The discovery problem
The previous lesson established a critical distinction: the values you state and the values your behavior reveals are often different. Stated values are what you claim matters. Revealed values are what your actions demonstrate actually matters. The gap between the two is where most people live — narrating one set of priorities while enacting another.
This lesson addresses the obvious next question: if your values are not what you think they are, how do you find out what they actually are?
The answer is not more thinking. It is structured reflection — a disciplined examination of the evidence your life has already produced. Your values are not inventions. They are not things you choose from a menu or construct from first principles. They are patterns already embedded in your behavior, your emotional responses, and your consistent priorities across different contexts and life stages. The task is not to create values. The task is to make the values you already hold visible to yourself.
This distinction — between inventing and discovering — changes the entire nature of the project. If values were invented, you could simply decide what to value and start. But values are discovered, which means you need a method for detection. You need a way to examine the evidence of your own life with enough rigor to see what is actually there rather than what you want to be there.
Why raw introspection fails
The most natural approach to discovering your values is to sit quietly and ask yourself: what do I value? This feels like it should work. You are the person living your life. You have privileged access to your own mind. Surely you can simply look inward and report what you find.
The research says otherwise. In 1977, psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published a landmark paper — "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes" — that challenged the reliability of introspective access. Across a series of experiments, they demonstrated that when people are asked to explain why they made a particular choice or felt a particular way, they frequently confabulate. They produce plausible-sounding explanations that have no relationship to the actual causes of their behavior. Nisbett and Wilson concluded that people have "little or no introspective access to higher order cognitive processes." We can observe the contents of our consciousness — our feelings, our sensory experiences — but the processes that generate those contents are largely opaque to us.
This finding has direct implications for values discovery. When you sit down and ask yourself what you value, you are asking an introspective question about a higher-order cognitive process — the process by which you prioritize, allocate resources, and make trade-offs. According to Nisbett and Wilson's research, you are likely to produce an answer that reflects your theory about what you value rather than an accurate report of what actually drives your behavior. You will retrieve culturally approved values — integrity, family, growth — because those are the values your social environment has taught you to claim. The values that actually organize your behavior may be entirely different, and they may be invisible to raw introspection precisely because they operate below the level of conscious access.
This does not mean introspection is useless. It means introspection alone is insufficient. You need a method that supplements the unreliability of direct self-report with more reliable sources of evidence.
The values clarification tradition
The most developed methodology for values discovery comes from the values clarification movement, originating with Louis Raths, Merrill Harmin, and Sidney Simon in their 1966 book Values and Teaching. Raths proposed seven criteria that distinguish a genuine value from a mere preference, belief, or aspiration. These criteria fall into three categories: choosing, prizing, and acting.
Choosing requires that the value be chosen freely, from alternatives, after thoughtful consideration of the consequences of each alternative. A value imposed by authority or adopted without awareness of alternatives is not a value in this framework — it is a conformity.
Prizing requires that you cherish the value and are willing to publicly affirm it. If you hold a priority but would be embarrassed to state it openly, the values clarification framework questions whether it has been fully integrated as a value.
Acting requires that the value be expressed in behavior repeatedly, as a pattern. A one-time action does not constitute a value. Values show up as consistencies — the same priority enacted across different situations over time.
Simon, Howe, and Kirschenbaum expanded this framework in their 1972 Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies, which provided dozens of structured exercises designed to help people move beyond stated preferences to discovered values. The exercises share a common structure: they present situations that force trade-offs, reveal priorities through choice rather than declaration, and use behavioral evidence rather than self-report as the primary data source.
The values clarification framework matters for this lesson because it shifts the method of values discovery from introspection ("what do I think I value?") to evidence examination ("what do my choices, emotional reactions, and behavioral patterns reveal?"). The seven criteria provide a test: if something you claim to value was not freely chosen, is not something you are willing to affirm, and does not show up as a behavioral pattern — then whatever it is, it is not functioning as a value in your life.
