Personal Values Assessment: What Drives Your Decisions

Everyone has values. But most people can't name theirs with any precision, and fewer still understand how those values quietly steer their choices, relationships, and sense of meaning. Here's what psychology actually knows about personal values, how they're measured, and why understanding yours might explain decisions you've never been able to articulate.

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What Are Values, Really?

When most people hear "values," they think of abstract words on a motivational poster. Integrity. Honesty. Excellence. These aren't wrong, but they aren't what psychologists mean either.

In personality psychology, values are trans-situational motivational goals that serve as guiding principles in a person's life (Schwartz, 1992). That's a mouthful, so here's the simpler version: values are the things you believe are important enough to organize your life around, even when nobody's watching and there's no reward for doing so.

The difference between values and preferences is stakes. You might prefer chocolate ice cream, but you wouldn't restructure your career over it. If you deeply value self-direction, though, you might leave a high-paying job because it feels suffocating. If you deeply value security, you might stay in that same job precisely because the stability matters more than the excitement.

Values are the why behind behavior that personality traits alone can't explain.

Where values fit in the 8-Layer Personality Map: Values are Layer 3: your driving values. They answer the question: What matters most to you, and why? While Big Five traits (Layer 1) describe how you tend to behave, and attachment (Layer 2) captures how you bond with others, values explain what you're actually pursuing when you behave the way you do. Two people can be equally extraverted but value completely different things. Learn more in our complete guide to the 8-Layer Personality Map.

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Schwartz's Theory of Basic Human Values

In 1992, social psychologist Shalom Schwartz proposed a theory of universal values that has since been tested in over 80 countries across every inhabited continent. Unlike many personality frameworks that emerged from Western psychology and were later exported elsewhere, Schwartz built cross-cultural validation into the project from the start.

The core finding: across cultures, the same 10 basic value types keep appearing. The specific behaviors associated with each value vary by culture (what "tradition" looks like in Japan vs. Brazil, for example), but the motivational structure behind the values is consistent.

That consistency is what makes the Schwartz model the most widely used values framework in psychology today (Schwartz, 2012).

The 10 Universal Value Types

Here's what each value type actually means, with everyday examples that go beyond textbook definitions.

1. Self-Direction. Valuing independent thought and action. Choosing your own goals. You pick the restaurant, the career, the route home. Being told what to do feels like a cage, even when the instructions are good.

2. Stimulation. Valuing excitement, novelty, and challenge. You get restless when things stay the same too long. Routine is your enemy. A predictable week feels like a wasted one.

3. Hedonism. Valuing pleasure and sensory gratification. This isn't shallow. It means you take seriously the idea that life should feel good, that enjoyment isn't something to postpone until retirement.

4. Achievement. Valuing personal success through demonstrating competence. You want to be good at things, and you want others to recognize that you're good at them. Standards matter. Mediocrity is uncomfortable.

5. Power. Valuing social status, prestige, and control over people and resources. This one has a bad reputation, but at moderate levels it simply means you want influence. You'd rather lead than follow, and you're willing to compete for position.

6. Security. Valuing safety, harmony, and stability. You want to know the ground beneath you is solid. Financial stability, health insurance, a predictable routine, a safe neighborhood. Uncertainty is not exciting to you; it's draining.

7. Conformity. Valuing restraint of actions and impulses that might upset or harm others or violate social expectations. You don't want to rock the boat. Social norms exist for a reason, and respecting them feels right, not oppressive.

8. Tradition. Valuing respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that culture or religion provide. The way things have always been done carries weight. Heritage isn't baggage; it's grounding.

9. Benevolence. Valuing the welfare of people you're close to. You care deeply about your in-group: family, friends, close colleagues. Loyalty, helpfulness, and forgiveness among people you know personally are central to how you live.

10. Universalism. Valuing understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and nature. Like benevolence but broader. You care about fairness, social justice, and the environment, even for people you'll never meet.

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The Value Circumplex: Why the Circle Matters

Schwartz didn't just identify 10 values. He discovered that they're organized in a specific pattern: a circle (or circumplex) where adjacent values are psychologically compatible and opposing values create tension.

