at Michigan State University, and later at Washington State University, where he held a joint appointment in the Departments of Sociology and Psychology. Rokeach received his Ph.D from University of California, Berkeley in 1947. He is best known for The Open and Closed Mind (1960) and Beliefs, Attitudes and Values: A Theory of Organization and Change (1968).

His influential book The Nature of Human Values (1973), and the Rokeach Value Survey, which this book served as the test manual for, occupied the final years of his career. In it, he posited that a relatively few Terminal Human Values are the internal reference points that all people use to formulate attitudes and opinions, and that by measuring the relative ranking of these values one could predict a wide variety of behavior, including political affiliation and religious belief. This theory led to a series of famous experiments in which changes in values led to measurable changes in opinion for an entire small city Washington State.

Milton Rokeach received the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award of American Psychological Association in 1984.

Bibliography

• The Open and Closed Mind (1960)
• Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values (1968)
• The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (1964)
• The Nature of Human Values (1973)