Personal values: how to identify yours and use them in hard decisions

Ask anyone to list their values and the answer is almost always the same: honesty, family, freedom, respect. A respectable list, produced in twenty seconds, with a high probability of not describing that particular person. Lists made that way say more about what's socially acceptable to say than about what actually organizes a life.

The values that really govern you live somewhere else. They live in what you do when two good things exclude each other, in what irritates you when other people violate them, and in what you keep choosing even when it gets expensive. This article covers what a value is, shows the map psychology built to organize them, and gives three methods for finding yours from evidence rather than aspiration.

What a personal value is

A value is a desirable, relatively stable goal that serves as a guiding principle in your life. That's the definition social psychology works with, and every part of it does work.

It transcends situations. A value applies across different contexts. If autonomy is one of your values, it weighs in your job, in your relationships, and in how you respond to unsolicited advice. Preferring to work alone on one specific task is a preference, not a value.

It's ordered by priority. Here's what separates values from good intentions. Nearly everyone endorses safety, freedom, success and loyalty. What defines you is the order in which you sacrifice them when you can't have them all.

It guides evaluation. You use your values to judge people, actions and events, often without noticing. Disproportionate irritation at someone else's behavior is usually one of your values being stepped on.

It's worth separating values from personality traits. A trait describes how you tend to behave, a value describes what you consider important to achieve. Someone low in extraversion can deeply value human connection, and the distance between those two things explains much of their frustration. Traits are the territory of the Big Five; values are another layer, with rules of their own.

Schwartz's ten values, and the circle that explains the conflicts

In 1992, Shalom Schwartz proposed a theory of basic human values that became the standard in the field. He tested it across dozens of countries, with samples that today exceed eighty nations, and found a structure that repeats across cultures very different from each other. You can read the author's own overview in open access.

There are ten values.

Self-direction. Independent thought and action, choosing, creating, exploring.

Stimulation. Novelty, challenge, a life with movement in it.

Hedonism. Pleasure and sensuous gratification.

Achievement. Personal success demonstrated through competence, by recognized standards.

Power. Status, prestige, control over people and resources.

Security. Stability and harmony, in society, in relationships and in yourself.

Conformity. Restraint of impulses likely to upset others or violate expectations.

Tradition. Respect for and acceptance of the customs and ideas of your culture or religion of origin.

Benevolence. Preserving and enhancing the welfare of the people you're in close contact with.

Universalism. Understanding and protecting the welfare of all people and of nature.

The genuinely useful part of the theory comes next. These ten values arrange themselves in a circle, and position in the circle predicts the tensions. Adjacent values support each other, opposing values conflict. That produces two axes which explain most real dilemmas.

The first axis opposes openness to change, joining self-direction and stimulation, to conservation, joining security, conformity and tradition. It's the axis of those who want to explore against those who want to preserve.

The second opposes self-enhancement, joining power and achievement, to self-transcendence, joining benevolence and universalism. It's the axis of serving yourself against serving others.

When a decision paralyzes you for weeks, you'll almost always find one of these two axes underneath it. The resignation you hesitate to hand in is openness against security. The promotion that costs you time with your children is self-enhancement against benevolence. The circle doesn't decide for you, but it names what's at stake, and naming reduces the sense of being simply confused quite a lot.

A 2012 revision, led by Schwartz himself, refined the model into nineteen finer values while keeping the circular structure. For personal use, the original ten do the job.

Why you name one value and live another

The distance between stated values and actual behavior is known, measured and fairly large. It's worth understanding where it comes from, because the lazy explanation, hypocrisy, is almost never the true one.

Social desirability. Some values sound better than others. Universalism and benevolence are easy to claim. Power is the most under-reported value in the studies, and at the same time a perfectly legitimate engine behind many well-lived lives.

Inherited by default. Part of what you say you value was absorbed from family and never went through review. It keeps occupying space on the list without ever having been chosen.

No conflict yet. A value only reveals itself once it costs something. If you've never had to choose between security and autonomy, you don't know which weighs more in you, only which sounds better.

Too much context. A lot of what you do is dictated by the situation rather than by your priorities. That's why the correlation between values and isolated behaviors tends to be modest in the literature, and rises when you look at patterns repeated over time instead of single acts.

How to identify yours: three methods

All three start from evidence that already exists, which keeps you from producing one more aspirational list.

The expensive-decisions method. List five decisions from recent years where you gave up something real: money, time, status, a relationship, comfort. For each one, write what you got in return. The pattern that shows up in that column is your value system in operation, measured by the price you've already paid. This method is the most reliable of the three precisely because the choices are already made and can't be dressed up.

The irritation method. For two weeks, note everything that irritates you disproportionately in other people's behavior. Someone who's always late, someone who claims credit for others' work, someone who follows the rule when the rule makes no sense. Every strong irritation points at a value of yours being violated. It's a fast method and uncomfortably accurate.

The elimination method. Take Schwartz's ten values and pick the five that feel most important. Then force yourself to cut down to two. The cut is where the information is: the first five are consensus, the final two are yours. If you get stuck between two, ask which one you'd sacrifice to save the other in a concrete situation you've actually lived through.

If you'd rather work on this in writing and with structure, self-knowledge questions make a good script, and repeated journaling over weeks surfaces patterns that a single session hides.

What to do when two values pull in opposite directions

This is the real problem, and most writing about values avoids it.

Schwartz's circle tells you something uncomfortable: some of your values are structurally incompatible. Security and stimulation sit on opposite sides, and no clever arrangement of your life will stop them contradicting each other. The useful work lies in managing that tension consciously.

Three approaches work better than trying to eliminate the conflict.

