Young men want what’s attainable
They’re not building castles in the air. Instead, they’re working to attain the attainable. A generation of young men is offering researchers a few surprises.
Young men: Only those who actually believe in their future earning potential long to one day own a cool car. | Image: colourbox.com
What is it that makes for a good life? Family, security, influence, tolerance, belief. These are central values in the Western world. But they’re not all equally important to everyone, and scientists don’t agree on the reasons for this being the case. Some say that we organise our values according to what we lack. In other words, we want what we don’t have. A high standard of living is especially important to people who grew up with little money. Another hypothesis is that people remain faithful to the context of their own values. If someone thinks he is wealthy, then he’ll be noticeably more materialistic in how he thinks and organises his values – because they’re attainable.
A team of researchers led by the sociologist Isabella Lussi is now providing a firmer basis for the second theory. To this end, they have carried out a survey of 26,444 Swiss men aged between 18 and 21. What’s unusual about it is that this study was carried out in the context of the military service recruitment process, which is compulsory for almost all young men. Lussi's study thus illustrates the thinking of a whole generation of men.
For the first-ever time in value research, her team also employed the ‘capability approach’, which is focussed on realisation opportunities. Lussi explains it like this: “Whether you see yourself as privileged or disadvantaged doesn’t just depend on your available resources, but on the significance that you assign to them. We show how our perception of individually significant realisation opportunities can influence the development of our values”. Her results are unambiguous: whoever sees the opportunity to realise a value and to live it out, regards it as more desirable. This result could help us in meeting one of the central challenges of our time: how to integrate refugees. If values only acquire their meaning when they are realised, then, says Lussi, “people will only believe in the values of a society when they actually belong to it. And not the other way round”.
Johannes Giesler
