Personal Values

Personal values are the broad, enduring goals that guide how you judge what matters and what you strive for across situations. The theory developed by Shalom Schwartz identifies ten basic values that recur across cultures and organizes them by the motivations behind them. This test measures where each of those ten values sits in your own priority structure.

This 21-item version asks you to rate how much short descriptions of a person resemble you, and takes about 6 minutes. Because values are about relative priority - what you put first when goals compete - your results are most informative as a ranking: which values lead for you and which you are willing to trade off. There are no better or worse value profiles, only different ones.

Schwartz showed that the ten values are not an arbitrary list but form a circle, or circumplex, defined by motivation. Values that share a motivational basis sit next to each other and tend to rise and fall together, while values driven by opposing motivations sit across the circle and tend to conflict. Pursuing self-direction and stimulation (openness to change) pulls against conformity, tradition, and security (conservation); pursuing achievement and power (self-enhancement) pulls against universalism and benevolence (self-transcendence).

This is why your profile is best read as a pattern of trade-offs rather than ten independent scores. Most people endorse benevolence and self-direction highly and power less so, so what distinguishes your profile is the relative emphasis among values and where your priorities fall on these two underlying tensions.

The Schwartz value theory is one of the most extensively validated frameworks in cross-cultural psychology. The ten-value structure and its circular motivational order have been recovered in samples from dozens of countries, which is what lets the same value map be applied across very different populations. A refined version later subdivided the circle into more fine-grained values while preserving the same continuum of compatible and conflicting motivations.

Values measured this way predict attitudes and behavior in coherent ways - political and environmental attitudes, prosocial behavior, consumer and occupational choices - and the predictions follow the structure of the circle, with adjacent values relating similarly and opposing values relating in opposite directions. Two caveats are worth keeping in mind. Values describe broad guiding priorities, not specific actions, so they shape behavior probabilistically rather than dictating it. And a brief survey estimates your relative priorities; it does not diagnose anything or judge your character, and is intended for reflection and self-understanding.