Schon's reflective practice: turning experience into knowledge
The method of reflection itself has been rigorously examined. Donald Schon, in The Reflective Practitioner (1983), distinguished between two forms of reflection that are essential for values discovery.
Reflection-on-action is retrospective. You examine a past experience — a decision you made, a situation you handled, a period of your life — and extract the patterns, assumptions, and priorities that were operating beneath the surface. Most values reflection is reflection-on-action. You look back at what you did, how you felt, and what you prioritized, and you use that retrospective examination to identify the values that were driving behavior you may not have been aware of at the time.
Reflection-in-action is concurrent. It happens during the experience itself, when something surprises you or disrupts your expectations. Schon described this as the moment when a practitioner's tacit knowing-in-action encounters a situation that does not fit — a result that is unexpected, a feeling that is inappropriate to the context, a reaction that is stronger than the situation warrants. That surprise is a signal. Something in the situation is touching a value, either honoring it or violating it, and the surprise reveals the value's presence.
For values discovery, reflection-in-action is particularly valuable because it catches values in the act of operating. When you notice yourself becoming unexpectedly angry during a team meeting, that anger is not random. Something in the meeting violated a value you hold. If you can pause — even briefly — and ask "what is being violated here?", you have a chance to identify a value that might never surface in retrospective reflection because it operates so automatically that you never notice it during calm, deliberate self-examination.
The combination of both forms produces the most accurate values map. Reflection-on-action gives you the broad patterns — the values that show up across months and years of behavioral evidence. Reflection-in-action gives you the acute signals — the values that reveal themselves in moments of emotional intensity.
Narrative identity: your story reveals your values
Dan McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has spent decades studying what he calls narrative identity — the internalized and evolving life story that each person constructs to make sense of their experience. In his research, published across numerous papers and books including The Redemptive Self (2006), McAdams demonstrates that the stories people tell about their lives are not neutral recollections. They are value-laden constructions that reveal what matters most to the narrator.
McAdams identifies specific narrative patterns that encode values. Redemption sequences — stories where negative experiences are transformed into positive outcomes — reveal values around growth, resilience, and the belief that suffering can be meaningful. Contamination sequences — stories where positive experiences are ruined by negative turns — reveal anxieties about what can be lost, which is itself a signal about what is valued. Agency themes — stories emphasizing personal control, achievement, and self-determination — reveal values around autonomy and competence. Communion themes — stories emphasizing connection, care, and belonging — reveal values around relationship and service.
The practical application for values discovery is this: the stories you tell about yourself, especially the stories you tell repeatedly, are encoded value statements. If you consistently narrate your career as a story of overcoming obstacles through persistence, you are revealing that persistence is a core value. If you narrate your relationships as stories of mutual growth, you are revealing that development through connection is a core value. If your stories consistently feature moments where you stood alone against a group, you are revealing that individual conviction matters more to you than social harmony.
The narrative approach adds a dimension that behavioral analysis misses. Behavior shows you what you do. Narrative shows you how you interpret what you do — and that interpretation reveals the evaluative framework through which you assign meaning to your experience. Two people can perform the same action — leaving a stable job to start a business — and tell completely different stories about it, because the action serves different values. One tells a story of liberation (valuing autonomy). The other tells a story of service (valuing impact). The behavior is identical. The underlying value is not. Narrative analysis reveals the difference.
The three evidence streams
Combining these research traditions produces a practical methodology for values discovery that does not depend on the unreliability of raw introspection. The method uses three independent evidence streams, each providing a different form of data about your actual values.
Behavioral evidence
Your calendar, your bank statements, your browser history, your time allocation — these are the least distorted records of your priorities. Unlike self-reports, behavioral records cannot be retrospectively edited to match your self-image. If you spent four hours this week on creative writing and forty minutes on exercise, that ratio says something about relative priorities that no amount of claiming "health is my top value" can override.
The key to reading behavioral evidence is looking for patterns across time, not individual data points. A single afternoon spent helping a friend move does not establish a value. Three years of consistently prioritizing other people's needs over your own deadlines does. The value shows up in the pattern, not the instance.
