Methodology

What we mean by "shared" and "universal"

"Widely shared" does not mean everyone ranks a value the same way, or that it means the same thing in every culture — it means most people, across most cultures studied, recognize the value as something worth having at all. Honesty and loyalty are both widely recognized as good; that doesn't stop them from pulling in different directions in a specific situation, which is the entire premise of this site. We do not claim any value is ranked identically everywhere, and we never claim a value is universal in the sense of being ranked first by everyone.

Values, virtues, rights, behaviors, and preferences

We use "value" specifically: a broad thing a person or culture treats as worth pursuing or protecting — honesty, freedom, belonging. This is different from a virtue (a character trait, like patience), a right (a legal or moral entitlement, like a right to a fair trial), a behavior (a specific action, like telling the truth in one moment), or a preference (a personal taste with no broader claim on anyone else, like a favorite color). A dilemma here is built around two values in genuine tension — not a behavior being judged right or wrong, and not a preference being debated.

Research foundations

The framing of values as a recognizable, cross-cultural set — rather than an arbitrary list we made up — draws on:

• Sagiv & Schwartz, "Personal Values Across Cultures," Annual Review of Psychology 73 (2022): 517–546.
• Schwartz & Cieciuch, "Measuring the Refined Theory of Individual Values in 49 Cultural Groups: Psychometrics of the Revised Portrait Value Questionnaire," Assessment 29 (2022).
• UNESCO, "Global Citizenship Education: Topics and Learning Objectives" (2015).
• Basarkod, Cahill, Noetel et al., "Educational interventions are effective in improving students' ethical and moral outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis," Nature Human Behaviour (2026) — 92 RCTs, 12,693 students, 20 countries. This is a meta-analysis of ethics and moral education interventions generally, not specifically of interactive formats; that discussion-based programs outperformed lecture- and reading-only ones is a finding inside the review, not what the review set out to test. We cite it for that specific, narrower finding, not as if the whole study were about it.

All four links verified live 2026-09-01. Full list: sources.

How the initial twelve values were chosen

The twelve values in the atlas were chosen to be immediately recognizable and distinct enough to write a genuine two-sided dilemma around — not as a claim that exactly twelve captures the full range of human values, and not as an exhaustive academic taxonomy. Cross-cultural values research (above) informed which concepts travel well across contexts; the final cut favored values a visitor would recognize in one sentence over ones that need a paragraph of definition first.

How a dilemma is written and reviewed

Every dilemma is drafted around two specific values genuinely in tension, then goes through a fixed reviewer checklist before publication — including a reviewer who is not the dilemma's author, without exception. The full roles, checklist, and correction process are on the editorial policy page.

What this product can and cannot infer

This product cannot infer anything about you. It has no account, no database, and the choice you make in a dilemma is never scored, ranked, or compared against anyone else's. It cannot tell you which value "won," because that isn't a question it's built to answer — the "What matters most here?" step is a prediction you make about the scenario, never graded, and never used to build a profile of who you are. See privacy for exactly what is and isn't collected.

Cultural review

A dedicated cultural-reviewer role checks every dilemma specifically for assumptions, stereotypes, exclusions, and regional misreadings — including whether the copy implies one culture is more "advanced" than another, and whether an incidental demographic detail accidentally signals which choice is "correct." Detail on this role is on the editorial policy page.

Version history and corrections

A published dilemma's substance — its choices, its values, its perspectives — is never edited in place. A correction to the logic creates a new version instead, because a saved reflection in your journal points at the exact version you answered, and an in-place edit would silently change what that reflection means. See editorial policy for the corrections log.

Conflict of interest

This site is funded by sales of its own digital products. No external funder, sponsor, or advertiser has paid for a value, a dilemma, or a citation's inclusion, and none of the sources above were chosen because of a financial relationship with their authors or publishers.