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.
What you build here is a configuration: your Character Values, in your order and at your weights, together with how you process them inside and how you carry them toward other people. Your first one is your homeostatic baseline; after that you can record situational entries. Each describes one stretch of your life, in one context. Change the arrangement and the reading changes with it.
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 colour-expression system, an incongruency read built on what the values demand, thirty-six Beacons free of incongruency, and a visible layering 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; in the Lab's single-value inspector, how far out along its ray a value sits shows how fully it is felt, from 0 to 5. 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 saturation, 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 292 value labels themselves. The families are important because processing and posture are linked to values 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 derives from values alone. Processing and posture change how vividly and how openly that hue is expressed, but they never move the hue itself.
The three sets: colour and place
Three sets of sliders drive both the aura colour and where the marker sits in the solid. Character Values set the colour's hue and the marker's longitude — its bearing around the sphere. Internal Processing — the eleven processing sliders — sets saturation (vivid versus muted) and radial depth: muted sits toward the core, vivid toward the shell. Relational Posture — the eight posture sliders — sets lightness and latitude: light goes north (open), dark goes south (guarded).
The three never cross-feed. A processing slider changes vividness and depth without moving the hue; values that clash stay vivid and take on a metallic sheen instead of greying out.
Two handles and an order
Every processing and posture slider carries three numbers. Two are handles: how hard the left pole is pulling you and how hard the right pole is pulling you, each from 0 (not pulling) to 10. The third is its rank: which fires first within its own set — the order under non-stressful conditions on your baseline, and the order things fired in on a situational entry.
In the colour, the right handle adds and the left handle takes away: the right pole saturates (processing) or lightens (posture) the values the slider is linked to, the left pole drains or darkens them. Equal pulls cancel. The order of the sliders never enters the colour.
Both handles low means the process or posture is barely pulling. Both handles pulling equally — at any loudness — is a freeze.
How processing is tied to character values
The eleven processing sliders are Deliberation, Revision, Regulation, Delivery, Vigilance, Association, Interoception, Tagging, Resonance, Standing, and Focus. They describe internal processing — how a person works through experience before acting.
Every value family has one primary processing owner, plus a graded set of weaker links. A value's saturation is the affinity-weighted blend of its linked processing sliders' pulls, right minus left.
How posture is tied to character values
The eight posture sliders are Disclosure, Appraisal, Warmth, Attunement, Approach, Safety Read, Bearing, and Bond. They describe relational posture — how a person shows up with others. Each one runs between one of your own domains and that same domain in the other person, outward or inward, which is what makes them relational: every one of them takes two people to happen.
Every value family has one primary posture owner, sometimes with weaker links. A value's lightness is the affinity-weighted blend of its linked posture sliders' pulls, right minus left.
How the values are layered into one colour
Up to fifteen values, each with a rank and a weight. Rank is the priority the value has in your life — it is not situational — and it is the value's layer in the aura: the rank-1 value is the base layer at full opacity, and ranks two to fifteen are layered over it in order. Weight is how strongly the value directs your decisions and thoughts, 1 a social minimum and 5 a social maximum, and it is how much of its layer comes through: 13, 21, 34, 55 or 89 percent. So rank decides the order of the stack and weight decides how much of each layer shows. A value can be high-ranked and faint, or low-ranked and dense.
The same layering places the marker: its longitude is the layered direction of the values around the continuum, its latitude comes from the layered lightness, and its depth from the layered saturation. The colour and the place are the same three quantities.
Demand: what your values ask for
Each family of values is connected to certain processing and posture sliders — the processing that has to be running and the posture to display the value in society. Holding a value creates a demand on those sliders, stronger the higher it is ranked and the more weight it carries. The sliders then create demands on each other, and those demands create demands on others again. The demand never moves your sliders.
The congruency goal is the configuration those demands ask for: two handles and a rank for every slider. It is deterministic: the same values with the same ranks and weights always ask for the same pulls and the same order.