This circular structure has been replicated across hundreds of samples in dozens of countries. It's not a metaphor. It reflects the actual statistical relationships between how people endorse values.

How Compatibility Works

Values next to each other on the circle share underlying motivations:

• Self-Direction and Stimulation both involve seeking novelty and personal autonomy
• Tradition and Conformity both involve subordinating the self to socially imposed expectations
• Achievement and Power both involve social superiority and esteem
• Benevolence and Universalism both involve concern for others' welfare

You can hold adjacent values strongly at the same time without internal conflict. A person who values both self-direction and stimulation just wants an independent, exciting life. No tension there.

How Tensions Work

Values on opposite sides of the circle pull in genuinely different directions:

• Self-Direction vs. Conformity: You can't simultaneously prioritize doing things your own way and following group expectations. At some point, you have to choose.
• Achievement vs. Benevolence: Competitive success sometimes requires putting your goals ahead of others' needs. Prioritizing others' welfare sometimes means sacrificing personal advancement.
• Power vs. Universalism: Accumulating influence and status for yourself is hard to reconcile with caring equally about everyone's welfare.
• Stimulation vs. Security: Seeking excitement and novelty is inherently at odds with seeking stability and predictability.

These tensions don't mean you can't care about both. They mean that when life forces a decision, you'll consistently lean toward one side. That lean is what the PVQ-40 measures.

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The Four Higher-Order Value Groupings

The 10 values cluster into four broader dimensions that sit on two fundamental axes. This is where the model gets especially useful for understanding yourself.

Axis 1: Openness to Change vs. Conservation

Openness to Change (Self-Direction, Stimulation): You value autonomy, independence, and new experiences. You resist restriction and embrace change.

Conservation (Security, Conformity, Tradition): You value order, self-restriction, preservation of the past, and resistance to change. Stability isn't boring to you; it's the foundation everything else is built on.

Axis 2: Self-Enhancement vs. Self-Transcendence

Self-Enhancement (Achievement, Power): You prioritize your own success, status, and dominance. This isn't selfish in a pejorative sense. It means you're oriented toward personal advancement and measurable accomplishment.

Self-Transcendence (Benevolence, Universalism): You prioritize the welfare of others and the broader world. You're oriented toward care, equality, and connection rather than competition.

Where does Hedonism fit? Hedonism sits between Openness to Change and Self-Enhancement. It shares the novelty-seeking of openness and the self-focus of enhancement. Schwartz placed it at the boundary because it genuinely straddles both dimensions.

Why These Groupings Matter

The four quadrants predict broad life orientations:

• High Openness to Change + High Self-Enhancement: Entrepreneurial, ambitious, restless. Wants personal success on their own terms.
• High Openness to Change + High Self-Transcendence: Activist, creative humanitarian. Wants to change the world.
• High Conservation + High Self-Enhancement: Corporate climber, institutional leader. Wants success within existing structures.
• High Conservation + High Self-Transcendence: Community pillar, devoted caregiver. Wants to preserve and protect what matters.

Most people don't fall neatly into one quadrant. But knowing which direction you lean explains a lot about your career choices, your political leanings, and the arguments you keep having with people who lean the other way.

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Values vs. Personality Traits: What's the Difference?

This is one of the most common questions people ask, and it matters because confusing values with traits leads to misunderstanding yourself.

Traits describe how you tend to behave. If you score high on Extraversion (Big Five, Layer 1), you're naturally drawn to social stimulation. That's a behavioral tendency, not a choice.

Values describe what you believe is important. If you value benevolence, you prioritize helping people close to you. That's a motivational goal, something you're pursuing, not just a tendency you exhibit.

A Concrete Example

Two people both score high on Agreeableness (Big Five trait). They're both cooperative, warm, and conflict-averse. But they value different things:

• Person A values benevolence. They're agreeable because they genuinely care about the people around them and want to preserve close relationships.
• Person B values conformity. They're agreeable because they don't want to violate social norms or make waves. Their cooperation comes from a desire to fit in, not from personal warmth.

