Why this exercise, and does it help?
A short background on where values card sorting comes from, what research says about values work in therapy and beyond, and a full reading list.
Where values card sorting comes from
Sorting cards
Learning about a person by having them sort cards goes back to William Stephenson, who proposed the idea in the 1930s and gave it its full form in 1953 as the "Q-sort": a person arranges a deck of statement cards along a continuum, from most like me to least like me, and the arrangement itself becomes data. Carl Rogers' research group at the University of Chicago quickly made this one of the first serious outcome measures in psychotherapy research. In the best-known study, clients sorted 100 self-descriptive cards twice, once for "how I see myself" and once for "how I would like to be," and the gap between the two sorts narrowed measurably over client-centered counseling (Butler & Haigh, 1954). Sorting cards to understand someone's inner world, in other words, came into clinical psychology largely through Rogers' group, and card sorts have been a fixture of counseling practice ever since, including a long run in career counseling (Osborn, Kronholz, & Finklea, 2015).
Studying values
The values side of the story has its own lineage. Milton Rokeach's The Nature of Human Values (1973) asked people to rank-order 36 values, in two lists of 18, rather than rate them, on the insight that trade-offs reveal priorities in a way ratings cannot; nearly everything sounds important until you have to put it above or below something else. Shalom Schwartz (1992) later showed that the structure of basic human values is remarkably consistent across cultures, testing his theory in 20 countries.
"Values clarification" also had a life in education: Raths, Harmin, and Simon's Values and Teaching (1966) popularized structured exercises for examining and choosing one's own values. Their definition of a value still resonates in therapy: something chosen freely from alternatives after weighing the consequences, prized, openly affirmed, and acted on repeatedly. The classroom movement faded by the early 1980s, partly under criticism that it could seem to treat all values as equally valid; Cuban (2025) gives a readable account of its rise and fall. Clinical values work today aims at something different: helping a person articulate and act on priorities they already hold, rather than teaching anyone what to value.
This deck
These threads meet in the deck used on this site. In 1983, William R. Miller, a psychologist at the University of New Mexico, described a different way of talking with problem drinkers, drawn from conversations with colleagues in Norway: rather than confronting people into change, the therapist draws out the person's own motivations (Miller, 1983). On sabbatical in Australia in 1989 he met Stephen Rollnick, who told him the approach had quietly caught on in British addiction treatment and urged him to write more. Their 1991 book gave Motivational Interviewing its definitive form, and values exploration has been part of it from the start: change becomes compelling when people connect it to what they already care about.
In 2001, Miller and his New Mexico colleagues Janet C'de Baca, Daniel B. Matthews, and Paula L. Wilbourne turned that idea into a concrete tool, the Personal Values Card Sort, created originally for work with people with substance use problems. They placed it in the public domain so it could be copied, adapted, and used freely, which is why exercises like this one can exist.
The deck itself is simple by design: 83 values, each card carrying one word or phrase (family, honesty, adventure, inner peace) with a one-line description of what it means, plus header cards for the piles and blank cards for anything the deck missed. The standard administration is the one this site follows: sort every card into Very Important, Important, or Not Important to me, then narrow the Very Important pile to a small, ranked set and talk about what those values mean and how they are being lived. Clinicians adapt it freely, which the public domain license invites: different pile counts, different final numbers, paper or screen, individuals or couples.
Does values work help? What the research shows
A fair question to ask of any exercise. The card sort itself is a reflection tool rather than a treatment, so the strongest evidence comes from the therapeutic approaches it belongs to and from research on values reflection more broadly. Across those literatures, the picture is consistent: helping people identify and act on their values is associated with benefits large enough to show up in meta-analyses.
Motivational Interviewing, where this deck was born
MI helps people resolve ambivalence about change by strengthening their own reasons for changing, and values exploration is one of its central tools: seeing the distance between what you care about most and how you are currently living is often what makes change feel worth it (Miller & Rollnick, 2023). The MI evidence base is large. A meta-analysis of 119 studies spanning 25 years found MI produced small but lasting effects across substance use, diet, exercise, and treatment engagement compared with no or minimal treatment, and performed on par with other established interventions (Lundahl et al., 2010). The Personal Values Card Sort itself continues to appear in current research; a 2024 study analyzed the values people expressed while completing this exact activity during MI sessions addressing drug use and sexual health (Starks et al., 2024).
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
In ACT, clarified values set the direction for "committed action," one of the model's six core processes: values tell you which way to move, especially when difficult thoughts and feelings are present (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis, 2006). A meta-analysis of 39 randomized controlled trials with 1,821 patients found ACT beat control conditions by a medium margin (Hedges' g = 0.57); in the trials that compared them directly, its results were statistically indistinguishable from those of established treatments for anxiety, depression, addiction, and somatic health problems (A-Tjak et al., 2015).
Writing about values, on its own, does something
Social psychologists have a confusing name for brief reflection on core values: "self-affirmation." Despite how it sounds, it has nothing to do with pep talks or complimenting yourself in the mirror. In these studies, people simply pick a value that matters to them and write for a few minutes about why it matters. That small act seems to steady a person's sense of themselves, and something unusual follows: defensiveness drops. People who write about a core value first are more open to threatening health information and more likely to follow through on change, with a meta-analysis of health studies finding modest but consistent effects on actual behavior (Epton, Harris, Kane, van Koningsbruggen, & Sheeran, 2015). A major review of this literature found the same small exercise paying off in classrooms, clinics, and couples research, and in some studies the benefits were still detectable months or years later (Cohen & Sherman, 2014). This literature is why the exercise on this site ends with a writing step rather than just a ranked list.
