Running head: CULTURAL VALUES AND PERSONAL ETHICS
Effect of Cultural Values and Personal Ethics
Anne E. Bonidie
University of Phoenix
Effect of Cultural Values and Personal Ethics
Decisions we make everyday are influenced in part by our core values. Our cultural background, individual bias, personal ethics, and past experiences help to form the basis of our value system. "We begin sharpening our values at a very early age. Our parents, teachers, friends, religious leaders, heroes and fictional idols teach us right from wrong" (Deblieux, 1995). These teachings help us to evaluate situations and form conclusions.
We are all individuals, but together we form a society. "Each society develops a different set of assumptions and norms under which to operate, and different professions, functions, and even genders within a society or organization can have different cultures themselves" (Raatikainen, 2002). This holds true for different generations within a society or organization as well.
As we bring our individualism together to form a group, we must recognize the differences within each member. We must overcome any prejudgments formed by past experiences. "We tend to prejudge others in our mind then merely reinforce these prejudices with information we gather. We need to train ourselves to reverse this process. Instead, we must gather the information that disproves our prejudice to overcome the self-fulfilling prophesy inherent in our prejudicial stereotypes. That is we must be ready to make a concerted effort to prove our prejudices and stereotypes are wrongs as a result of the information we gath ...