Incongruency and dissonance
Incongruency is the structure; dissonance is the feeling it can build into. There are four kinds.
Value against value. Two held values that compete for opposing processing or posture. It is not a flaw in your ranking; sometimes it is a burden a person knowingly carries.
Values against sliders. A value you hold whose processes and postures do not run as it demands — pulling less than the goal asks, or firing later than it asks. The value is held but not lived.
A freeze. Both handles of a slider pulling equally; a process or posture a prioritized value demands not being prioritized; or competing values pulling one slider both ways.
Rigidity. A process or posture used at the same intensity even in situations where your own values deem it unnecessary. Held that way at 8 to 10, it can indicate dogmatism.
Freeze, rigidity and the dogmatic reading cannot be read from one profile. They appear once there is a baseline and at least one situational entry.
Each kind has its own visual signature: value against value takes a metallic sheen; a processing gap casts a photo-negative; a posture gap casts a neon edge. They are painted on top, so the base colour stays readable underneath.
Show Incongruency shows these readings, in words as well as in colour. Leave it off and the app shows your colour and your place without comment. Lock to the goal shows the congruency goal in your sliders — the pulls and the order your values ask for — as a view only: your entry is never changed.
The 36 zones and their Beacons
The solid divides into 36 zones: twelve sectors of territory, each cut into three bands of equal volume by how much of that territory is carried outward. A node sits at the exact centre of every zone, and each node holds a named Beacon.
A Beacon is an ideal configuration, free of incongruency: values, ranks and weights in working relation to how it processes, with postures that follow from both. Each one is a configuration a person could aim at, placed where that configuration actually lands. The most useful comparison is against the three Beacons your own configuration sits closest to.
The three bands at one bearing are three different people who share territory. The one at the equator sees the upper as living too openly and the lower as holding too close. Their values are different values, in different orders, at different weights, and all three would recognise each other.
Turn on Show beacons to see them, and tap one to open its profile. The same position on the solid can be reached by different values held in different orders; a configuration built from values no Beacon uses is read by exactly the same rules.
The twelve archetypes
The twelve classical archetypes are written here as full configurations in the same system — incongruent configurations, each showing a specific incongruency from the outside. Turn on Show archetypes and they appear as diamonds at the positions their configurations produce; tap one to open its page, with the mismatch it carries and what resolves it. Beacons are the references, free of incongruency; the archetypes illustrate it.
Finding your values in your own words
The search box reads more than the value names. Type family and you get Kinship, Belonging, Loyalty, Tradition and Care. Type money, burnout, faith or lonely and the same thing happens. Every value carries the words that part of life is actually called by, so you can search from your own experience rather than from the catalogue.
Your entries and your files
Your entries stay in this browser, on this device, and are never sent anywhere unless you submit one for the emailed profile — and then never its journal note, its label or its dates. You can protect them with a passphrase. Export writes an entry, or your whole journal, to a file you keep; Import brings it back, including files saved before two handles, which open as they were recorded. A file carries your values, ranks and weights, every slider's two pulls and order, the place, the goal and the readings, with the definitions that explain them.
Where a configuration comes from
A person's configuration comes from that person. It is what they say they value, in the order they say, at the weight they say, with the processing and postures they recognise as theirs. Reading it back tells them what shape that arrangement produces and where it is incongruent, in this context, at this time.
Proposal status
The Value Solid is presented as a theory proposal with an explicit structure: an established value-continuum foundation, a spherical extension, a curated family taxonomy, hue direction, two-handle processing and posture, layer order by rank and opacity by weight, an incongruency read built on demand, thirty-six Beacons free of incongruency, and twelve incongruent archetypes. Its strength is that the proposal is operational. Every visible behaviour — every colour, marker, overlay, Beacon and reading — has a rule that can be inspected, discussed, tested and improved.
Technical reference: open the implementation-level PDF.