Shalom H. Schwartz

Introduction

Shalom Hillel Schwartz (born 1 January 1936) is an American-Israeli social psychologist, cross-cultural researcher and the creator of the Theory of Basic Human Values — the framework that currently dominates the empirical study of human values. The theory proposes that a limited set of values is recognised in virtually all cultures, that these values are motivational goals rather than traits, and — the part that made the theory distinctive — that they are organised in a circular structure in which adjacent values are psychologically compatible and opposing values conflict. A person who prizes achievement will find it easy to also prize power and hard to also prize universalism.

Schwartz built measurement instruments to match the theory — the Schwartz Value Survey and, later, the Portrait Values Questionnaire — which have been translated into more than fifty languages and used in over ninety societies. The Portrait Values Questionnaire became the human values module of the European Social Survey, meaning his framework is now used to track value change in representative national samples on a continuing basis.

Early Life and Education

Schwartz was born in Hempstead, New York, on New Year's Day 1936. He attended public school for six years, where he was known by versions of his middle name, Hillel, before reclaiming his first name when he transferred to a yeshiva in Jamaica, Queens. Alongside Hempstead High School he commuted twice a week to Manhattan to continue Jewish studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

At Columbia College he specialised in comparative literature. He found the introductory psychology course of the day — entirely behaviourist, involving training a rat — so unstimulating that he took no further psychology until graduate school. While completing his AB at Columbia he also completed a BA in Hebrew language and literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and spent a semester of his senior year in Jerusalem, which began his attraction to living in Israel.

He then spent five years in rabbinical studies at the Seminary, one of them in Jerusalem with his wife. A course with Goodwin Watson at Columbia Teachers College shifted his interest toward social psychology. Intending to specialise in group dynamics, he applied to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor — and completed a PhD in social psychology in 1967 through a joint programme of the psychology and sociology departments without taking a single group dynamics course. His dissertation asked whether people's internalised moral norms actually affect their behaviour, a claim widely believed by non-psychologists and deeply unfashionable in psychology at the time.

Academic and Professional Career

Schwartz began teaching in 1967 in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he became a full professor in 1973. Two of those years, 1971–1973, were spent as a visiting lecturer in psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Colleagues there — among them Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman — tried to recruit him; he returned to Madison to think it over, and in 1979 moved to Israel with his wife and three children, joining the Hebrew University's psychology department. He remained there until retiring in 2003 and now holds the Leon and Clara Sznajderman chair as professor emeritus.

The move to Israel changed the direction of his research. A country with great internal cultural diversity but a circumscribed academic community encouraged him to travel and to collaborate internationally, which in turn drew him into cross-cultural psychology. He joined the executive council of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology in 1994 and was elected its president for 2004–2006.

From 1967 through the 1980s his research concerned altruism and helping behaviour. In the 1980s he developed the Theory of Basic Human Values with Wolfgang Bilsky, drawing on the earlier work of Milton Rokeach and on Louis Guttman's approach to structural analysis. In the 1990s he proposed a parallel theory of seven culture-level value orientations for mapping and comparing societies. In 2012 he and colleagues refined the ten basic values into nineteen more finely differentiated ones.

He was a member of the scientific board of the European Social Survey from 1998 to 2016 and authored its Human Values Scale, which has been fielded in the Survey's biennial representative samples since its inception. After retiring he spent time as a research professor at the University of Bergen (2007–2009) and as scientific supervisor of the International Laboratory of Socio-Cultural Research at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2011–2016).

His honours include the Israel Prize in psychology (2007), the highest civilian award the State of Israel gives to researchers; an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki (2011); the Distinguished Career Award of the American Sociological Association's section on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity (2014); and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2019).

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Theory of Basic Human Values

Schwartz defines values as beliefs about desirable end states that transcend specific situations, are ordered by importance, and guide how people and institutions are evaluated. The theory identifies ten (later nineteen) basic values recognised across cultures: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism.

Its central structural claim is the circumplex. Values are arranged in a circle such that the pursuit of any value has consequences for its neighbours and its opposites. Two orthogonal bipolar dimensions summarise the circle:

  • Openness to Change versus Conservation — self-direction and stimulation against conformity, tradition and security.
  • Self-Enhancement versus Self-Transcendence — power and achievement against universalism and benevolence.