Same trait. Different underlying motivation. Different behavior when the stakes get high. Person A will stand up to a stranger who's hurting their friend. Person B might not, because confrontation violates their conformity values even when someone they care about is involved.

When Values Predict Better Than Traits

Research by Schwartz, Caprara, and Vecchione (2010) found that values predicted voting behavior better than personality traits. Traits told you whether someone was likely to vote at all (conscientious people show up). Values told you which way they'd vote.

Similarly, values predict:

• Career satisfaction beyond what traits capture (a conscientious person in a values-mismatched career will still be unhappy)
• Relationship conflict patterns (value disagreements cause different kinds of fights than personality friction)
• Life satisfaction in ways traits miss (you can be emotionally stable but deeply unfulfilled if your life doesn't reflect your values)

The two frameworks complement each other. Traits are the engine; values are the steering wheel.

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Values and Decision-Making

Here's where values become immediately practical. Every major decision you've made, and many minor ones, was shaped by your value hierarchy. You just didn't notice because values operate mostly below conscious awareness.

How Values Actually Guide Choices

Schwartz (1992) proposed that values influence behavior through a three-step process:

1. Activation: A situation triggers values relevant to it. A job offer activates achievement, security, self-direction, and power values simultaneously.
2. Weighting: Your personal value hierarchy determines which activated values carry the most weight. If security is your top value, the salary and benefits dominate your thinking. If self-direction is dominant, the autonomy and creative freedom matter more.
3. Behavior: The value with the strongest pull wins, and you act accordingly. Often without realizing why.

Real Decisions, Real Values

Choosing a career: A person who values self-direction over security will freelance. A person who values security over self-direction will take the corporate job. Both are rational. The difference is the value hierarchy.

Choosing where to live: High universalism might pull you toward a diverse, progressive city. High tradition might pull you toward the town where you grew up. High stimulation might pull you abroad entirely.

Choosing how to spend money: High hedonism means you spend on experiences and pleasure. High security means you save. High benevolence means you give to people you know. High universalism means you donate to causes.

Choosing how to parent: High conformity parents emphasize obedience and good behavior. High self-direction parents emphasize independence and self-expression. Both love their kids. They just prioritize different developmental outcomes.

The Power of Value Conflicts

The most agonizing decisions in life aren't between good and bad options. They're between options that satisfy different values you hold.

Stay in the stable job (security) or start the business (self-direction)? Spend the holiday with your family (tradition, benevolence) or travel somewhere new (stimulation)? Push for the promotion (achievement) or protect your work-life balance (hedonism)?

When you can name the values in tension, the decision doesn't necessarily get easier, but it gets clearer. You stop feeling confused and start seeing the actual trade-off.

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Values in Relationships

Value alignment is one of the strongest predictors of long-term relationship satisfaction, and it's distinct from personality compatibility. You can have compatible personalities (both introverted, both agreeable) but incompatible values (one prioritizes achievement, the other prioritizes benevolence), and that mismatch will eventually surface.

When Shared Values Matter Most

Research by Gaunt (2006) found that value similarity predicted relationship satisfaction even after controlling for personality similarity. The areas where shared values matter most:

Core life decisions: Where to live, whether to have children, how to spend money, how to raise kids. These are values negotiations, not personality ones. Two people who both value security will agree on financial strategy. Two people who split on security vs. stimulation will fight about it for decades.

Conflict resolution: Shared values create a common ground for resolving disagreements. When both partners value benevolence, they can appeal to "we both care about each other's wellbeing" as a starting point. When one values power and the other values universalism, they may not even share a framework for what "fair" means.

Long-term goals: Values predict what you're building toward. If one partner values achievement and the other values tradition, they may have fundamentally different visions of what a good life looks like.

When Value Differences Can Be Enriching

Not all value differences are problems. Some create productive complementarity:

• A partner high on stimulation paired with one high on security can balance adventure with stability. One person pushes the couple to try new things; the other ensures they have a safety net.
• A partner high on achievement paired with one high on benevolence can balance ambition with relationship warmth. One drives the family forward; the other holds the family together.

