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 desirable goals that motivate action, apply across situations, and serve as standards for judging actions and people (Schwartz, 2012). 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

Social psychologist Shalom Schwartz developed a theory of basic human values that has been tested in hundreds of samples from 82 countries (Schwartz, 2012).

The core finding: across cultures, the same 10 basic value types keep appearing (Schwartz, 2012). 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.

Schwartz reports that the ten values were distinguished in at least 90% of the samples studied, and that the circular structure of their relationships appeared across countries and across both of the measurement methods he developed (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 found in hundreds of samples from 82 countries (Schwartz, 2012). 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.

What Values Predict

Schwartz, Caprara, and Vecchione (2010) measured the basic values, political values, and votes of Italian adults before and after the 2006 national election. Basic values explained a substantial share of the variance in each of eight political values and predicted voting. Political values accounted for the link between basic values and how people voted.

The study did not compare values with personality traits, so it can't tell you which predicts better. Schwartz describes the two as different things: traits describe what people are like, while values describe what people consider important (Schwartz, 2012).

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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

According to Schwartz (2012), values influence what you do when two things hold: the value is relevant to the situation, and it is important to you. Most actions touch more than one value, so it is the trade-off among the values in play that guides what you choose. He also notes that the impact of values on everyday decisions is rarely conscious, and that values enter awareness when the options you are weighing pull on different values you hold.

For example, a job offer can touch achievement, security, self-direction, and power at once. If security is your top value, the salary and benefits are likely to carry the most weight. If self-direction is, the autonomy and creative freedom are.

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

Similarity in values is linked to 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

Gaunt (2006) studied 248 married couples and found that greater similarity between partners was associated with higher marital satisfaction and lower negative affect. Similarity in gendered personality and in values was more strongly associated with these measures than similarity in attitudes or religiosity. These are associations, so they don't show that similar values cause satisfaction. The areas where shared values may 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 differ by age, and they can change over a lifetime. The research below describes differences between age groups, which is not the same as tracking the same people as they grow older.

Age-Related Patterns

Robinson (2013) compared people of different ages using European Social Survey data from 12 industrialised countries. The age differences were:

• Conservation values (security, conformity, tradition) were higher in older age groups. Tradition showed the strongest positive relationship with age.
• Openness to Change values (self-direction, stimulation, hedonism) were lower in older age groups. Stimulation showed the strongest negative relationship with age.
• Self-Transcendence values (benevolence, universalism) were greater in midlife and older adults than in young adults. The relationship with age was positive between young adulthood and midlife, but not beyond.
• Self-Enhancement values (achievement, power) were lower in older age groups.

These are group averages, not rules. The study compared different people at different ages at one point in time, so part of what looks like age may be a difference between generations. Plenty of 70-year-olds value stimulation more than any 25-year-old you've met.

Cultural Influences

Schwartz (2006) describes cultures, not individuals, using seven cultural value orientations. Using data from 73 countries, he mapped 76 national cultures into seven groupings: West European, English-speaking, Latin American, East European, South Asian, Confucian influenced, and African and Middle Eastern.

Across societies, though, the average ordering of the ten individual values is surprisingly similar. In the vast majority of nations Schwartz studied, benevolence, universalism, and self-direction sit near the top, and power, tradition, and stimulation sit near the bottom (Schwartz, 2012). Individual variation within any culture is large.

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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 to measure the ten basic values (Schwartz, 2012).

Why the PVQ-40?

Schwartz developed the PVQ to measure values in children aged 11 to 14 and in people not educated in Western schools that emphasize abstract, context-free thinking. It also works with adults in national samples (Schwartz, 2012). 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. Each portrait describes a person's goals without naming a value, and your values are inferred from how much you say each person is like you (Schwartz, 2012).

Within-Person Centering: Why It Matters

Scoring is worth understanding because it affects how your results read.

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. Schwartz's reasoning is that what affects behavior and attitudes is the trade-off among relevant values, not how important any single value is on its own (Schwartz, 2012). Two people can give tradition the same rating, and tradition still has higher priority for the one who rates everything else lower.

Schwartz's approach is within-person centering: subtract each person's mean response to all the value items from their response to each item (Schwartz, 2012). Here, after you complete the questionnaire, the scoring algorithm calculates your personal mean across all 40 items, and 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.

Schwartz describes this correction as necessary to measure value priorities accurately (Schwartz, 2012).

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 has no midpoint, so each portrait calls for a judgment that leans one way or the other.

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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?

Possibly. Research comparing age groups finds that older people, on average, score higher on conservation values and lower on openness to change and self-enhancement values, and that self-transcendence values are higher in midlife and older adults than in young adults (Robinson, 2013). That kind of study compares different people at one point in time, so it can't say how any one person's values will change. If you retake the assessment later, your results may differ.

Do couples need to share the same values?

Not necessarily all of them. Gaunt (2006) found that married couples who were more similar in values reported higher marital satisfaction, though that is an association and not proof that shared values cause it. The values that may 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 is Schwartz's alternative to the Schwartz Value Survey, which asks people to rate abstract values directly. The PVQ uses portrait descriptions that measure values indirectly (Schwartz, 2012). Scoring uses within-person centering, which removes individual differences in how people use the response scale.

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.

Robinson, O. C. (2013). Values and adult age: Findings from two cohorts of the European Social Survey. European Journal of Ageing, 10(1), 11-23.

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.

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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.