Thinking Style and Moral Values in Adolescence

Moral values, as universally accepted ethical principles, that govern everyday life, maintaining unity and harmony between people and thinking styles, as positive habits that contribute to better critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making, are two important aspects for the development of adolescents. The objectives we set out are: 1) to offer an overview on adolescents perception of moral values; 2) to discover the existence of significant differences between male and female adolescents regarding their moral values systems and 3) to distinguish the differences between the adolescent's classification of moral values due to the predominance of a certain thinking style. Using the Rokeach Value Survey (1973) and Thinking Styles Inventory by Sternberg & Wagner (1992), we questioned 127 participants, between 14 and 23 years of age. We discovered that today's adolescents value health, freedom or self-esteem (terminal values) and ambition, love or capability (instrumental values), but we found no significant differences between male and female adolescents regarding their terminal values classifications. However, there are significant differences between them regarding instrumental values. While female adolescents value independence, love and honesty, male adolescents value ambition, cleanliness and helpfulness. Using Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U test for independent samples, we found significant differences between value classification based on the thinking styles. Based on Sternberg's theory of mental self-governing, we found significant differences between legislative, executive and judicial thinking people regarding terminal value “an exciting life” and instrumental value “ambitious”. While we discovered no difference between hierarchical, monarchical and oligarchical thinking people for terminal values, they value differently “independent” and “polite” (instrumental values). Although global thinking people value true friendship less than local thinking people, we found no significant differences for instrumental values. External thinking people value courage more than internal thinking people and liberal thinking people value wisdom less than conservative thinking people.