A Powerful Tool for Viewing the Terrain of Your Value System, and Strengthening Their Connections: The Rokeach Value Survey

The Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) is a tool for identifying your values and, just as important, the relationships among them.

The process is simple, and only requires that you understand an important distinction that the test draws between two kinds of values:

1. Ultimate values — these are the things you think are good in and of themselves, because, for you, they fundamentally define the good life or the way the world should be. One might, for instance, think that truth is an unqualified good that is essential for the good life.
2. Instrumental values — these are the things we think are valuable primarily because they are essential or useful for upholding our Ultimate Values. The person who values truth as an Ultimate Value might hold that honesty is important because it is instrumentally essential for upholding truth.

The test presents two lists of 18 choices for Ultimate Values and 18 choices for Terminal Values. First, one reads the list of Ultimate Values and notes which third (6) of them one feels the strongest emotional resonance with.

The Terminal Values:

True Friendship
Mature Love
Self-Respect
Happiness
Inner Harmony
Equality
Freedom
Pleasure
Social Recognition
Wisdom
Salvation
Family Security
National Security
A Sense of Accomplishment
A World of Beauty
A World at Peace
A Comfortable Life
An Exciting Life

First, identify which six are most important to you.

Next, identify which three of those six you think are most central to your value structure, and write a sentence or two about why you personally believe they are so important.

Next, read through the list of Instrumental Values, looking again for those six that resonate most strongly with you.

The Instrumental Values:

Cheerfulness
Ambition
Love
Cleanliness
Self-Control
Capability
Courage
Politeness
Honesty
Imagination
Independence
Intellect
Broad-Mindedness
Logic
Obedience
Helpfulness
Responsibility
Forgiveness

Once you’ve selected your top six, again select the three that you feel most strongly toward, and write a sentence or two about each of them and why they’re so important to you.

The last step — not originally part of the RVS, but one that I think is extremely useful — is to take those six Ultimate and six Instrumental values and arrange them in two columns with the Ultimate values on the right.

Then, starting with the first Instrumental Value in its list on the left, consider if that value is essential or useful for pursuing any of the values on the right list, and whenever you identify a connection like this between an Instrumental and Ultimate value, draw a line from the Instrumental Value, connecting it to the Ultimate Value it supports.

Once you’ve done this with the whole list, you’ll have a little graph of your central values and some of the relationships between them. This is psychologically helpful, especially in moments where you need to muster a little extra willpower to act in accordance with what you value, because it reminds you why that value is important and how it connects to other things that are important to you. The temptation to be slightly dishonest is a lot easier to resist if you can quickly muster the thought “I choose to be honest to others because I believe that the truth matters, and because I believe that being honest to a person is an essential part of treating them with the dignity they deserve.”

I know that a lot of “exercises” are busywork, and feel about as productive (but not as fun) as finger painting. But this little exercise really is worth doing once. It will strengthen the lattice of neural connections between each of those value concepts in your brain, and having a strong path of those connections is the neurological basis of willpower and good character.

Good luck. And let me know which tools you think are also useful for clarifying and strengthening our values! I’d love to hear from you at Michael Glawson at me dot com.

The philosophical basis for the RVS is outlined in Rokeach’s book Beliefs, Attitudes, and Values (1968), and the RVS itself first appeared in his The Nature of Human Values (1973).