The key variable is whether the value difference falls on the same axis (high tension) or different axes (manageable). Self-Enhancement vs. Self-Transcendence differences tend to create more friction than Openness to Change vs. Conservation differences, because the former involves a fundamental disagreement about whose needs come first.

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How Values Change (and Don't)

Values are more stable than moods and more changeable than personality traits. Research shows they occupy a middle ground: slow-moving but responsive to life experience.

Age-Related Patterns

Schwartz and Rubel (2005) found consistent age-related value shifts across cultures:

• Conservation values (security, conformity, tradition) tend to increase with age. As people accumulate responsibilities, families, and assets, stability becomes more appealing.
• Openness to Change values (self-direction, stimulation) tend to decrease slightly. Not because people become closed-minded, but because novelty-seeking naturally moderates as life settles.
• Self-Transcendence values (benevolence, universalism) tend to increase modestly. Concern for others' welfare often grows as people mature and gain perspective.
• Self-Enhancement values (achievement, power) tend to decrease. The drive to prove yourself and accumulate status often softens in midlife and beyond.

These are averages, not rules. Plenty of 70-year-olds value stimulation more than any 25-year-old you've met. But the population-level pattern is consistent enough to be meaningful.

Life Events That Shift Values

Major life transitions can produce faster value changes than aging alone:

Becoming a parent typically increases benevolence and security values. Suddenly, another person's safety and wellbeing depend on you, and your priorities reorganize accordingly.

Career crises (burnout, layoffs, moral injury) often trigger a rebalancing. People who spent years prioritizing achievement may suddenly discover that self-direction or benevolence matters more than they realized.

Immigration and cultural change can shift the balance between tradition/conformity and self-direction. Leaving your culture of origin often forces you to renegotiate which values you carry forward and which you leave behind.

Loss and grief frequently increases self-transcendence values. Confronting mortality has a way of making power and achievement feel less urgent and connection feel more so.

Cultural Influences

Schwartz (2006) documented systematic cultural differences in value emphasis:

• Western European countries tend to emphasize self-direction and universalism
• East Asian countries tend to emphasize conformity and tradition
• English-speaking countries tend to emphasize achievement and hedonism
• Sub-Saharan African countries tend to emphasize security and benevolence

These are cultural-level patterns. Individual variation within any culture is enormous. But culture shapes which values are reinforced, rewarded, and modeled from childhood onward.

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How Your True Self Measures Values

Your True Self uses the PVQ-40 (Portrait Values Questionnaire), a 40-item instrument developed by Schwartz and colleagues specifically for values measurement in non-academic settings.

Why the PVQ-40?

The PVQ-40 was designed to be accessible to people across educational levels and cultures. Rather than asking abstract questions ("How important is power to you?"), it presents short portraits of people and asks how much each portrait sounds like you.

For example: "Thinking up new ideas and being creative is important to him/her. He/she likes to do things in his/her own original way." You rate how much this person is like you on a 6-point scale.

This portrait-based approach measures values indirectly. Instead of asking you to evaluate the desirability of a value (which tends to produce socially desirable responses), it asks you to compare yourself to people who embody different values. The result is a more honest picture of your actual value hierarchy.

Within-Person Centering: Why It Matters

Here's something most values assessments get wrong, and it's worth understanding because it directly affects the accuracy of your results.

People differ in how they use rating scales. Some people rate everything highly ("Yes, I value all of these!"). Others use the middle of the scale. This response tendency contaminates raw scores because it creates artificial similarities between values that are actually quite different in importance to you.

Schwartz's solution is within-person centering. After you complete the questionnaire, the scoring algorithm calculates your personal mean across all 40 items. Then each value score is adjusted by subtracting that mean.

The result is a profile that shows your relative value priorities. If your centered score for self-direction is +1.2 and your centered score for conformity is -0.8, that means self-direction is genuinely more important to you than conformity, regardless of whether you're someone who rates everything high or someone who rates conservatively.

