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 values, at your ranking and your weights, together with how you process them inside and how you carry them toward other people. It describes one stretch of your life. 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 color-expression system, a coherence read built on demand, thirty-six 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 292 value labels themselves. 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 eleven 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 eight Contrast sliders only — sets lightness (open versus guarded) and latitude: open lifts the marker north (social-serving), guarded drops it south (self-serving).
The three run at once and stay independent of each other. A Chroma slider changes vividness and depth without moving the hue. Values in different directions scatter, and that scatter is read as dissonance rather than as colour.
How Chroma is tied to character values
Chroma is the vivid-versus-muted part of the color, carried by eleven sliders: Deliberation, Revision, Regulation, Delivery, Vigilance, Association, Interoception, Tagging, Resonance, Standing, and Horizon. 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. Eight sliders carry it: Disclosure, Appraisal, Warmth, Attunement, Approach, Safety Read, Bearing, and Bond. They describe relational posture — how a person shows up with others.
Each Contrast channel runs between one of your own domains and that same domain in the other person, outward or inward. That is what makes them relational: every one of them takes two people to happen.
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 holds 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. Three, four, or more values can all sit near 5 if they all strongly drive the person in the moment being modeled.
Rank and magnitude are two axes, and the model uses each for its own job. Rank is the order you would follow when two values collide, and rank blends the aura: bearing, depth and lightness are all rank-weighted. Magnitude is how hard a value drives your decisions, and magnitude sets the demand your values place on the nineteen channels. Rank places the marker; magnitude decides what coherence means for it.
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 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.
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 eleven and eight 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.
Demand: what your values ask for
Every value family works through particular channels. Holding a value at a given rank and magnitude therefore asks something specific of the nineteen sliders: which channels it leans on, which pole it leans toward, and how hard. Summed across all fifteen values, that is the demand profile.
The coherent goal is where the sliders would sit to answer that demand. It is scaled so the most-demanded channel lands around 7.6 on the ten-point scale — a lived-in engagement. A settled person runs no part of their processing at maximum, and the goal is built to the same limit.
Dissonance: demand against delivery
Dissonance is the mismatch between what your values ask of a channel and what that channel actually delivers. It comes in four shapes.
Opposition. A channel is pulled the opposite way from the pole your values ask for.
Shortfall. A channel your values lean on hardest sits far from where they ask, including the case where it sits in the dead zone — under 2.66 out of 10 — and cannot run at all.
Overdrive. A channel nothing asks for is welded near its rail, above 7.34, spending engagement your values never called for.
Binds. Two values you both hold strongly are in a named bind, where serving one fully makes the other harder to serve in the same act. Honesty against Loyalty is one. Control against Trust is another. Binds are specific and named; values pointing in different directions otherwise coexist, which is why a person can hold Nonviolence and Self-defense at the same time without being at war with themselves.
The engine also watches for a value set that pulls a single channel toward both poles at once. Inputs that disagree cancel, and the channel stalls.
The verdict is a ratio
Coherence and dissonance are both measured, and the verdict is their ratio. Ten to one or better reads as coherent. Seven reads as sound: real tension, carried. Four reads as strained, and below that as dissonant.
Carrying some dissonance is ordinary. Every one of the twelve classical archetypes carries a share of it, and so do the beacons. The reading distinguishes tension a character can hold from tension that is pulling it apart.
Where the tension lives decides how it paints. Values in a bind with each other, or pulling one channel toward both poles at once, raise a metallic sheen on the aura. A Chroma channel that contradicts the demand casts a photo-negative overlay of the affected hue. A Contrast channel that contradicts it casts a neon overlay. Overlays are painted on top, so the three base channels stay readable underneath.
Show dissonance paints those reads and prints the verdict. Leave it off and the app shows your colour and your place without comment. Either way the reading is computed, and it is always written into your export.
Lock moves every channel to the coherent goal, positions and ranks together, leaving your values untouched. It shows the expression those values would produce with nothing in the way.
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 a complete character whose values, ranks and weights sit 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 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 load its whole character into your sliders. The load is a copy; what you move afterwards stays yours.
The same position on the solid can be reached by different values held in different orders. The beacons are landmarks in a continuous space, and a configuration built from values no beacon uses is read by exactly the same rules.
The twelve archetypes, at the start of the story
The twelve classical types are written here as full configurations in the same fifteen-value, eleven-Chroma, eight-Contrast system, each set at the beginning of its journey, in the crisis the story opens on. The Hero with his fear unfelt and his course unquestioned. The Caregiver who cannot feel her own needs. The Creator who finishes nothing.
Turn on Show archetypes and they appear as diamonds at the positions their configurations produce. Clicking one loads it into your sliders and names its crisis and what the journey resolves.
Two kinds of crisis show up in the reading. Most are contradictions: the configuration is at war with itself, and the story erupts from inside. Three of them — the Ruler, the Magician and the Sage — are consistent and gripped instead: welded channels, frozen channels, values in a bind, all of it holding steady. Those are stable prisons, which is why those stories begin with a call, an intruder or a rebellion arriving from outside.
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.
Taking it with you
Export writes a JSON file with your values, ranks and weights, all nineteen channel positions and ranks, the placement, and the full dissonance reading. It also carries the definitions: what each of your chosen values means, what each slider measures and what its two poles are, and how the whole thing is read. The file explains itself to you or to any tool you take it to, and that extra material is ignored when you load the file back in.
Everything runs in your browser. Your configuration goes where you save it.
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 strains, 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, Chroma activation, Contrast expression, rank-opacity weighting, a demand-based coherence read, thirty-six named beacons, and twelve archetypes at their story-start crisis. Its strength is that the proposal is operational. Every visible behaviour — every colour, marker, overlay, beacon and verdict — has a rule that can be inspected, discussed, tested and improved.
Technical reference: open the implementation-level PDF.