Interactive reflection map
Values Explorer
Choose three values and watch the field reorganize around them, revealing which commitments sit close together and which pull further apart.
Values and self-understanding
Values Explorer
This lab helps you see how values cluster, support each other, or sometimes pull against each other when you try to hold them in the centre together.
Orientation
This lab asks you to choose three values that feel most important to you right now.
Your job is not to build a perfect identity statement. Your job is to notice what happens when you place a few important commitments at the centre and let the rest of the field reorganize around them.
In this lab, useful things to notice often include:
- which values sit comfortably together,
- which nearby values seem to support them,
- which meaningful values drift further out, and
- how the whole field changes when you swap one anchor for another.
What to pay attention to: what feels coherent, what feels tense, and which values seem easier or harder to hold together at the same time.
What this is not: a final ranking of your values or a fixed portrait of your character. It is a way of noticing which values feel most central in this moment, and how they shape the rest of the field around them.
Pick 3 core values
Search for a value below or click directly in the map.
After 3 picks, the field will reorganize to show the shape of your value terrain.
Tip: choosing from different colours often creates a richer terrain.
How to read your terrain
Closer to the triangle means stronger likely resonance with your selected values.
Farther away means weaker resonance.
Hover any word to inspect it. Click a triangle value to swap it and watch the terrain change.
What you may have noticed
Some values seemed to sit naturally together, while others may have pulled against each other a little. That is normal. Most of us care deeply about more than one good thing, and those good things do not always fit together easily in real life.
You may also have noticed that changing even one anchor value can reshape the whole field. That is not a flaw in the exercise. Values are not always fixed in one permanent order. Different situations, roles, and pressures can bring different commitments to the centre.
What matters most here is not choosing the “right” values. It is noticing which values feel central, which ones reinforce each other, and where tension starts to appear when several important things all compete for the same space.
How this works
This map is built from a simple idea: values can be represented as patterns, and those patterns can be compared. In this prototype, each value is treated as a vector in a shared value space shaped by dimensions such as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, liberty, agency, openness, stability, transcendence, and enhancement.
When you choose three anchor values, the lab compares every other value in the field to those anchors. Values that are more similar are pulled closer toward the centre. Values that are less similar remain further out.
1. Similarity between values
To compare one value with another, the lab uses cosine similarity:
$$ \mathrm{sim}(v,a)=\frac{v\cdot a}{|v|\,|a|} $$Here, v is the vector for any value in the field, and a is one of your chosen anchors. Values pointing in similar directions produce higher similarity scores.
2. Combined pull toward your three anchors
Each value is compared to all three anchors, and those similarities are averaged:
$$ S(v)=\frac{\mathrm{sim}(v,a_1)+\mathrm{sim}(v,a_2)+\mathrm{sim}(v,a_3)}{3} $$This produces a single resonance score for how closely a value aligns with the three anchors you selected.
3. Distance from the centre
That resonance score is then converted into radial distance:
$$ r(v)\propto 1-S(v) $$In simple terms: higher resonance pulls a value inward, and lower resonance leaves it further away. Closer does not mean “better.” It only means “more aligned with this particular set of anchors.”
4. Why the values form clusters
The map also uses a light force layout so it stays readable. Similar values attract, dissimilar ones repel, labels avoid colliding, and the three chosen anchors are pinned into the centre triangle. That is why the field behaves more like a terrain than a flat list.
Optional: what a value vector looks like
In simplified form, a value can be represented like this:
$$ v=(\mathrm{care},\mathrm{fairness},\mathrm{loyalty},\mathrm{authority},\mathrm{liberty},\mathrm{agency},\mathrm{openness},\mathrm{stability},\mathrm{transcendence},\mathrm{enhancement}) $$The exact numbers differ from value to value, but the structure is the same: each value occupies a position in a shared multi-dimensional space.
What this means
This is not a diagnosis, a hidden truth about your personality, or a final ranking of your values. It is a structured similarity map. Its job is to help you see which values cluster comfortably around your chosen centre, which ones sit further out, and how the terrain changes when you change what sits in the middle.
References
Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20(1), 98–116.
Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65.
Turney, P. D., & Pantel, P. (2010). From frequency to meaning: Vector space models of semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 37, 141–188.
This lab uses a theory-informed, hand-crafted vector model to visualize value relationships. It should be read as an exploratory map rather than a validated psychometric instrument.