Emotional evidence
Emotions are value signals. Every emotional response contains information about what matters to you. Anger signals a boundary violation — something you value is being transgressed. Joy signals alignment — something you value is being honored. Resentment signals a sustained mismatch between what you value and what you are getting. Guilt signals that you have acted against something you value. Envy signals that someone else has something you value but do not have.
The emotional evidence stream requires honest examination rather than emotional management. The question is not "should I feel this way?" but "what does this feeling tell me about what I value?" A surprising emotional reaction — anger at a compliment, sadness after a promotion, excitement about a setback — is especially informative because the surprise indicates a value you had not consciously recognized.
Counterfactual evidence
Imagined futures reveal values through the mechanism of emotional pull and resistance. When you imagine a life optimized for one value at the expense of others — maximum financial security but no creative expression, maximum social connection but no solitude, maximum achievement but no family — the emotional response to each scenario tells you where the genuine priorities lie.
The counterfactual method is valuable precisely because it forces trade-offs. When you ask "what do I value?" in the abstract, you can list everything — health, family, career, creativity, adventure. When you imagine a future where you can only have two of those five, the ranking reveals itself. The resistance you feel when contemplating the sacrifice of a particular value is proportional to how deeply you hold that value.
Writing as a reflective instrument
James Pennebaker's research on expressive writing, beginning with his seminal 1986 study and continuing through decades of subsequent work, demonstrates that the act of writing about emotional experiences produces measurable changes in understanding. In a 2018 review published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, Pennebaker reported that the benefits of expressive writing are mediated by specific linguistic patterns — particularly the increased use of cognitive processing words like "realize," "understand," "because," and "reason." People who improved through writing were constructing coherent narratives from fragmented experience, and that construction process produced genuine insight.
For values discovery, writing serves as a reflection technology. The act of putting experience into words forces a level of examination that thinking alone does not produce. When you think about your values, you can hold contradictory ideas simultaneously without noticing the contradiction. When you write about your values, the contradictions become visible on the page. The sentence that does not follow from the previous sentence. The claim about what matters that is contradicted by the example you just gave. Writing externalizes the reflection, making it inspectable.
The Pennebaker protocol — writing continuously for fifteen to twenty minutes about emotionally significant experiences — can be adapted for values discovery. Instead of writing about trauma, write about decisions. Write about the decision to take this job instead of that one. Write about the decision to end a relationship. Write about the decision to move to a new city. As you write, pay attention to the reasons you give. The reasons that feel true — that carry emotional weight rather than logical convenience — point toward values. The reasons that feel rehearsed — that sound like justifications you have given before — point toward rationalizations that may be masking a different underlying value.
The phenomenological stance
There is a deeper methodological principle underlying all of these approaches, drawn from the phenomenological tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl. Husserl proposed a method called the epoché — a deliberate suspension of assumptions about the world in order to examine experience as it actually presents itself, rather than as we expect it to present itself.
Applied to values discovery, the epoché means setting aside what you think you know about your values in order to examine the evidence fresh. It means bracketing the narrative you have been telling about yourself — "I am a person who values family above all else" — and looking at what your actual experience, examined without that narrative filter, reveals. The goal is not to debunk your existing self-understanding. The goal is to prevent your existing self-understanding from distorting your examination of the evidence.
This is harder than it sounds because values are deeply tied to identity. The values you claim are part of how you experience yourself as a person. Questioning whether you actually hold those values feels like questioning who you are. The phenomenological stance asks you to tolerate that discomfort temporarily — to hold your identity claims lightly enough that the evidence can speak without being filtered through your need to confirm your existing self-story.
Your Third Brain as reflection partner
AI systems represent a new category of reflection tool — one that can engage in structured dialogue, surface patterns in data you provide, and ask questions designed to probe beneath your initial responses. Tools like Stanford d.school's Riff chatbot are designed specifically to deepen reflective practice by generating personalized follow-up questions based on a user's initial input, pushing past the surface-level responses that raw introspection tends to produce.
