Two people can both say honesty matters, and still make opposite choices when a friend asks them for help at the cost of a promised weekend. Personal values explain part of that gap: not what you claim to believe in general, but what you treat as most important when things have to be traded off.
Here is how our personal values test works, what its scores can and cannot tell you, and how to read them honestly.
A personal values test measures which broad life goals a person treats as most and least important. This test administers Shalom Schwartz's 57-item Revised Portrait Value Questionnaire (PVQ-RR), which scores 19 values and four higher-order values. Scores are centered on each person's own mean rating, so they describe priorities, not levels compared with others.
What a personal value is
A value is a broad goal that guides what a person decides is worth doing: independence, security, success, kindness to others, or a stable routine. Everyone holds all of them. What differs is how much each one counts, relative to the others.
That makes values a different kind of measure from a personality trait. Traits, such as those in the Big Five test, describe how you usually behave. Values describe what you are working toward. They also differ from work values, which ask what a job must give you before it feels worth staying in.
Nineteen values on a circle
Shalom Schwartz's refined theory describes 19 values, each measured by three questionnaire items. The values sit on a circle. Neighbouring values are compatible, so you can pursue both at once. Opposing values pull against each other, so pursuing one often costs the other.
The 19 values group into four higher-order values. Two oppositions organise the circle: openness to change against conservation, and self-transcendence against self-enhancement.
- ✦Openness to change: self-direction (thought and action), stimulation, and hedonism.
- ✦Self-enhancement: achievement, and power (dominance and resources).
- ✦Conservation: security (personal and societal), tradition, and conformity (rules and interpersonal).
- ✦Self-transcendence: universalism (nature, concern, and tolerance) and benevolence (caring and dependability).
- ✦On the borders: face and humility, which the scoring reports on their own.
Why each score is centered on you
People use a rating scale differently. Some agree with almost every statement; others with very few. If you ignore that, the person who agrees with everything looks as if they value everything highly.
The questionnaire's authors therefore center each value on your own mean rating across all 57 items. A positive score means a value matters more to you than your average value; a negative one means less. The score is a priority inside your own life. It is not a rank among people, and no percentile is computed.
A low value is a trade-off, not a flaw
A value near the bottom is what you are most willing to give up when something has to give. Every choice gives something up, so a low rank describes a preference, not a defect. Schwartz's theory treats every value as legitimate.
The practical use is in hard decisions. Most of them are not right against wrong. They set one value against another, and naming the two in play often clarifies a choice even when it does not make it easier.
How reliable the result is
Each value rests on only three items, so single values are less precise than the four higher-order values built from them. Across 49 cultural groups in the 2022 study, the 19 values had an average reliability (alpha) of .70. Four were weaker: self-direction thought (.65), achievement (.60), security-personal (.58), and humility (.47). The result flags them wherever they appear.
The four higher-order values were above .70 in every group, which makes them the most dependable part of the result. Small differences between two narrow values are not treated as meaningful, and the result does not read them.
Reading the result without over-reading it
Values predict behaviour only loosely. Treat your top three as a hypothesis to check. Compare them with how you actually spent last week, including the hours you did not plan. The gap between the two is often the most useful part of the result.
Do not compare your order with someone else's, and do not treat the typical hierarchy in the advanced report as a norm. It is the median of 49 cultural group means, a description of common patterns across countries rather than a target for you.