What Are Core Values? A List, Examples and How to Find Yours

Most core values lists online run to a hundred words: honesty, integrity, courage, growth, faith, adventure. They mix values with traits and virtues, and nothing tells you which words compete. We think that is why so many people pick ten favorite words and then find the list doesn't help them decide anything.

Schwartz's ten values are a better starting point because they have been tested across cultures for three decades. Schwartz and Anat Bardi compared value rankings from representative samples in 13 nations, school teachers in 56 nations and college students in 54 (Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2001, doi:10.1177/0022022101032003002). In 2012 Schwartz and colleagues refined the theory into 19 narrower values and confirmed that values form "a circular motivational continuum", using 15 samples from 10 countries (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, doi:10.1037/a0029393). We use the ten because they are easier to recognize in your own life.

Our Core Values Test asks 50 statements about everyday choices, five for each value, such as how you feel about rules, savings or a free evening. It takes about 8 minutes. The statements are ours, not those of Schwartz's own questionnaires. Your top value is free when you finish; the full profile ranks all ten and shows where your top values compete.

Schwartz's most useful idea is the shape. The ten values form a circle, and the circle splits into two tensions.

The first runs between openness to change (Self-Direction and Stimulation) and conservation (Security, Conformity and Tradition). It is the pull between "try something new" and "keep what works". Moving abroad for a job, quitting to freelance, or questioning the faith you were raised in all sit on this line.

The second runs between self-enhancement (Achievement and Power) and self-transcendence (Benevolence and Universalism). It is the pull between your own success and other people's welfare. Staying late to finish the project that gets you noticed, on the night of a friend's birthday, is this tension in its smallest form. Hedonism shares something with both Openness and Self-Enhancement and sits between them.

This explains feeling torn even when you are sure of your values. If your top two are Achievement and Benevolence, you will feel that pull often, because they sit almost opposite each other. If they are Achievement and Power, you'll rarely feel it, and the people around you may feel it for you. Neither pattern is better.

Searches for core values are mixed with searches for company values, and the two are different things. A company's values are a promise about how its staff should behave ("customer first", "move fast"). Personal values are what you actually want from life. A company can choose its values in a meeting; you mostly find yours.

Values also differ from morals. Morals are judgments about right and wrong ("lying is wrong"). Values are goals you rank, and the circle includes goals with no moral weight at all, like Stimulation or Hedonism. Our moral foundations test looks at the moral side, which overlaps with values but measures something narrower.

And values differ from personality traits. A trait is how you tend to act; a value is what you think is worth pursuing. An introvert can value Stimulation, and a very organized person can rank Self-Direction first. Our Big Five guide covers traits. Many words on popular core values lists, such as patience or optimism, are really traits.

The most common advice is to read a long list and circle the words that speak to you. The trouble is that almost everyone circles honesty, kindness and family, because they are admired values, and the list ends up describing who you'd like to be seen as. Here is what we think works better.

Start with decisions, not words. Write down three real choices you made in the last few years where you gave something up: a job, a move, a relationship, money. For each, name what you chose and what you sacrificed. The sacrifice is the clue. Someone who turned down more pay for a shorter commute and a team they trusted ranked Security or Benevolence above Achievement, whatever they'd circle on a list.

Check where your time and money go when nobody is asking. A month of bank statements and calendar entries is more honest than a questionnaire. Be careful with it, though. Anat Bardi and Shalom Schwartz found that Stimulation and Tradition values show up strongly in everyday behavior, while Security, Conformity, Achievement and Benevolence relate only weakly, probably because social norms push most people toward those behaviors whatever they value (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2003, doi:10.1177/0146167203254602). Everyone is polite to their boss; that doesn't make Conformity everyone's top value.

Notice what makes you angry. Strong reactions to unfairness point to Universalism; anger at being micromanaged points to Self-Direction; distress when plans fall apart points to Security.

