Core values list: 40 values to choose from

In short

This core values list holds 40 concrete values, spread across the ten universal value categories from Schwartz. Use the selection exercise below to pick up to five: you immediately see which Schwartz cluster each value belongs to, and whether there is tension between your choices. The exercise is exploratory — it measures nothing and stores nothing. Want to know how strongly each value actually drives you? The values test is the logical next step.

What a core value is — and isn’t

A core value is a motivation that colours almost every choice, even when you never consciously notice it. It is not a goal you check off but a direction that keeps recurring: in the job you accept, the conversation you do or don’t start, the way you resolve a conflict. Freedom as a core value doesn’t mean you choose autonomy once — it means you make that trade-off again and again, often without ever naming it.

A core value is also not a norm and not a personality trait. A norm is what your environment expects of you; a core value is what you find important yourself, regardless of what is asked of you. And where a personality trait describes how you do something — impulsively or deliberately, reserved or exuberant — a core value describes why you do it. Two people who share the value Achievement can behave completely differently: one chases visible titles, the other quiet craftsmanship. Both are driven by the same motive.

That makes a core values list useful as a starting point and risky as an endpoint. The words help you name something that felt vague. But picking from a list is not a measurement: it says something about which words resonate with you right now, not how strongly each value actually drives your behaviour compared with the rest of the population.

The list: 40 core values, ten clusters

The forty values below are grouped by the ten value categories Schwartz identified: Self-direction, Stimulation, Hedonism, Achievement, Power, Security, Conformity, Tradition, Benevolence and Universalism. Click a value to select it — up to five. Click again to let it go.

What your selection says — and what it doesn’t

Clicking five words tells you something: which terms trigger a light of recognition in you. The cluster and higher-order group that appear next to your choice show where that recognition comes from — whether you lean towards Openness to change, say, or towards Conservation instead. That is useful information, even without anything being measured.

What your selection does not tell you is how strongly each value actually weighs, and how that weight compares with a large group of other people. Two visitors who both pick Freedom and Justice could still land far apart on a real measurement: one moderately high on Self-direction, the other extremely high. The exercise shows no scores and no percentiles, on purpose — that is exactly what the PVQ-40, the questionnaire behind the values test, is built to do.

If a tension sentence appears with your selection, that is expected. The Schwartz model places the ten values on a circle where opposing values structurally work against each other. Someone who values both Self-direction and Conformity highly feels that tension in concrete choices — that is not an inconsistency in you, but a feature of the model itself.

From list to measurement

A list of words gives you direction but no ranking. Want to know which of your values genuinely weighs heaviest — not because the word appealed to you, but because the pattern in your answers shows it — then the next step is the Innerscape values test. It measures the ten Schwartz values with the PVQ-40: forty short portraits of people, where you indicate how much each one resembles you. Free, no account, and you see your score and percentile on each of the ten values right away.

Want to dig into the underlying theory first — why there are exactly ten, how the circular structure works, and where the model runs into its limits — read the Schwartz theory of values.

Sources

Frequently asked questions