Value Conflict Measurement

Value conflict measurement quantifies the tension citizens feel when an issue pits two values they both cherish against each other, and traces its cognitive consequences. Philip Tetlock's value pluralism model holds that people reason in integratively complex ways precisely when an issue activates conflicting values they regard as important and roughly equal in weight. Stanley Feldman and John Zaller showed that this conflict, between values such as equality and economic individualism over the welfare state, produces ambivalence: opinions built from opposing considerations that are unstable and sensitive to how questions are framed. Together these approaches measure value conflict and link it to complexity, ambivalence, and the instability of political attitudes.