Before Schwartz: The Measurement Problem
Psychologists have studied values since at least the 1930s, when Gordon Allport and colleagues developed the Study of Values (1931) — an instrument measuring the relative importance of six value orientations (Theoretical, Economic, Aesthetic, Social, Political, and Religious) derived from Eduard Spranger's philosophical typology. The Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values was widely used in occupational psychology through the mid-twentieth century and established that values could be measured reliably, but it offered no theory of where these six categories came from or how they related to each other.
Milton Rokeach's The Nature of Human Values (1973) was the next major advance and remained the dominant framework for nearly two decades. Rokeach proposed a distinction between terminal values — desirable end-states of existence, such as freedom, happiness, or equality — and instrumental values — preferred modes of conduct, such as honesty, ambition, or responsibility. His Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) asked respondents to rank-order 18 terminal and 18 instrumental values in order of personal importance.
The RVS generated a large body of research but had fundamental methodological problems that accumulated over time. The forced-choice ranking format — requiring respondents to order all 18 values into a unique hierarchy — produced ipsative data in which scores on one value were mathematically constrained by scores on others, inflating some correlations and suppressing others in ways that were difficult to interpret. The value lists themselves were derived by intuition and consensus rather than theory: Rokeach assembled a set of values that seemed comprehensive and distinctive, but offered no principled account of what made these 36 items the right set rather than some other set.
Most critically for cross-cultural research, the RVS had no structural theory. Without a theory of how values relate to each other — which values should conflict, which should be compatible, which should cluster together — researchers using different value lists in different countries had no basis for synthesizing their results. Values research accumulated without converging.
Inglehart and the Post-Materialist Thesis
Running in parallel with Rokeach's psychological approach, political scientist Ronald Inglehart developed an influential sociological theory of value change that shaped the landscape into which Schwartz's work arrived.
In The Silent Revolution (1977), Inglehart argued that post-war prosperity in advanced industrial societies was producing an intergenerational shift in value priorities. People who grew up during periods of economic scarcity and physical insecurity tended to prioritize materialist values — economic security, law and order, physical safety. People who grew up during the post-war period of sustained prosperity took material security for granted and shifted emphasis toward post-materialist values — self-expression, autonomy, quality of life, environmental protection, political participation.
Inglehart operationalized this thesis with a four-item survey battery that asked respondents to rank national priorities, and tracked value change across countries through the Eurobarometer surveys beginning in the early 1970s and the World Values Survey beginning in 1981. The World Values Survey — now spanning over 100 countries across multiple waves — became one of the most important longitudinal data sources in cross-cultural social science.
Inglehart's framework was theoretically elegant but structurally simple: a single dimension running from materialist to post-materialist priorities, with an economic-development thesis explaining movement along that dimension across generations. What it lacked was the richer mapping of value content and structure that Schwartz would provide — the account of what specific motivational categories exist and how they relate to each other. Inglehart's national-level, sociological approach and Schwartz's individual-level, psychological approach have been used together in the World Values Survey, which incorporates both.
Schwartz and Bilsky: Deriving the Structure
Shalom Schwartz, working at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, approached values research from a different angle than either Rokeach or Inglehart. Rather than asking which values people hold or how value priorities change over generations, Schwartz asked: what is the complete set of motivationally distinct value categories that humans need, and what is the theoretical basis for predicting how these categories relate to each other?
His 1987 paper with Wolfgang Bilsky, "Toward a Universal Psychological Structure of Human Values," published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, established the theoretical foundation. Schwartz and Bilsky derived value categories not from intuition or empirical surveying but from functional analysis: values serve three universal requirements that any human social group must address. First, individuals have biological needs that must be satisfied. Second, social interaction among individuals requires coordination and restraint of behaviors that would disrupt cooperative functioning. Third, groups must maintain themselves as functioning units over time.