The value of AI-assisted reflection for values discovery is not that the AI knows your values better than you do. It does not. The value is structural: the AI enforces the iterative questioning that reflective practice requires and that most people abandon after the first comfortable answer. When you tell an AI reflection tool "I value authenticity," it can ask "describe a situation where you chose convenience over authenticity — what happened?" That follow-up question is exactly the kind of probe that surfaces the gap between stated and revealed values, and it is exactly the kind of question most people do not ask themselves.
The risk of AI-assisted reflection is also worth noting. An AI trained on cultural norms will tend to validate culturally approved values, potentially reinforcing the very aspiration-retrieval problem that makes raw introspection unreliable. The AI is useful as a structured dialogue partner — a mechanism for enforcing depth and iteration in the reflection process — not as a values authority. Your values are in your evidence. The AI helps you examine that evidence more carefully than you would alone.
The iterative nature of values discovery
Schwartz's refined theory of basic individual values, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012, identifies nineteen distinct values arranged on a circular motivational continuum. The theory demonstrates that values are not independent — they exist in systematic relationships of compatibility and conflict. Valuing self-direction (autonomy in thought and action) is compatible with valuing stimulation (excitement and novelty) but conflicts with valuing conformity (adherence to social norms). Valuing benevolence (care for close others) is compatible with valuing universalism (care for all people) but conflicts with valuing power (control over resources and people).
This structure means that values discovery is inherently iterative. You cannot identify your values in a single session because the relationships between values only become visible as you accumulate evidence across different contexts. The value of autonomy might dominate in your career decisions but recede in your family relationships, where the value of benevolence takes priority. A single reflection session captures one slice. The full picture emerges over multiple sessions, each examining different life domains and different time periods.
The practical implication is that your first values reflection is a draft, not a final answer. The values you identify today will be tested against new evidence as you pay closer attention to your behavioral patterns, emotional responses, and narrative themes. Some values will be confirmed and sharpened. Others will be revealed as aspirations you have been performing rather than priorities you have been living. And some values — the ones you discover with genuine surprise — will emerge only after several rounds of reflection, because they were so deeply embedded in your behavior that you mistook them for personality traits rather than recognizing them as values.
Where this leads
You now have a methodology. Values are discovered, not invented. Raw introspection is unreliable because higher-order cognitive processes are opaque to direct self-examination. But structured reflection — using behavioral evidence, emotional evidence, counterfactual scenarios, narrative analysis, and written examination — bypasses the limitations of introspection by grounding discovery in data rather than self-report.
The values clarification tradition provides the framework: genuine values are freely chosen, prized, and acted upon as a pattern. Schon's reflective practice provides the method: examine experience both retrospectively and in the moment. McAdams's narrative identity research provides the lens: the stories you tell about yourself encode the values you hold. Pennebaker's expressive writing research provides the instrument: writing externalizes reflection and makes contradictions visible. And the phenomenological tradition provides the stance: set aside what you think you know in order to see what is actually there.
The next lesson — L-0624, Peak Experiences Reveal Values — takes one element of the emotional evidence stream and examines it in depth. Peak experiences — moments of deep satisfaction, engagement, and fulfillment — are concentrated value signals. They compress more information about what you truly care about into a single experience than weeks of ordinary behavior can reveal. If this lesson gave you the general method for values discovery, the next lesson gives you the most powerful single probe in that method.
Sources:
- Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). "Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes." Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259.
- Raths, L. E., Harmin, M., & Simon, S. B. (1966). Values and Teaching: Working with Values in Classrooms. Charles E. Merrill.
- Simon, S. B., Howe, L. W., & Kirschenbaum, H. (1972). Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students. Hart Publishing.
- Schon, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
- McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). "Narrative Identity." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233-238.
- Pennebaker, J. W. (2018). "Expressive Writing in Psychological Science." Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 226-229.
- Schwartz, S. H. (2012). "Refining the Theory of Basic Individual Values." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 663-688.