Core values list
Core values are the few things you most want your choices to stand for, such as honesty, family or freedom. A long list is only a place to start. The psychologist Shalom Schwartz found that values fall into 10 groups, and that some groups pull against each other.1 The question that sorts your list is "which one wins when two of them collide?"
Reading the list
Read it once, fast. Mark every value that makes you nod, and don't stop to judge. The prompts further down will cut your marks to a handful.
A value is a direction you keep choosing, on a good day or a bad one, and you never finish it the way you finish a goal.
88 values in Schwartz's 10 groups
The 10 group names and what each one is about come from Schwartz's theory.1 The words under each group are our own sorting of common values; his survey uses different items. The examples are made up.
Self-direction
Thinking and acting for yourself: choosing, creating and exploring.1
Freedom, independence, creativity, curiosity, autonomy, originality, learning, self-reliance, exploration.
"I'd rather earn less and set my own hours than be told how to spend every day."
Stimulation
Excitement, novelty and challenge.1
Adventure, excitement, variety, novelty, challenge, spontaneity, boldness, daring, change.
"The months I remember are the ones where something new scared me a little."
Hedonism
Pleasure and enjoyment for yourself.1
Pleasure, enjoyment, fun, play, comfort, leisure, humor, sensuality, rest.
"A slow Sunday breakfast isn't wasted time to me. It's half the point."
Achievement
Success that comes from showing you're good at something, by the standards around you.1
Success, ambition, competence, excellence, mastery, hard work, influence, capability, accomplishment.
"I want to be the person the team calls when the hard problem shows up."
Power
Status and prestige, and control over people or resources.1
Status, wealth, authority, control, prestige, reputation, recognition, leadership.
"I want a say in the decisions. Carrying them out isn't enough."
Security
Safety, harmony and stability, for you, your relationships and your society.1
Safety, stability, health, order, financial security, family security, belonging, predictability, cleanliness.
"Three months of savings in the bank lets me sleep. I won't give that up for a bigger apartment."
Conformity
Holding back actions that could upset or harm others, or break the norms people expect.1
Politeness, self-discipline, obedience, honoring parents and elders, duty, restraint, courtesy.
"I bite my tongue at family dinners. Keeping the peace matters more to me than winning the point."
Tradition
Respect for, and commitment to, the customs and ideas of your culture or faith.1
Faith, humility, modesty, moderation, heritage, devotion, custom, ritual, acceptance.
"We still make my grandmother's recipe every December, even the year nobody felt like it."
Benevolence
Caring for the people you're close to and see often.1
Honesty, loyalty, kindness, forgiveness, helpfulness, responsibility, friendship, love, generosity, family.
"If my brother calls at midnight, I pick up. That's not up for debate."
Universalism
Understanding, fairness and care for all people and for nature, well beyond your own circle.1
Fairness, justice, equality, tolerance, open-mindedness, wisdom, peace, care for nature, beauty.
"I'll pay more for the company that treats its workers decently, even when money is tight."
Adventure against stability: the values circle
Schwartz arranged the 10 groups in a circle. Groups next to each other usually fit together, and groups across the circle can conflict, because chasing one makes the other harder.1
- Openness to change (self-direction, stimulation): New, free and my own way. Pulls against conservation.
- Conservation (security, conformity, tradition): Safe, steady and the way it's done. Pulls against openness to change.
- Self-enhancement (achievement, power, and hedonism in part): My success, my standing, my pleasure. Pulls against self-transcendence.
- Self-transcendence (benevolence, universalism): Other people and the wider world. Pulls against self-enhancement.
That's the reason picking values can feel hard. Wanting adventure and wanting stability is no flaw in you: the two sit on opposite sides of the circle, and most people hold some of both.
The real decision is which one leads right now.
Anger at a cut line, and other clues
Values tend to show up first as a feeling. Anger is a good clue. A flash of it when someone cuts a line can point to fairness, and a heavy, flat feeling at a job that pays well can mean the job asks you to set aside something you care about.
Then there's the gap. It sits between the values you'd list and the ones your week shows. "Family" and "health" come first on a lot of lists, and then the calendar has work in every slot.
That gap doesn't make you a fraud. It can be the most useful thing on the page.
Five ways to cut the list to a few
- Mark everything that fits. Go through the list and mark each value that feels true of you, skipping the ones that only sound good. Ten to twenty marks is a normal first pass.
- Run the collision test. Take two of your marks and imagine a choice where you can only honor one. Freedom or security? Honesty or loyalty? Whichever one you keep choosing, across three or four imagined choices, is closer to the core.
- Check it against your week. Look at how you spent last week's time and money. Psychologists who study self-knowledge suggest watching your own behavior, because much of what drives you isn't visible from the inside.2
- Ask someone who knows you. Ask a friend which three values they think you live by. Other people's view is another way to see what introspection misses.2
- Write one value out in full. Pick your top value and write for 10 minutes about why it matters and a time it guided you. This is the values writing exercise used in self-affirmation studies, described below.3
Which two values on your list would you hate to choose between? Describe a real moment when they collided, and which one won.
Answer this with JoyIf someone followed you around for a normal week, which three values would they say you live by? Where does that differ from the list you'd write?
Answer this with JoyHow well the values research has held up
The 10 groups travel. Schwartz first tested the theory in 20 countries.4 His 2012 overview reports findings from 82 countries that support the theory and its circle of compatible and conflicting values.1 A refined version splits the 10 groups into 19 narrower values, tested in 10 countries.5
Values and personality traits are separate things in his theory. Traits describe how you tend to act; values describe what you see as worth pursuing.1 A person low in extraversion can still value adventure, and if you want your traits too, our personality test scores the Big Five.
Writing about a value has eased stress in the lab. People who wrote about a value they cared about before a stress test had lower cortisol, a stress hormone, than people who did a control task, in an experiment with 85 people.6
The school results are where it gets shaky. A short values writing task improved the grades of African American students and cut the racial achievement gap by 40% in two field experiments.7 A later, larger replication found no effect, and the researchers called the results fragile.8 Values writing is promising. It isn't proven.
Health effects are small and steady: across 144 experiments in a meta-analysis, self-affirmation made people a little more open to health advice and a little more likely to act on it.9
Nobody has an official list of 5 or 7 core values. The numbers in other lists are choices made by their authors, and a handful is common advice because a short list is easy to remember. We found no study that tests an ideal number.
When a value shows you something has to change
Sometimes looking at values brings up a hard truth: a job, a relationship or a faith that no longer fits. If that leaves you stuck, anxious or low for weeks, it's worth talking through with a counselor or therapist.
Joyful is an AI journaling companion, not therapy. Joy can point out the values that keep turning up in what you write, and it can't replace care.
Pick the value you most want to live by this month. What is one small thing you could do tomorrow that it would ask of you?
Answer this with JoyQuestions people ask
What are the 10 core values of a person?
The best-known answer is Schwartz's 10 basic values: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism.1 Each is a group of related values, and people rank the 10 in different orders.
What are the 5 main core values?
There's no agreed list of five. Any list of "the five core values" is one author's pick. Your five are the ones that win when choices get hard.
Can your core values change?
Yes. Priorities can shift with age, a new child, a loss or a move. The wheel of life and our self-reflection questions are ways to check in on them once in a while.