In the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists studying human values faced a fundamental problem: every culture seemed to have different values. Japanese workers valued harmony and group loyalty; American workers valued individual achievement and autonomy. How could you build a universal theory from such apparent diversity?
Shalom Schwartz's answer was to look not at the specific content of cultural values, but at their motivational structure, the underlying goal each value is oriented toward. When you analyze at that level, the diversity of cultural expressions converges on a surprisingly small set of universal categories.
From Diversity to Universality
Schwartz started by compiling value survey instruments from across the psychological literature, hundreds of value items used in different countries. He then analyzed what each value was fundamentally about: what motivational goal did it represent?
The result was 10 categories that captured the entire motivational landscape:
1. Self-Direction
The motivational goal is independence of thought and action, choosing your own goals and methods, being free to be creative and original. The psychological need it serves is autonomy and competence. When blocked, people experience frustration with constraint and external control.
2. Stimulation
The motivational goal is novelty, excitement, and challenge. This value derives from the need for variety and stimulation to maintain an optimal level of arousal. People high in Stimulation are energized by change and depleted by routine.
3. Hedonism
The motivational goal is pleasure and sensuous gratification. Schwartz places Hedonism at the boundary between Openness to Change and Self-Enhancement because it involves both personal indulgence and resistance to Conservation. It is not about excess, it is about placing genuine importance on enjoyment as a life goal.
4. Achievement
The motivational goal is personal success through demonstrated competence according to social standards. The key word is "demonstrated", Achievement specifically involves social recognition. This distinguishes it from intrinsic competence-seeking, which belongs more to Self-Direction.
5. Power
The motivational goal is social status, prestige, and control over people and resources. Schwartz draws on Adlerian psychology and evolutionary biology to ground this value: the need to control others and resources has deep adaptive roots, even if its expression varies enormously across cultures.
6. Security
The motivational goal is safety, harmony, and stability, both personal and societal. Security operates on two levels: personal safety and social order. People high in Security are motivated by threats to either; they invest heavily in arrangements that reduce uncertainty.
7. Conformity
The motivational goal is restraint of actions and impulses that might upset or harm others or violate social expectations. Conformity is prosocial by definition, it is about protecting social harmony, not blind obedience. People high in Conformity believe rules exist for good reasons.
8. Tradition
The motivational goal is respect for and commitment to the customs and ideas of one's cultural or religious heritage. Schwartz distinguishes Tradition from Conformity: Conformity is about current social expectations; Tradition is about inherited cultural practices. Both are Conservation values, but from different sources.
9. Benevolence
The motivational goal is preserving and enhancing the welfare of people one is in close personal contact with, family, friends, community. Benevolence is focused on the in-group. This distinguishes it from Universalism, which extends concern to all people.
10. Universalism
The motivational goal is understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature. This is the most expansive of the 10 values, it is abstract (applying to strangers and future generations) and includes environmental concern.
The Structure: Why Values Form a Circle
Schwartz's most important structural insight was that these 10 values are not independent, they have a predictable motivational relationship to each other. Values that share compatible motivations tend to cluster together. Values that express conflicting motivations are positioned opposite each other.
This produces a circular (circumplex) structure with four quadrants:
- Self-Enhancement (Achievement, Power): Focused on personal benefit and social dominance.
- Self-Transcendence (Universalism, Benevolence): Focused on others' welfare and the common good.
- Openness to Change (Self-Direction, Stimulation, Hedonism): Focused on novelty, autonomy, and pleasure.
- Conservation (Security, Conformity, Tradition): Focused on order, stability, and maintenance of the status quo.
The Cross-Cultural Validation
What makes the Schwartz model remarkable is not its theoretical elegance, it is its empirical robustness. The 10-value structure and their circular organization has been replicated across 80+ countries, spanning different religions, political systems, and economic development levels.
The European Social Survey has measured these values across European countries since 2002, producing one of the largest longitudinal datasets on human values ever assembled. The structural replication is consistently strong even when the relative importance of specific values varies enormously between cultures.
This cross-cultural universality is what makes the PVQ-21 a reliable tool for individual self-understanding: your profile reflects a motivational structure that transcends cultural context, giving you insight into the deep priorities that will operate across different environments, roles, and life phases.