Hedonism straddles the boundary between openness and self-enhancement. The circular ordering is not a decorative diagram but a set of testable predictions about which values will correlate positively, which negatively, and which will be roughly independent — predictions that have been tested in dozens of countries using multidimensional scaling and confirmatory factor analysis.

Measurement

The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) presents 57 value items on an asymmetric nine-point scale from −1 (opposed to my values) to 7 (of supreme importance), forcing respondents to discriminate rather than rate everything highly. Because the SVS is demanding — it takes around twelve minutes and yields a substantial number of incomplete forms — Schwartz developed the Portrait Values Questionnaire, which asks respondents how similar they are to short verbal portraits of people whose goals implicitly express a value. The PVQ was designed for younger or less literate respondents and for time-constrained surveys, and it reduces some of the response biases the SVS invites.

Culture-level value orientations

Schwartz's second framework describes seven societal-level orientations — embeddedness, intellectual autonomy, affective autonomy, hierarchy, egalitarianism, mastery and harmony — derived by applying the same logic to societies rather than individuals. This work is frequently used alongside, and sometimes as a competitor to, Hofstede's cultural dimensions, with the advantage of being derived from an explicit theory of value content rather than from post-hoc factor analysis of survey items.

Major Publications

  • Schwartz, S. H., & Bilsky, W. (1990). "Toward a theory of the universal content and structure of values: Extensions and cross-cultural replications." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 878–891.
  • Schwartz, S. H. (1992). "Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries." In M. P. Zanna (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1–65). Academic Press.
  • Schwartz, S. H. (1994). "Are there universal aspects in the content and structure of values?" Journal of Social Issues, 50(4), 19–45.
  • Schwartz, S. H. (2006). "A theory of cultural value orientations: Explication and applications." Comparative Sociology, 5(2–3), 137–182.
  • Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., and others (2012). "Refining the theory of basic individual values." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 663–688.
  • Schwartz, S. H. (2012). "An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values." Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1) — his own summary of the framework.

Impact and Legacy

Schwartz's framework is the dominant empirical paradigm for studying values across the social sciences. Where earlier work treated values as an inventory of attitudes, his theory supplied a structure with competing and compatible relations, together with instruments that made cross-national comparison possible at scale. Its inclusion in the European Social Survey gives it a permanent place in the infrastructure of European social research, and its vocabulary — self-transcendence, conservation, openness to change — is standard in political psychology, organisational behaviour, environmental research and consumer psychology.

The theory has nonetheless drawn sustained criticism, several strands of which concern the instruments rather than the ideas.

The universality claim. The strongest theoretical objection is that asserting autonomy-related and other value distinctions as universal risks ethnocentrism, imposing categories derived from European philosophical traditions onto societies organised on different premises. Critics have argued that the ten-value typology cannot capture values specific to particular cultures — amae in Japan, ubuntu in southern African thought are the usual examples — and that some values simply mean different things in different places. Notably, "spirituality" was considered as a candidate basic value and rejected for failing to hold up cross-culturally, which critics read as evidence both of the theory's rigour and of its limits.

Measurement and scoring. The SVS is hard to complete, takes about twelve minutes, and produces a significant share of only partially filled forms. Many respondents rate most values highly, skewing responses toward the top of the scale. More consequentially, the recommended centring procedure — subtracting each respondent's mean rating from each item — produces ipsative, ordinal scores, which restricts the statistical techniques that can legitimately be applied and complicates structural equation modelling. Research on acquiescence suggests a large share of variance in raw SVS and PVQ responses reflects differing personal "zero points" rather than value content, which is precisely what centring is meant to remove but does not fully solve.

Social desirability. Studies relating SVS and PVQ scores to measures of desirable responding find small-to-moderate correlations concentrated in achievement and hedonism; the Portrait Values Questionnaire was in part a response to this, since indirect portraits are less transparent than direct ratings of one's own values.

The value–action gap. The relation between stated value priorities and actual behaviour is real but modest, and mediated by situational constraints, habits and competing motives. Critics argue that a theory whose central constructs predict behaviour only weakly and only under specifiable conditions is better described as a theory of self-presentation or of aspiration than of action.

Schwartz's own position, stated repeatedly, is that the needs and value content are universal while the behaviours that express them are culturally variable — so that deferring to family expectation in a collectivist setting may express relatedness rather than a lack of autonomy. This distinction is accepted by many but regarded by others as unfalsifiable, since any apparent counterexample can be reinterpreted as a culturally specific expression of the same underlying value.

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References

  • Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1-65). Academic Press.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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