principles of social change

(from a list)...

To demonstrate what I am talking about with developing principles of social change, i will use Rokeach's values test as an example. The overriding principle is something like:

When people's awareness of contradictions in their personal values is increased, the likelihood of changing one or more of the values also increases; the value that changes is in all likelihood one that is liked least (or something to that effect).

see, with something like this, we have a generalizable proposition that we can use to develop specific interventions; we can take something like this along with us when we are encountering different situations that someone wants changed. let's develop some more!

caveat(s)...of course, this will not necessarily apply to ALL situations; it is predicated on several underlying assumptions that I don't know that we have data on -- people prefer values consistency to values inconsistency, people are uncomfortable when their values are in conflict (i think this is where cognitive dissonance comes in), etc.