What Do You Actually Value?
Four value families that pull against each other in every decision
Values are easy to claim and hard to measure, because almost everyone says they value almost everything. What makes this model useful is that it is built on conflict: the values are arranged in a circle, and the ones opposite each other cannot both be served by the same choice. You cannot maximise security and stimulation at once, or self-direction and conformity. Your profile is the shape of the trade-offs you tend to make.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about what guides you in practice, not about what you believe is admirable. The two differ for almost everybody and the gap is not a character flaw.
What it measures
The four higher-order value families that ten basic values fall into. Openness to change covers independence and novelty. Conservation covers safety, tradition and rules. Self-enhancement covers achievement and status. Self-transcendence covers concern for others and for the world. Openness opposes conservation, and self-enhancement opposes self-transcendence.
Based on: Schwartz theory of basic human values (Schwartz, 1992; Schwartz et al., 2012)
Possible results
Openness to change
Independence, novelty, choosing your own direction.
Conservation
Safety, order, tradition, doing what is expected.
Self-enhancement
Achievement, competence, status, getting ahead.
Self-transcendence
Care for other people, fairness, the wider world.
Common questions
I scored high on everything. What does that mean?
Usually that you answered about what you believe is good rather than about what actually guides you, which is the standard difficulty with measuring values. The informative reading is not the height of the bars but the differences between opposite pairs. If openness and conservation are both at eighty, look at which is even slightly higher - that small gap is where your real trade-offs land.
Do values change?
Slowly, and in a fairly predictable direction. Across large samples, conservation values tend to rise with age and openness values to fall, while the self-enhancement side declines after early adulthood. Large life events - having a child, migrating, losing security - move them faster than time does.
Can I use this to make a decision?
It is better at explaining decisions than making them. Where it genuinely helps is with a choice that has been stuck for a long time: stuck choices are usually stuck because they sit exactly on one of these two axes, and naming which value you are about to sacrifice tends to be more clarifying than another list of pros and cons.
Sources
- 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.
- Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., et al. (2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Schwartz, S. H., & Cieciuch, J. (2022). Measuring the refined theory of individual values in 49 cultural groups: Psychometrics of the revised Portrait Value Questionnaire. Assessment.
An honest note This is one of the better-supported models on the site. The circular structure has been reproduced across more than eighty countries, and a 2022 study of the revised questionnaire in 49 cultural groups, with over fifty thousand people and thirty-two languages, recovered the predicted order of values around the circle. Two honest limits remain. First, values are measured by asking, and people describe themselves as more principled than their behaviour shows - the correlation between a value score and the matching behaviour is real but moderate. Second, this test uses the four broad families rather than the ten or nineteen finer values of the full instrument, which is a deliberate simplification for readability and does lose detail.
Try one of these next
Can You Spot Profound-Sounding Nonsense?
Real insight, empty grandeur and plain facts, side by side
How Much Do You Dwell on What You Didn't Do?
The choices that still visit you, and whether it's the made ones or the missed ones
How Resilient Are You?
Not how much you can take. How quickly you come back.