Plain-English purpose
This application is a working model of a human character-value spectrum. It takes the well-established idea that human values can be arranged around a circle, then tests a richer version: a full value solid where every value begins at the same center point and can extend outward as that value becomes more fully felt.
The sphere and circle display the filtered value set for comparison.
Foundation and contribution
The starting scaffold is Schwartz's refined theory of basic individual values. In this app, the 19 refined values are treated as anchor points around the character-value continuum. Nearby anchors are meant to feel related; opposite anchors are meant to create motivational tension.
The proposal builds from the established use of spatial similarity in value meaning. Its contribution is a specific spherical map, a north/south latitude rule, a family-level color-expression system, a coherence-based dissonance read, named reference configurations, and a visible mixing process that can be inspected, challenged, and refined.
What the sphere adds
The sphere adds two ideas to the circle. First, every value is a ray from the center, and magnitude on that ray represents how fully that value is felt inside a person. A 0 means the value is present as a possible value but has no current pull. A 5 means the person is fully driven by that value in the moment being modeled. Second, the sphere adds north/south latitude. North means more social-serving; south means more self-serving or self-enhancing; east and west are neutral bridge directions that still curve smoothly into the north/south logic.
The 2D circle keeps the same value order around the outside but flattens away latitude. That makes it a comparison view: the circle shows the older circumplex-style baseline, while the sphere shows what the added social/self-serving dimension changes. You can zoom the sphere from its outer shell all the way in to the core, so a marker that reads as muted — low Chroma, which sits near the centre — can still be inspected up close.
How values are layered
The app reads the value space at several scales: four fuzzy quadrants, 19 middle-scale regions built from the refined value anchors, 32 curated value families, and the local filtered value labels. The families are important because color expression is attached at the family level.
Region boundaries are intentionally soft. The highlighted shell patch is a visible neighborhood around the selected region. A value can sit near a transition, which is the point of using a continuum instead of isolated boxes.
How hue is tied to character values
Hue is the color direction of the character-value continuum. The code assigns hue degrees to the 19 refined value anchors, then smoothly blends between those anchor hues as values move around the circle. In plain terms: the value's position around the character spectrum chooses its base color family.
Hue stays anchored in the value map. Chroma and Contrast then change how vividly and how openly that hue is expressed, but they never move the hue itself.
The three channels: colour and place
Three independent channels drive both the aura colour and where the marker sits in the solid. Values set the colour's hue and the marker's longitude — its bearing around the sphere. Chroma — the nine Chroma sliders only — sets saturation (vivid versus muted) and radial depth: muted or neutral sits at the core, vivid pushes out to the shell. Contrast — the six Contrast sliders only — sets lightness (open versus guarded) and latitude: open lifts the marker north (social-serving), guarded drops it south (self-serving). The channels stay independent: a Chroma slider never shifts the hue, and clashing values never mute the colour — that scatter is read separately, as dissonance.
How Chroma is tied to character values
Chroma is the vivid-versus-muted part of the color, carried by nine sliders: Deliberation, Revision, Regulation, Delivery, Vigilance, Association, Interoception, Tagging, and Resonance. They describe internal processing — how a person works through experience before acting.
Every value family has one primary Chroma owner at full strength, plus a graded set of weaker secondary couplings. A value's saturation is the affinity-weighted blend of its family's coupled Chroma sliders; for the combined aura those per-value readings are blended by rank opacity. Moving a Chroma slider right makes the values it touches more vivid and pushes their marker toward the shell; left mutes them and draws it toward the core.
How Contrast is tied to character values
Contrast is the guarded-versus-open part of the color, implemented as HSL lightness: darker means more braced or guarded, lighter means more open or forthcoming. Six sliders carry it: Disclosure, Appraisal, Warmth, Attunement, Approach, and Safety Read. They describe relational posture — how a person shows up with others.
Every value family has one primary Contrast owner at full strength, sometimes with weaker secondary couplings. A value's lightness is the affinity-weighted blend of its family's coupled Contrast sliders; for the combined aura those are blended by rank opacity. Moving a Contrast slider right lightens the values it touches and lifts their marker north; left darkens them and drops it south.
