The VALS is a personality type model originally developed in 1976 by futurist Arnold Mitchell. Mitchell created VALS to explain changing U.S. values and lifestyles in the 1970s. VALS was formally inaugurated as an Stanford Research Institute (SRI) product in 1978 and was cited by Advertising Age as "one of the ten top market research breakthroughs of the 1980s." In 1989, VALS was updated by a team of experts from SRI International, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley,
SRI says this about VALS: "The basic tenet of VALS is that people express their personalities through their behaviors. VALS specifically defines consumer segments on the basis of those personality traits that affect behavior in the marketplace. Rather than looking at what people do and segregating people with like activities, VALS uses psychology to segment people according to their distinct personality traits. The personality traits are the motivation—the cause."
The eleven VALS personality types are shown in the illustration at the top of this post. Like the 16 personality types of Jung (best known in the books Please Understand Me and Know Your Type ; or the 9 Enneagrams.
You can find out which the eleven VALS people you are by taking a Free Test from SRI. When you get done, you can find out more about each of those eleven types in the diamond grid by going to SRI's version of the grid and cliding on each of the sections here.
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