A Short History of Values Research

In 1931, two psychologists at Harvard, Gordon Allport and Philip Vernon, published a questionnaire built on an idea borrowed from the German philosopher Eduard Spranger. (Gardner Lindzey joined for a later revision, which is why the test is often remembered under three names.) Spranger had proposed that people lean toward six basic orientations to life: theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious. The Study of Values turned that idea into a test you could actually take and score.

What made it notable was the structure. Instead of asking you to rate how much you cared about each area on its own, it made you choose between them. Given a limited pool of points, more for one area meant less for another. That forced trade-off was ahead of its time, and it stayed in wide use in universities and workplaces for decades. Its weakness was the model underneath: six fixed categories drawn from one thinker's worldview, which felt narrow as psychology grew more interested in how values actually differ across cultures.

The next big move came in the 1970s. Milton Rokeach argued that values weren't vague orientations but specific, nameable beliefs about what's worth pursuing. He drew a sharp line between two kinds. Some values are destinations, the end states you want your life to reach. Others are the conduct you use to get there, the way you'd want to behave along the way.

His survey asked people to rank each list in order of importance, top to bottom. Ranking, rather than rating, was the point. Rokeach believed a value only tells you something when it's set against your other values, because real life constantly forces you to pick. His work also pushed the field to treat values as relatively stable but not frozen, and to study how they connect to attitudes, behavior, and even how societies change over time.

Where Rokeach gave psychology a method, Shalom Schwartz gave it a map. Beginning in the 1980s and drawing on survey data from dozens of countries, Schwartz proposed that human values organize into a set of broad motivational types that show up, in recognizable form, almost everywhere people were studied. Think of categories like self-direction, achievement, security, and benevolence.

His deeper insight was about the relationships between them. Some values naturally support each other and sit close together, while others pull in opposite directions and sit across from each other. Chasing novelty and risk tends to strain your appetite for stability and caution. Pursuing personal status sits in tension with caring for the people around you. Schwartz arranged these into a circle, so that the closer two values are, the more compatible they tend to be, and the farther apart, the more they compete. That circular structure is his lasting contribution: it reframed values not as a checklist but as a set of pushes and pulls you're always balancing.

Running through all of this is a slow methodological shift, and it's worth understanding because it shapes what any values result can honestly tell you.

The easy way to build a values test is to list qualities and ask you to rate each one from low to high. The problem is that almost nobody rates their values as unimportant. Ask people to score honesty, family, growth, and fairness, and most will mark them all near the top. The result is a flattering, flat profile that doesn't distinguish you from anyone else. Researchers call this the tendency to agree with everything, and it ruins rating scales for values.

The fix is to make you choose. Forced-choice methods, sometimes called ipsative, refuse to let everything be a priority at once. You have to say this matters more than that, which mirrors how values actually operate. A value is never more vivid than in the moment you set something else aside for it.

A ranking method buys honesty at a price, and it's fair to name it. Because your answers are measured against each other rather than an outside standard, the result tells you how your values stack up inside you, not how your intensity compares to the next person's. Two people can share an identical top value and hold it with very different heat.

That's a real limit, not a flaw to hide. It just means a forced-choice values result is a picture of your internal priorities, best read as a mirror rather than a measuring stick against the crowd.

What's My Core Values stands in the forced-choice tradition rather than the rating tradition. Each of the twenty sets asks you to name the statement most like you and the one least like you, so you're always trading one priority against another instead of waving everything through.

The output follows the same logic. You get a ranked view of your top values, not a set of scores that could all land near the top. When one value clearly leads, it's named; when the top few sit close together, you're shown an honest cluster instead of a false winner.

The framework and the ten values here are our own, not a reissue of any of the instruments above. Those older tests belong to their researchers and their eras. What they hand down is the harder-won lesson underneath all of them: your values reveal themselves in what you'll trade away, so a test worth taking is one that makes you choose.