Certificate of Value Orientation Bureau of Personality
Flat lay of a compass, a paper boat, a lit candle, a key on a ribbon, a small potted seedling, a photo of someone looking out an open window at a path, and a certificate with a star seal, framed by hand-drawn hearts, stars, and arrows.

Certificate of Value Orientation

to be completed in your own hand

Processing time: 5 min Items: 24

No sign-up. Issued the same day.

This certificate is issued after 24 short items are answered in order; on completion, the bearer receives a certified value orientation, a profile across all four dimensions, and a seal. Processing time: about 5 minutes.

Share This Test

Facebook X
0%
A tricky problem comes up with no obvious rulebook answer. Your first move?
At the end of one particular long day, what tells you it was worth it?
A day's routine suddenly turns genuinely unpredictable. How much does that throw you?
Someone close seems a little off, though they haven't said anything. What do you do?
Before settling anything important, how far do you go looking for a second opinion?
Which is closer to you: success is what others recognize, or a private sense regardless of who notices?
News points to real instability in institutions or public order. Does that settle, or unsettle you?
Which fits better: people count on you to follow through, or count on you to be warm about it?
An easier goal someone else set sits next to a harder one you chose yourself. Your pick?
A group stalls with no clear leader in the moment. What's your instinct?
An inherited custom could easily lapse this year; nobody would mind either way. Do you keep it going?
A decision comes up that affects people you'll likely never meet. Does their fair treatment factor in?
In general, does a goal feel more like yours when you set it, or when someone else did?
In general, how strong is the pull to be the one directing a group rather than following?
A procedure spells out exact steps; a shortcut here would go unnoticed. What do you do?
How strong is the pull to weigh environmental impact into a choice, without being asked to?
Offered a choice between a familiar option and an untested one, which do you volunteer for?
A decision about money or resources comes up. What matters more — the control it buys, or the comfort?
An honest reaction would probably upset someone close. Do you say it anyway?
Someone lays out a viewpoint very unlike your own. What's your first move?
Picture a long stretch with nothing new in it. Comforting, or confining?
Which fits better: resources are mainly good for the control they give, or the comfort they buy?
Does keeping up an old custom matter to you on its own, apart from convenience?
Which is closer to you: fairness for total strangers matters, or fairness is mainly about people close to you?

The certificate will be issued in this name. Leave it blank to issue it to the bearer.

About This Certificate

How a person's answers tilt among four value pulls — Openness to Change, Self-Enhancement, Conservation, and Self-Transcendence — weighed against each other, not collapsed into one number.

Test author Editorial Staff

Rate This Certificate
4.9/5

Attachments

Attachment 1. Methodology

This test is based on the approach of a long-running line of psychological research that arranges the values people lean on into four wide, overlapping pulls, set out in a loop rather than sorted into separate boxes. Twenty-four questions feed that loop, six per pull, and the score that comes back is a reading across all four, with whichever pull came out strongest named as the headline.

What gets named is only where the answers landed today, not a permanent label. Research following people over the years finds priorities keep moving across a lifetime, with the biggest movement usually coming earlier on, in the first stretch of adulthood. None of the four pulls outranks another, and the result implies nothing about picking a career, a partner, or which way to steer one's life.

The four pulls sit next to each other on that same loop: Openness to Change beside Self-Enhancement, Self-Enhancement beside Conservation, Conservation beside Self-Transcendence, and Self-Transcendence closing the loop back around to Openness to Change. Two of those joins — Self-Enhancement with Conservation, and Conservation with Self-Transcendence — fall in territory the underlying research itself calls genuinely fuzzy, so a lean sitting close to either edge is best read as how someone actually behaves, not as a firm boundary separating one pull from the next.

Like most measures of this kind, this one runs entirely on self-description — the reader's own read of their priorities, not an outside, independently verified measurement. That comes with a known tilt: people tend to rate the values that sound better slightly higher than what actually shows up in their day-to-day choices.

The word "value" itself gets a plain, no-frills definition here; this overview page goes further into the theory behind the scoring and how researchers actually measure it.

This test is not a diagnostic instrument.

Attachment 2. Frequently Asked Questions

What are personal values?

Think of the values someone holds as a quiet filter sitting behind most choices — a sense of what actually matters, what's worth chasing, and what's worth standing up for, that rarely gets spelled out loud. They work less like a fixed rulebook and more like a set of instincts a person leans on to size up whether something is good or worth doing.

Do personal values change over time?

They do, yes. Research that follows people over the years finds value priorities keep moving, with the biggest swings usually happening while someone is still fairly young into adulthood — things tend to settle more after that, though rarely completely. Coming back to retake something like this months or years later and landing somewhere different isn't a contradiction; it's roughly what that research would predict.

Does a values test say what career or relationship is right for someone?

No, and it isn't built to. What comes back is simply the orientation the answers point toward most — it stops there. Whether that translates into a particular job, a particular partner, or any other path through life is a far bigger question than twenty-four questions can settle, and the result doesn't try.

What's the difference between a values test and a personality test?

They're picking up on two different things. A personality test is mostly reading how someone tends to behave, and that reading tends to hold fairly steady once early adulthood is behind them. A values test is after something else — what a person actually treats as worth defending or chasing — and that part is known to move as life stages change.

How many core values should a person have?

Not many, in practice. Once a list of values gets long enough, it stops working as an actual set of priorities, which is why most frameworks in this area end up narrowing things down to a short list instead. That's also why this test rolls a wide set of smaller, specific values up into four broad orientations, rather than handing back a long scorecard of separate numbers.

Attachment 3. References
  1. Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). doi:10.9707/2307-0919.1116
  2. Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., Ramos, A., Verkasalo, M., Lönnqvist, J.-E., Demirutku, K., Dirilen-Gumus, O., & Konty, M. (2012). Refining the Theory of Basic Individual Values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 663–688.
  3. Rokeach, M. (1973). The Nature of Human Values. New York: Free Press.