Values & Moral Psychology

19 motivationally distinct values arranged in a circular structure · 57 items · ~10 min

The strongest evidence base in the values space. Adjacent values in the circle complement each other; opposite ones conflict (Security vs. Self-Direction), and that circular structure has replicated across 80+ countries. The official repository archives all four instrument versions (SVS, PVQ-40, PVQ-21, and the current best, the 57-item PVQ-RR) with scoring instructions and a comparison table for picking between them. Free for personal and academic use with attribution.

• Repository of Schwartz Value Scales

Rank-ordering of 18 'terminal' and 18 'instrumental' values · 36 values · ~15 min

The 1973 predecessor to Schwartz's work, historically important and still occasionally used. Its forced-ranking format has weaker psychometric properties than Schwartz's later rating-based instruments, and the model has been largely superseded. Even so, rank-ordering your values by hand remains a clarifying exercise, dated psychometrics and all.

• Background

24 character strengths, grouped under 6 broad virtues · ~96 items · ~15 min

Positive psychology's inventory from the Peterson & Seligman research program. Individual strength scores have decent psychometric support, but the six-virtue groupings don't replicate cleanly in factor analyses, so treat those as a loose organizing scheme and not as validated higher-order factors. The free ranked profile is all you need; the paid reports add packaging without adding measurement.

• Take it online

Endorsement of six moral foundations: Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, Purity · 36 items · ~7 min

The most famous instrument on this page, and also one of the most contested: Haidt and colleagues' theory holds that moral judgment rests on a small set of evolved foundations. The factor structure has repeatedly needed statistical patching to fit, and cross-cultural invariance is weak for at least one foundation (Purity) in multiple replications. The 2023 revision is a real improvement but is still being independently stress-tested. Take it, but alongside the MAC-Q below, and treat neither as the settled answer.

• Official questionnaires
• Take it at YourMorals

Seven cooperation-based moral domains: family, group, reciprocity, heroism, deference, fairness, property · 42 items · ~8 min

Curry's direct theoretical competitor to Moral Foundations Theory treats morality as a set of solutions to recurring cooperation problems, derived from game theory instead of intuition research. In head-to-head comparisons its seven-factor structure has fit the data as well as or better than the MFQ's. Taking both and comparing where they disagree about you is a better afternoon than taking either alone.

• Theory + questionnaire (Curry)

Two nearly independent dimensions: Instrumental Harm and Impartial Beneficence · 9 items · ~2 min

Older trolley-problem research treated willingness to actively harm for the greater good and impartial concern for everyone's welfare as two ends of one axis. They turn out to be nearly independent, and this scale is the fix. People high in psychopathic traits score high on Instrumental Harm but low on Impartial Beneficence, which is the opposite of what a single 'utilitarian' scale would predict. Short, solid psychometrics, replicated across 15+ language adaptations, and scorable right in the Oxford Uehiro Centre's own post.

• Take it (Practical Ethics blog)

Moral reasoning schemas: personal interest, norm maintenance, postconventional · 5 dilemmas · ~35 min

You cannot self-administer or self-score this one, which is the practical dealbreaker: scoring runs only through the University of Alabama's Center for the Study of Ethical Development, for a per-use fee. What it measures is moral reasoning sophistication in the neo-Kohlbergian tradition, based on how you weigh considerations in hypothetical dilemmas, with reasonably good construct validity in factor-analytic studies. Listed for completeness and for anyone willing to go through the front door.

• Official center

How central morality is to your self-concept: private Internalization and public Symbolization · 10 items · ~2 min

The question here isn't what you value. It's how much being a moral person matters to who you are, split into how much moral traits matter to your private sense of self versus how much you display them publicly. Brief, well replicated, and it predicts actual moral behavior (volunteering, honesty in experiments) better than most values instruments do. The full item set is in the original 2002 paper.

• Original paper (items included)

Submission to authority, aggression toward norm-violators, and conventionalism · 20–30 items depending on version · ~5 min

One of the most replicated constructs in political psychology, developed over decades by Bob Altemeyer. Despite the name, what it measures is an attitude cluster and not a party affiliation. Altemeyer's own free book, The Authoritarians, includes the scale with scoring and a readable account of the forty years of research behind it.

• The Authoritarians (Altemeyer, free book + scale)
• Scale overview

Preference for group-based hierarchy vs. equality between social groups · 16 items · ~3 min

RWA's complement measures something else: not deference to authority but comfort with some groups sitting on top of others. The current SDO-7 version splits this into dominance (support for active oppression) and anti-egalitarianism (opposition to equalizing) sub-dimensions. Reading your RWA and SDO scores side by side is more informative than either alone.

• Scale overview

Primal world beliefs: whether you see the world as Safe, Enticing, and Alive, 26 facets under one overall Good · 18 or 99 items · ~6–15 min

Clifton and colleagues set out to map our most basic beliefs about what kind of place the world is, and published the result with unusually thorough psychometrics for a new instrument. Scores track wellbeing and personality in ways the field is still working out; the literature is growing fast but remains centered on one Penn research group. ClearerThinking's mini-quiz is a quick taste; the full inventory is the real thing.

• Take it at myprimals.com (PI-99, PI-18, or brief)
• ClearerThinking's 6-minute version