Values vs Personality: How They Differ (and Why Both Matter).
"What are your values?" and "what is your personality?" sound like the same question. They are not. Psychology treats them as distinct layers of a person, measured by different instruments and predicting different things - and conflating them is one of the most common mistakes in self-understanding.
Values vs personality
Personality traits (the Big Five) describe how you characteristically behave - your typical patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. Values (the Schwartz model) describe what you consider important and worth pursuing - the goals that guide your choices. They are different layers of who you are: traits and values correlate only modestly, and values predict decisions and moral judgments that traits alone do not. A third layer, interests (RIASEC), captures what activities energize you. A full self-portrait needs more than one lens.
The cleanest way to hold the distinction: traits are how you behave, values are what you consider important, and interests are what energizes you. They overlap modestly, but each adds information the others miss. This page lays out the three layers, what each predicts, and why a serious self-portrait uses more than one.
Three layers: traits, values, interests
Personality traits describe your characteristic style of behaviour. The Big Five - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability - capture how you tend to act across situations: how organized, how sociable, how even-tempered. Traits are descriptive and relatively stable, and they answer "how does this person usually behave?"
Values describe the goals you consider worth pursuing - achievement, benevolence, security, self-direction, and the rest of the Schwartz set. They answer "what matters to this person, and what would they trade off for what?" Interests, the third layer (the RIASEC model), describe the activities that energize you - building, investigating, creating, helping, leading, organizing. Three different questions, three different instruments.
- Traits (Big Five): how you characteristically behave
- Values (Schwartz): what you consider important and worth pursuing
- Interests (RIASEC): what kinds of activity energize you
How much do values and traits overlap?
They are related but far from redundant. Meta-analytic work on the connection between traits and values finds the correlations are systematic but generally modest - meaningful enough to be theoretically sensible, small enough that you cannot read someone's values off their personality.
The links that do appear make conceptual sense. Openness to experience aligns with valuing self-direction and stimulation; agreeableness aligns with valuing benevolence and universalism; conscientiousness has ties to achievement and conformity-related values. But these are tendencies, not equations: two people equally high in openness can prioritize very different values, which is exactly why measuring one does not give you the other.
What values predict that traits do not
The clearest reason to keep the layers separate is that values predict things traits miss - especially choices and judgments with a moral or motivational core. Where you stand on Schwartz values forecasts political and social attitudes, what you find ethically acceptable, what causes you support, and the trade-offs you make when goals conflict. Traits, being about behavioural style rather than goals, predict these much less well.
Traits, in turn, predict things values are weaker on - day-to-day behavioural tendencies, emotional reactivity, how you come across socially, broad performance patterns. So the two are complementary forecasters: if you want to predict how someone will act under pressure, ask about traits; if you want to predict what they will choose when values collide, ask about values.
Why this matters for self-understanding
The practical payoff is that the layers explain different kinds of friction. Personality friction is about style - an introvert drained by constant meetings. Values friction is about direction - someone whose work demands they prioritize a goal they do not hold, like a strong-benevolence person in a role built around pure self-advancement. These feel different and call for different responses, and a single "personality test" cannot tell them apart.
It also explains why people who look similar on a personality test can want completely different lives. Same traits, different values: one optimizes for security and tradition, the other for stimulation and self-direction. The values layer is doing the explaining there, which is why career and life decisions are better informed by both lenses than by either alone.
Which should you measure?
It depends on the question. For understanding your behavioural style and how you react - useful for teamwork, communication, and stress - a Big Five trait measure is the right lens. For understanding what you will prioritize and the choices you will be at peace with - useful for career direction, big decisions, and value conflicts - a Schwartz values measure fits better.
For most serious self-understanding the honest answer is both, plus interests if the question is vocational. They correlate only modestly, so each adds genuine information - and the combined picture is far more informative than any single score. Just keep the modesty in mind: these are useful lenses on tendencies, not fixed readouts of who you are.
Also relevant: Schwartz values explained
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between values and personality?
Personality traits describe how you characteristically behave; values describe what you consider important and worth pursuing. They correlate only modestly, so you cannot read someone's values off their personality. Crucially, values predict choices and moral judgments - what someone will prioritize when goals conflict - that traits alone do not.
Do values and personality traits correlate?
Yes, but modestly. Meta-analytic work finds systematic but generally small correlations - for example openness aligns with valuing self-direction, agreeableness with benevolence. The links are real and theoretically sensible, but too weak to treat the two as the same thing or to infer one from the other.
What about interests - are they the same as values?
No, they are a third layer. Interests (the RIASEC model) describe the activities that energize you - building, investigating, creating, helping, leading, organizing - while values describe the goals you consider worth pursuing. They relate but are distinct, which is why career guidance often looks at interests, values, and traits together.
Should I take a personality test or a values test?
It depends on the question. Use a Big Five trait measure to understand your behavioural style and reactions; use a Schwartz values measure to understand what you will prioritize and the choices you will be at peace with. For serious self-understanding, both are worth taking, because each captures something the other misses.
References
- Parks-Leduc, L., Feldman, G., & Bardi, A. (2015). Personality traits and personal values: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19(1), 3-29.
- Roccas, S., Sagiv, L., Schwartz, S. H., & Knafo, A. (2002). The Big Five personality factors and personal values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 789-801.
- Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1-65.
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