Values clarification beyond therapy
The same logic has been tested in medical decision-making. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 43 "values clarification methods" in randomized trials found that when patient decision aids include an explicit values exercise, people more often make choices that actually match their values, and they feel less conflicted while deciding (Witteman et al., 2021). The stakes there are concrete: surgery or watchful waiting, one treatment or another.
Why might sorting cards, specifically, help?
Several ingredients recur across these literatures. Forced trade-offs make priorities visible, the insight behind Rokeach's original ranking method. The person generates the answer themselves, which matters: in MI process research, the balance of clients' own speech for and against change predicts their outcomes (Magill et al., 2018). Naming and writing about values appears to consolidate them, per the self-affirmation work. And the format is engaging and concrete, which is much of why card sorts have endured in counseling for more than seventy years (Osborn et al., 2015).
The most direct way to judge it is firsthand: the sort itself takes about twenty minutes.
References & further reading
Peer-reviewed and professional sources first, then practitioner resources.
A-Tjak, J. G. L., Davis, M. L., Morina, N., Powers, M. B., Smits, J. A. J., & Emmelkamp, P. M. G. (2015). A meta-analysis of the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy for clinically relevant mental and physical health problems. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 84(1), 30–36.
39 randomized trials: ACT beat controls (g = 0.57); head-to-head comparisons with established treatments found no significant differences.
Butler, J. M., & Haigh, G. V. (1954). Changes in the relation between self-concepts and ideal concepts consequent upon client-centered counseling. In C. R. Rogers & R. F. Dymond (Eds.), Psychotherapy and personality change (pp. 55–75). University of Chicago Press.
The classic Q-sort outcome study from Carl Rogers' research program.
Cohen, G. L., & Sherman, D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333–371.
Review of self-affirmation research: writing about core values can reduce defensiveness and support change.
Epton, T., Harris, P. R., Kane, R., van Koningsbruggen, G. M., & Sheeran, P. (2015). The impact of self-affirmation on health-behavior change: A meta-analysis. Health Psychology, 34(3), 187–196.
Meta-analysis: brief values reflection produced modest but consistent improvements in actual health behavior.
Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25.
The standard reference on ACT's model, in which values guide committed action.
Lundahl, B. W., Kunz, C., Brownell, C., Tollefson, D., & Burke, B. L. (2010). A meta-analysis of motivational interviewing: Twenty-five years of empirical studies. Research on Social Work Practice, 20(2), 137–160.
119 studies: small but durable MI effects versus no or minimal treatment, on par with other active interventions.
Magill, M., Apodaca, T. R., Borsari, B., Gaume, J., Hoadley, A., Gordon, R. E. F., Tonigan, J. S., & Moyers, T. (2018). A meta-analysis of motivational interviewing process: Technical, relational, and conditional process models of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 86(2), 140–157.
How MI works: the balance of clients' own speech for and against change predicts outcomes.
Miller, W. R. (1983). Motivational interviewing with problem drinkers. Behavioural Psychotherapy, 11(2), 147–172.
The first description of Motivational Interviewing, the tradition this card sort comes from.
Miller, W. R., C'de Baca, J., Matthews, D. B., & Wilbourne, P. L. (2001). Personal Values Card Sort. University of New Mexico.
The instrument used on this site, hosted by UNM's Center on Alcohol, Substance use, And Addictions (CASAA). The authors placed it in the public domain.
Miller, W. R., & Rollnick, S. (2023). Motivational interviewing: Helping people change and grow (4th ed.). Guilford Press.
The foundational MI text, including the role of values in evoking motivation.
Osborn, D. S., Kronholz, J. F., & Finklea, J. T. (2015). Card sorts. In M. McMahon & M. Watson (Eds.), Career assessment (pp. 81–88). Sense Publishers.
A scholarly overview of card sorts as qualitative assessment, including their history since the early 1960s.
Raths, L. E., Harmin, M., & Simon, S. B. (1966). Values and teaching: Working with values in the classroom. Charles E. Merrill.
The book that launched the values clarification movement.
Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. Free Press.
Introduced the Rokeach Value Survey: rank-ordering 18 terminal and 18 instrumental values.
Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 25, pp. 1–65). Academic Press.
The cross-cultural theory of basic human values.
Starks, T. J., Stewart, J. L., Gupta, S. K., Hillesheim, J., & Cain, D. (2024). A qualitative analysis of shared values and motivation for change expressed by sexual minority men in relationships: Use of the Personal Values Card Sort activity during motivational interviewing sessions addressing drug use and sexual health. AIDS and Behavior, 28(9), 3080–3092.
A recent example of this exact card sort used in MI research.
Stephenson, W. (1953). The study of behavior: Q-technique and its methodology. University of Chicago Press.
The origin of Q methodology and the Q-sort.
Tyler, L. E. (1961). Research explorations in the realm of choice. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 8(3), 195–201.
Credited with introducing card sorts to career counseling.
Witteman, H. O., Ndjaboue, R., Vaisson, G., et al. (2021). Clarifying values: An updated and expanded systematic review and meta-analysis. Medical Decision Making, 41(7), 801–820.
43 values clarification methods in randomized trials: explicit values exercises led to more values-congruent choices and less decisional conflict.
Practitioner resources
Professional communities and overviews rather than peer-reviewed sources.
MINT (Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers) Original administration instructions (MINT) ACT overview (EFPT Psychotherapy Guidebook) Psychwire tool overview Share Collaborative on values across MI and ACT Larry Cuban on the rise and fall of classroom values clarification