Separate by domain. You can live stimulation in one territory and security in another. Stable career and exploratory personal life, or the reverse. Plenty of people do this on instinct and feel incoherent because of it, when in fact they found a functional solution.

Separate by phase. Values shift in weight across a life, with a repeatedly observed pattern: conservation and self-transcendence tend to rise with age, openness to change and self-enhancement tend to fall. A decade of exploration followed by a decade of consolidation is a coherent sequence.

Decide the priority in advance. If you know that in a head-on clash between autonomy and belonging you choose autonomy, you decide faster and regret less. Prolonged indecision is usually an undefined priority rather than missing information.

Using values in big decisions

There's a practical difference between goals and values that changes how you decide. A goal can be reached and crossed off. A value works as a direction, and never gets completed. This distinction comes from work in acceptance and commitment therapy, and it has an immediate consequence: asking which option moves you toward the direction you chose produces more stable answers than asking which one makes you happier.

Three questions do most of the work in a hard decision.

Which option moves me toward what I've already proven I value, looking at the expensive decisions I listed. Which one am I avoiding out of fear, with the value serving as justification after the fact. And ten years from now, which one will I defend without needing to explain it to anyone.

One warning is worth adding. Values serve to guide choices, and they also serve, with remarkable ease, to justify what you'd already decided for other reasons. Someone invoking loyalty to stay somewhere they're afraid to leave is using a value as camouflage. The test is simple: if the value always shows up on the side of the more comfortable option, it's probably working for the fear.

What writing about values does to a person

There's a well-documented effect here worth noting, because it's one of the few self-knowledge exercises with solid experimental evidence.

Geoffrey Cohen and David Sherman spent decades studying what happens when someone writes for fifteen minutes about an important personal value and about an occasion when that value was present in their life. The reference review, The Psychology of Change, published in the Annual Review of Psychology in 2014, gathers what's known. These brief self-affirmation exercises reduce defensive reactivity to threatening information and improve outcomes in education, health and relationships, with effects that in some studies persist for months or years.

The proposed mechanism is that writing about a value broadens the view you hold of your own resources, and a specific threat then weighs less because it stops being the only thing on the table.

Two honest caveats. The larger effects appear in contexts of threat, such as a difficult exam or a diagnosis, and are considerably smaller in neutral circumstances. And the literature on brief psychological interventions has been through serious critical review in recent years, with several effects shrinking in larger replications. The exercise costs fifteen minutes and carries no risk, which still makes it a reasonable bet, without expecting miracles.

Shared values in relationships

The question that matters here is which one predicts a lasting relationship better: identical values or compatible ones.

Research on compatibility suggests that similarity in values counts, and counts for less than popular culture assumes. What weighs more is how a couple handles the differences that do exist, a subject we covered in what actually predicts a lasting relationship.

Even so, there's a subset of values where divergence costs more, and they're the ones that generate concrete, repeated decisions: money, time, children, roots, ambition. Two people on opposite sides of the openness-against-conservation axis will negotiate the same underlying argument forever, disguised as vacations, houses and schedules. This is solvable, and the solution starts with recognizing that the argument is always the same one.

This layer, working out what a fulfilled life means to you and how that translates day to day, is what Agapone reads in the Life Vision category, where the Success Definition and the Civic Compass map precisely where long-term compatibility gets decided.

What to take with you

Your values are already running, whether or not you decide to look at them. They show up in decisions you've already made, in what irritates you about other people, and in what you keep choosing when it gets expensive.

The useful work has two parts. First, replacing the aspirational list with a reading based on evidence, which tends to be less flattering and much more operational. Then, accepting that some of your values contradict each other by construction, and that managing them by domain, by phase, or by priority decided in advance is the best there is.

A list of values is good for one concrete thing: deciding faster and regretting less. If yours doesn't do that, you're probably still looking at the list you'd say out loud.

Frequently asked questions

What are personal values?

They're desirable, relatively stable goals that serve as guiding principles in a person's life. They transcend specific situations, they arrange themselves in order of priority, and it's that order, more than the list itself, that distinguishes one person from another. Nearly everyone endorses the same values in the abstract.

What are Schwartz's ten universal values?

Self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism. They arrange in a circle where adjacent values support each other and opposing values conflict, with two main axes: openness to change against conservation, and self-enhancement against self-transcendence.

How do I find out what my values are?

Start from evidence that already exists instead of writing an aspirational list. Analyze five decisions where you gave up something real and look at what you got in return. Record for two weeks what irritates you disproportionately in other people. And force a choice among Schwartz's ten values until only two remain, because the information sits in the cut.

Do personal values change over a lifetime?

The core is relatively stable, and the relative weight of each value shifts along repeatedly observed patterns. Conservation and self-transcendence tend to gain weight with age, openness to change and self-enhancement tend to lose it. High-impact events, such as illness or becoming a parent, can accelerate that reordering.

What do I do when two of my values conflict?

Schwartz's circle shows that some values are structurally opposed, such as security and stimulation, and that the contradiction doesn't disappear. The three strategies that work are separating by domain, living each one in a different territory of life, separating by phase, and deciding the priority before you're inside the situation.

Is writing about my values actually useful?

Self-affirmation exercises, where you write for fifteen minutes about an important value and an occasion when it was present, reduce defensive reactivity and improve outcomes in contexts of threat, according to Cohen and Sherman's 2014 review. The effects are larger under threat and more modest in neutral circumstances.

Agapone cross-reads your values with other layers, from lifestyle to how you connect with others, to show where your definition of a good life meets someone else's. To see that reading in practice, visit Agapone and explore your profile.