Refining the Theory of Basic Individual Values

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Shalom H. Schwartz, Jan Cieciuch, Michele Vecchione, al (2012)

This empirically refined framework sharpens Schwartz's original 10 universal human values theory into a more detailed 19 distinct values, tested across cultures. It accompanies the Common Cause Handbook (2011) above.

Link to study

What the evidence shows

This paper refines Shalom Schwartz's influential 1992 theory of basic human values — a foundational framework in psychology positing that people everywhere share a common set of values (e.g., security, achievement, benevolence, universalism) organized in a circular structure of compatible and conflicting motivations. The original theory identified 10 broad values; this paper subdivides them into 19 more narrowly defined values (e.g., splitting "security" into personal-security and societal-security; splitting "power" into dominance, resources, and a new "face" value) to increase precision.

The refinement is grounded in the theory's often-overlooked core claim: that values form a continuous motivational circle rather than 10 discrete categories, meaning any value can be partitioned more finely if doing so adds explanatory power. The authors build and validate a new 57-item survey instrument (PVQ5X) to measure the 19 values, testing whether they are empirically distinguishable, whether they fall into the theorized circular order, and whether the finer-grained values predict real-world beliefs and attitudes (e.g., about wealth, immigration, homosexuality) more precisely than the original 10 broad values.

This is foundational values-psychology research rather than a communications or persuasion study, but it is highly relevant to message evaluation: any tool assessing whether a message appeals to "security," "universalism," "achievement," or similar value-driven motivations is implicitly drawing on this framework or its predecessor.

Key Findings

Every one of the 19 values showed significantly different correlations with external variables (e.g., age, gender, political attitudes) compared to its neighboring values on the motivational circle, supporting the practical value of the finer-grained distinctions rather than treating them as redundant.
The refined values substantially improved predictive precision: for the belief that "it is hard to get ahead in life without lots of money," the 19-value model explained about 15% more variance than the original 10-value model (16.5% vs. 14.3%); for attitudes toward equal rights for homosexual couples, the refined model explained about 18% more variance (15.3% vs. 13.0%).
The circular motivational ordering of values was largely confirmed, with one notable reversal: benevolence values and universalism values swapped positions relative to the originally hypothesized order, a finding also observed in prior research and left without a definitive explanation.
Two new values not captured in the original 10 were identified and validated: "face" (security and power through maintaining public image and avoiding humiliation) and "humility" (recognizing one's insignificance in the larger scheme of things), each shown to behave as conceptually and empirically distinct from their neighboring values.

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Stand-out data points

19 distinct values validated across N = 6,059 respondents in 10 countries — a large, cross-national empirical base supporting the refined framework's generalizability, though see limitations below on sample composition.
+15–18 percentage points of explained variance gained by using the 19-value model instead of the original 10-value model when predicting real-world beliefs (about wealth/status and about equal rights for same-sex couples) — a substantial jump in predictive precision from a values-based framework.
Benevolence/universalism order reversal in nearly all samples. In all 15 samples, the empirically observed circular position of benevolence and universalism values swapped relative to theory — a finding the authors could not fully explain, illustrating that even a mature, well-validated theory retains open empirical puzzles.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

Emotional resonance Provides a validated, fine-grained vocabulary of human motivations (e.g., security–personal vs. security–societal, universalism–concern vs. universalism–nature) that Understories could use to more precisely identify which specific value a climate message is appealing to, beyond broad categories like "safety" or "fairness."
Personal relevance The theory's core distinctions (e.g., personal- vs. societal-focused values, self-transcendence vs. self-enhancement) offer a validated way to assess whether a message's value appeal is personally self-interested or socially/collectively oriented — a useful axis for scoring personal relevance with more precision than a single generic criterion.
Autonomy A well-validated values framework supports transparent, explainable scoring ("this message appeals primarily to security–societal and conformity–rules values") rather than vague characterizations, which aligns with Understories' "AI suggests, humans decide" commitment to traceable recommendations.
Explainaibility This is precisely the kind of rigorously validated, specific psychological construct that supports traceable, citable scoring — each of the 19 values has a clear conceptual definition and validated survey items, making it well-suited to explainable recommendations.

non-exhaustive