From these three functional requirements, Schwartz and Bilsky argued, a specific set of motivationally distinct value categories follows — categories that reflect different ways of serving one or more of these requirements. They then tested whether this theoretical structure was visible in empirical data from Israel and Germany, using multidimensional scaling to map the relations among value items. The preliminary results were promising: the values formed a circumplex structure in which motivationally compatible values appeared adjacent and motivationally conflicting values appeared opposite.
The 1992 Framework and Cross-Cultural Validation
The full theoretical statement came in Schwartz's 1992 chapter, "Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries," published in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. This paper established the ten-value taxonomy and tested the circumplex structure across 20 countries with samples from teacher and student populations.
The ten values — Self-Direction, Stimulation, Hedonism, Achievement, Power, Security, Conformity, Tradition, Benevolence, and Universalism — were derived from the 1987 theoretical analysis and validated empirically by showing that they could be distinguished from each other and from alternative value groupings across culturally diverse samples. The circumplex structure — in which adjacent values share compatible motivational content and opposing values reflect conflicting motivations — appeared consistently across samples, with multidimensional scaling placing the values in roughly the expected positions.
The 1992 framework introduced the two higher-order axes: Self-Enhancement vs. Self-Transcendence (the dimension capturing whether values serve individual interests or the welfare of others) and Openness to Change vs. Conservation (the dimension capturing whether values emphasize independence and novelty or order and continuity). Cross-cultural extension followed through the 1990s and 2000s, eventually encompassing more than 80 countries and multiple methodologies.
Instrument Development: From SVS to PVQ
The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) — the original measurement instrument — asked respondents to rate each value item as a guiding principle in their life on a scale from −1 (opposed to my values) to 7 (of supreme importance). The rating format improved on Rokeach's ipsative ranking, producing interval-like data that could be analyzed with standard statistical methods.
The SVS had its own limitation: asking people directly how important each value is to them activates social desirability effects. Most respondents rate Universalism and Benevolence highly regardless of their actual behavior-guiding priorities, because these are values with high social approval. Cross-cultural comparison was also complicated by response style differences — cultures differ in their tendency toward extreme versus moderate ratings, which can distort cross-cultural comparisons of absolute priority levels.
The Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ), developed by Schwartz and colleagues around 2001, addressed these problems through indirect measurement. The PVQ presents respondents with brief verbal portraits of different people, each described in terms of goals, aspirations, and wishes that implicitly reflect a specific value priority. Respondents rate how similar they are to each described person rather than directly rating value importance. The portrait approach bypasses the social desirability problem because respondents are comparing themselves to someone else rather than directly endorsing abstract values.
The PVQ-40 (40-item version) was incorporated into the European Social Survey beginning in 2002, dramatically expanding the cross-cultural data available. It has since been adapted and validated across dozens of countries.
The Refined Theory and Ongoing Development
In 2012, Schwartz and colleagues published a refined theory that expanded the original ten values into 19 more narrowly defined value categories. The refinement preserved the circumplex structure and the four higher-order dimensions while providing finer-grained distinctions within each of the original ten categories — for example, splitting Self-Direction into Self-Direction of Thought and Self-Direction of Action, and splitting Conformity into Conformity to Rules and Conformity to Interpersonal Expectations.
The refined theory is measured by the PVQ-RR (Portrait Values Questionnaire — Revised), a 57-item instrument. It is actively used in research contexts where the additional granularity is valuable. Most practical applications, including the assessment on this site, continue to use the original ten-value framework because it provides sufficient precision for individual self-understanding and requires a shorter instrument.
The broader intellectual legacy of Schwartz's program is the establishment of values as a theoretically and empirically coherent construct distinct from personality traits and attitudes. The demonstration that the same ten motivational categories and the same circular structure of conflicts and compatibilities appear across culturally highly diverse contexts remains one of the more striking findings in cross-cultural psychology — and the one that distinguishes Schwartz Values from frameworks whose cross-cultural generalization is more limited.
For the current state of the empirical evidence — including cross-cultural stability, predictive validity, and the relationship between values and Big Five personality traits — see the research page. For the ten values individually, see the values overview. To find your own value priorities, take the assessment.