This is a well-validated methodological choice (Schwartz, 2005), and it's one of the reasons the PVQ-40 produces more meaningful individual profiles than simpler values surveys that just use raw scores.

The 6-Point Scale

The PVQ-40 uses a 6-point response scale:

Rating	Meaning
1	Not like me at all
2	Not like me
3	A little like me
4	Somewhat like me
5	Like me
6	Very much like me

The 6-point scale (with no midpoint) is intentional. It prevents fence-sitting and forces a directional judgment for each portrait. Combined with within-person centering, this produces more differentiated profiles than 5-point or 7-point alternatives.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 10 Schwartz values?

The 10 basic value types in Schwartz's theory are: Self-Direction, Stimulation, Hedonism, Achievement, Power, Security, Conformity, Tradition, Benevolence, and Universalism. They represent motivational goals that are recognized across cultures. Each person has all 10 values but prioritizes them differently, creating a unique value profile that guides decision-making and life choices.

How do values differ from personality traits?

Personality traits (like the Big Five) describe how you tend to behave. Values describe what you consider important. Traits are relatively automatic behavioral tendencies; values are motivational goals you actively pursue. Two people with the same trait profile can have very different values, which leads them to use their shared behavioral tendencies in completely different directions.

Can personal values change over time?

Yes, though they change more slowly than attitudes and more slowly than many people expect. Research shows consistent age-related patterns: conservation values tend to increase with age, openness to change decreases, self-transcendence increases, and self-enhancement decreases. Major life events (parenthood, career change, loss) can accelerate value shifts. However, your basic value hierarchy tends to remain recognizable over time, even as the emphasis shifts.

Do couples need to share the same values?

Not necessarily all of them, but alignment on core values predicts long-term relationship satisfaction. Research by Gaunt (2006) found that value similarity predicted relationship quality even after accounting for personality similarity. The values that matter most for couples are those governing daily life decisions: how to spend money (security vs. hedonism), how to raise children (conformity vs. self-direction), and how to balance ambition with relationships (achievement vs. benevolence).

What's the difference between the PVQ-40 and other values assessments?

The PVQ-40 is Schwartz's purpose-built instrument for measuring his 10 universal values. Unlike many values inventories that ask you to rank abstract words, the PVQ-40 uses portrait descriptions that measure values indirectly, reducing social desirability bias. It also uses within-person centering in scoring, which controls for individual differences in scale usage. This makes it one of the most psychometrically sound values measures available.

Why do my values sometimes conflict with each other?

Because opposing values on the Schwartz circumplex pull in genuinely different directions. Valuing both self-direction and conformity, for example, creates an internal tension between wanting to do things your own way and wanting to meet social expectations. This isn't a sign that something is wrong. It's normal, and it's the source of many of life's most difficult decisions. Understanding which values are in tension helps you make more deliberate choices when they collide.

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Citations

Gaunt, R. (2006). Couple similarity and marital satisfaction: Are similar spouses happier? Journal of Personality, 74(5), 1401-1420.

Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1-65). Academic Press.

Schwartz, S. H. (2005). Basic human values: Their content and structure across countries. In A. Tamayo & J. B. Porto (Eds.), Valores e comportamento nas organizações (pp. 21-55). Vozes.

Schwartz, S. H. (2006). A theory of cultural value orientations: Explication and applications. Comparative Sociology, 5(2-3), 137-182.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1).

Schwartz, S. H., Caprara, G. V., & Vecchione, M. (2010). Basic personal values, core political values, and voting: A longitudinal analysis. Political Psychology, 31(3), 421-452.

Schwartz, S. H., & Rubel, T. (2005). Sex differences in value priorities: Cross-cultural and multimethod studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 1010-1028.

Schwartz, S. H., et al. (2001). Extending the cross-cultural validity of the theory of basic human values with a different method of measurement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(5), 519-542.

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Part of the Understanding Your Personality guide. Personal Values is Layer 3 of the 8-Layer Personality Map.

Your True Self is an informational and self-reflection tool. It is not a clinical assessment, psychological evaluation, or substitute for professional mental health services.