Security: The Schwartz Value Type Explained

What Security Means in Schwartz's Value Framework

Security is one of the 10 universal value types in Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values. First mapped in 1992 and tested across 80+ countries, Schwartz's framework identifies values that organize human motivation in remarkably consistent patterns. Security specifically refers to the motivation to preserve stability, maintain order, and avoid threat. It's the pull toward safety, predictability, and group cohesion. When you choose the familiar over the novel, or opt for steady income over exciting risk, or prioritize your family's wellbeing over personal ambition, you're expressing security values.

In Schwartz's circumplex model, values are arranged in a circle showing which motivations naturally sit together and which naturally oppose each other. Security sits adjacent to Conformity and Tradition, values that also emphasize stability and social order. These three form what Schwartz calls the "Conservation" cluster. On the opposite side of the circle lies Openness to Change, which includes values like Self-direction and Stimulation. The tension here is real: a strong security motivation often means less room for novelty, risk-taking, and unpredictable change. You can hold both, but they pull in different directions.

How Security Shows Up in Daily Decisions

Security values drive thousands of small and large choices without you naming them. You keep your job even though it's dull because you know exactly what to expect and what you'll earn. You stay in the same town where your family is rooted rather than taking the promotion in a city where you'd know no one. You spend the evening with your partner instead of going to the music festival alone. You max out your emergency fund before putting money toward hobbies. You choose the doctor your parents recommend over researching an alternative. You avoid the fight with your boss because losing the job would destabilize everything. You say yes to the overtime because it secures the mortgage payment.

These are not selfish choices or small choices. They are how security values manifest in behaviour. The person operating from high security motivation is reliably trying to keep things intact, make things predictable, and reduce the variables that could go wrong. That has real worth. It also has a cost, and the cost appears in a specific way: you end up somewhere you didn't choose because you were protecting against somewhere you feared. The job becomes a cage. The town becomes a trap. The relationship becomes a safe harbour that's no longer a chosen one. The security was real. The cost was also real.

Security in Tension with Growth

The deepest friction in Schwartz's framework shows up between Security and Openness to Change. They are opposing motivations in the circumplex. If you are primarily driven by security, you will naturally resist the values that sit opposite: Self-direction (wanting to chart your own course), Stimulation (wanting novelty and challenge), and Hedonism (wanting pleasure and sensation). This is not failure. This is the structure of human motivation. You cannot weight both equally and have a coherent life.

The problem appears when you value security but life requires you to change. Your industry disrupts and you need to retrain. Your relationship needs you to risk vulnerability instead of managing everything. Your health improves only if you try something that might not work. Your potential exists only past the edge of what feels safe. In these moments, security values that were protective become limiting. The pattern keeps running because it has never been named: you choose safety, the outcome disappoints you, you feel trapped, so you choose safety again.

Understanding What You Actually Need

Security is not the problem. Neither is the impulse to protect what matters. The problem is operating from security values without knowing you are doing it. You make a choice that feels necessary, not realizing it's driven by a specific value type you haven't examined. You defend the choice as practical when it's actually protective. You stay in situations that feel manageable but increasingly empty because the alternative,change, visibility, unpredictability,triggers the deeper fear that security values were built to manage.

What changes is clarity. When you know that security is your priority, you can see the real tradeoff: stability in exchange for what? For growth foregone? For authenticity postponed? For relationships that are safe but not chosen? You can then ask whether that trade is still worth it. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the security was needed in that season, and now it's not. Sometimes you've been operating from a value you didn't actually choose, and naming it means you can finally choose something else.

The Schwartz framework is well-established because it works across cultures and across decades. It names the motivations that actually operate beneath your decisions. If security is yours, it's worth understanding exactly what you're securing yourself for, and what you're securing yourself against. The My Values assessment surfaces your value type, ranks how much each one matters to you, and shows you where your life aligns with your values and where it doesn't. That clarity is the starting point.