Basic Human Values
What matters most to you, on Schwartz's circle of values
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Values are the broad goals that guide your choices: what you aim for, what you defend and what you will give up for something else. This test measures the ten basic values identified by the social psychologist Shalom Schwartz in research across dozens of countries, and shows how they fit together on a circle where neighbors support each other and opposites compete.
Rate each statement by how well it reflects what is important to you, not what you think you should value. Almost every value matters to almost everyone; what makes you you is the order.
What it measures
Self-direction
Independent thought and action: choosing your own goals, creating and exploring.
Stimulation
Excitement, novelty and challenge in life.
Hedonism
Pleasure, enjoyment and the gratification of the senses.
Achievement
Personal success through demonstrating competence by the standards of your field or society.
Power
Social status and prestige, and control or influence over people and resources.
Security
Safety, harmony and stability of society, of relationships and of yourself.
Conformity
Restraint of actions and impulses that might upset or harm others or break social expectations.
Tradition
Respect for and commitment to the customs and ideas that your culture, family or faith has handed down.
Benevolence
Preserving and enhancing the welfare of the people you are in frequent contact with: family, friends, colleagues.
Universalism
Understanding, tolerance and protection for the welfare of all people and of nature.
Openness to change
Higher-order value: independence of thought and action and readiness for new experience (self-direction, stimulation and part of hedonism).
Self-enhancement
Higher-order value: pursuing your own success, status and interests (achievement, power and part of hedonism).
Conservation
Higher-order value: order, self-restraint, preserving the past and resisting change (security, conformity and tradition).
Self-transcendence
Higher-order value: concern for the welfare and interests of others, near and far (benevolence and universalism).
Possible results
About this test
In 1992 the social psychologist Shalom Schwartz proposed that a small set of basic values is recognized across cultures, because each one answers a universal requirement of human life: the needs of individuals as biological organisms, the demands of coordinating with others and the survival and welfare of groups. Surveys in more than eighty countries have broadly supported his ten values: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism.
The theory's key insight is structure. The ten values form a circle. Neighboring values share a motivation and are easy to pursue together; values across the circle conflict, because acting on one usually means sacrificing the other. The circle folds into two axes: openness to change versus conservation, and self-enhancement versus self-transcendence, with hedonism sitting between openness and self-enhancement. In 2012 Schwartz and colleagues refined the circle into nineteen narrower values; this test keeps the classic ten.
The statements here are original, not those of Schwartz's Portrait Values Questionnaire or Value Survey. Each one counts toward its value and its higher-order group, and five forced choices pit opposite values against each other. Because people use rating scales differently, Schwartz recommends centering each person's scores on their own average; the insights do this, so "high" means high for you relative to your other values.
Caveats: what matters is the order of your values, not their absolute level. Scores are relative to the range of possible answers, not to population norms, and self-reported values do not always match behavior. No value or profile is better than another.
References
- 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.
- Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1).
- Schwartz, S. H. et al. (2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 663-688.
- Schwartz, S. H. & Bardi, A. (2001). Value hierarchies across cultures: Taking a similarities perspective. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(3), 268-290.
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
Basic Human Values
About 8 minutes · 65 questions
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