How a single value becomes a color
Each selected value goes through the same pipeline. First, its location on the character-value continuum gives it a hue. Second, its family ownership reads the relevant Chroma slider positions and calculates current saturation. Third, its family ownership reads the relevant Contrast slider and calculates current lightness. The displayed color is then produced from those hue, saturation, and lightness values.
How mixed values combine
The Value mix can hold up to 15 values, because people are moved by several values at once. Each value has a visible 0..5 magnitude slider: felt value fullness, and the length of that value's own ray. Magnitude weights the 2D circle marker and feeds the coherence goal — it does not set the colour or the combined 3D marker's place; rank opacity and the Chroma/Contrast channels do that. Three, four, or more values can all sit near 5 if they all strongly drive the person in the moment being modeled.
In the 3D solid the combined marker's bearing (longitude) is the rank-weighted mean of the selected value directions, its latitude comes from Contrast, and its radial depth from Chroma — the three channels above, read as a place. The 2D circle keeps the older reading: the magnitude-weighted vector of the value directions, where agreeing values push outward and opposing ones pull back toward the centre. Values that point in clashing directions do not gray each other down — that scatter is read separately, as dissonance.
How rank drives the blend
Rank is not decoration. Dragging a value or a slider up its list changes its rank, and rank sets opacity through a single curve — about 1 over (rank + 1.09), re-normalized across the list. That opacity is the weight every blend uses: the combined hue is the opacity-weighted circular average of the selected values' hues, and the combined Chroma and Contrast are opacity-weighted blends of the nine and six slider positions. So the top-ranked items shape the aura most, and reordering a list visibly changes the color. The model stays inspectable: if the color changes, it is because a visible slider, value, or rank changed.
Dissonance and the coherent goal
For any set of values — with their ranks and magnitudes — the app solves, in closed form, for the coherent goal: where all fifteen sliders, in both position and rank, would sit to agree with those values. The goal is scaled to realistic intensities — strong demands ease toward a lived-in ceiling rather than pinning to the extremes — so a coherent person reads as balanced, not maxed-out. The values are the anchor and are never moved. Dissonance is simply the gap between where a slider actually sits and that goal.
That tension surfaces in three separate ways, matching where it lives. Values that conflict with one another — anchors opposed on the continuum — raise a metallic sheen on the aura, never a graying. A Chroma slider that disagrees with the goal casts a photo-negative overlay of the affected value's hue. A Contrast slider that disagrees casts a neon overlay. The overlays are painted on top; the three base channels stay untouched, so the underlying color is always readable.
Show dissonance turns these reads on: each slider gets a ghost at its goal position and its goal rank, and the aura picks up the metallic, negative, and neon overlays wherever the gap is real. Lock instead calibrates the sliders to the goal — positions and ranks — collapsing dissonance to zero without touching the values, so you can see the coherent expression those values would produce.
Reference overlays: beacons and archetypes
Beacons are named, coherent (dissonance-free) reference configurations. Turn on Show beacons and each is plotted where the engine actually drops it — its true locator, computed with the identical math the live mix uses — so you see where a named configuration lands, not a hand-placed dot. Beacons are read-only: click one for its values and slider positions, or upload a new beacon file to swap the set.
Archetypes are the twelve classical Jungian types, each written as a full configuration in the same fifteen-value, nine-Chroma, six-Contrast system. Turn on Show archetypes and they appear as diamonds — distinct from the beacon spheres — at their true locators; both layers can be shown at once. Clicking an archetype loads its whole configuration into the editable mix and sliders so you can explore how it moves and where it drifts. That load is a copy: moving the sliders never writes back to the archetype, and there is no upload — the set is baked from the source prose. Unlike beacons, archetypes are not coherence-derived: they are authored characters and usually carry some dissonance of their own, which is part of the portrait.
Proposal status
The app presents the Value Solid as a theory proposal with an explicit structure: established value-continuum foundation, spherical extension, curated family taxonomy, hue direction, Chroma activation, Contrast expression, rank-opacity weighting, coherence-based dissonance, and named reference configurations. Its strength is that the proposal is operational: every visible behavior — every color, marker, overlay, and beacon — has a rule that can be inspected, discussed, tested, and improved.
Technical reference: open the implementation-level PDF.