Rank, don't rate. Rating everything "very important" tells you nothing. Force yourself to choose: if you could keep only three of the ten for the next five years, which three? Then test them against a real choice coming up. A short ranked list you can use beats a long one you admire. Our values test works the same way: it forces trade-offs across 50 statements and ranks all ten.

Couples argue about money, holidays, where to live and how to raise children, and underneath those arguments there is usually a values clash rather than a personality clash. One partner wants savings (Security); the other wants the trip this year (Stimulation or Hedonism). Each is being reasonable by their own ranking.

Similar values do seem to help. In a study of 248 married couples, Ruth Gaunt found that partners who were more alike were more satisfied, and that similarity in personality and values was more strongly linked with satisfaction than similarity in attitudes or religiosity (Journal of Personality, 2006, doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2006.00414.x). The links in this kind of research are modest, though, and they describe averages, not your couple.

What we'd take from it: differences you know about are manageable; the ones that hurt are the ones you keep reading as character flaws. If you both take the values test, talk about the values furthest apart on the circle, because that is where your recurring arguments live. Our compatibility test looks at the wider picture.

People in different jobs do hold different values. Ariel Knafo and Lilach Sagiv asked 652 Israeli workers in 32 occupations about their values (European Journal of Psychology of Education, 2004, doi:10.1007/BF03173223). Grouped by the classic six types of work environment, people in social occupations (work built around helping and teaching people) put more weight on Benevolence and Universalism and less on Power and Achievement; investigative occupations went with more Self-Direction and less Tradition; artistic ones with less Conformity.

Fit seems to matter for how people feel. In a study published in 2000 in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Sagiv and Schwartz found support for the idea that well-being depends partly on how well a person's values match the values emphasized around them, comparing business and psychology students. Their samples were small, so treat this as a direction, not a law.

In practice: a Self-Direction person in a tightly scripted role, or a Universalism person selling something they believe does harm, often describes the problem as burnout or boredom. Naming the value makes the fix clearer. Sometimes it is a new job; sometimes it is one change in how the current one is run. Our career aptitude test looks at the work side directly.

Slowly, and in a predictable direction. The ranking you have at 25 is usually recognizable at 35, but the weights shift.

Taciano Milfont, Petar Milojev and Chris Sibley followed 3,962 adults aged 25 to 75 from a national probability sample over three years and found value priorities highly stable (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2016, doi:10.1177/0146167216639245). Across ages, older adults placed more weight on the welfare of others and on tradition and stability, while younger adults placed more on status, power and independence.

An eight-year study of 270 young adults aged 20 to 28 found the same pattern within people (Michele Vecchione, Shalom Schwartz and colleagues, Journal of Research in Personality, 2016, doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2016.06.002). Rank-order stability was moderate to high, averaging 0.69 and then 0.77 between waves four years apart. On average, conservation, self-transcendence and power values gained importance, achievement lost some, and openness to change stayed level.

So a values result at 22 that differs from one at 40 doesn't mean the first was wrong. It usually tracks what changed in your life: children, a mortgage, a career.

Values are one of the better tools psychology has for explaining choices. A 2017 review by Lilach Sagiv, Sonia Roccas, Jan Cieciuch and Shalom Schwartz concluded that self-reported values predict a large variety of attitudes, preferences and behaviors (Nature Human Behaviour, doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0185-3). People across very different countries also agree more than you'd expect about the order: in the 2001 comparison, Benevolence, Self-Direction and Universalism were consistently rated most important, Power, Tradition and Stimulation least, and the average rankings of 83% of samples correlated at least .80 with that shared order.

The limits are real too. A values profile tells you what you prioritize, not whether your priorities are good, and no value on the circle is the right one. It describes you now, not forever. It can't predict any single decision, because most decisions involve money, other people and luck as well. And a self-report test, ours included, depends on how honestly and how carefully you answer: on a stressful day, Security tends to look more important than it is. Use your result as a starting point for the choices above, not as a verdict.