# Inside MindSpec: The Values and the Questions

*A Main Street Independent reference — a look under the hood of the MindSpec interview: the values it measures, the 0–9 scale and the simple math behind it, and the three rounds of questions that turn a person's reactions into a profile. Published under CC0.*

*In plain terms: this is what's actually inside — the list of values, how each one gets a number, and the kinds of questions that pin the numbers down.*

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## You cannot ask people their values

Ask someone directly what they value and the answer is useless: everyone says honesty, family, hard work. The trick — borrowed from how good personality surveys are built — is to never name the value at all. Describe a person, or a situation, and watch the reaction. From enough reactions, the value falls out. MindSpec is a structured questionnaire built entirely on that trick.

## The values it measures

About forty core values, grouped into families by the job each one does:

- **Appetite** — the pulls toward ease and stimulation: *comfort, novelty, pleasure.*
- **Social** — how the regard of others moves you: *approval, status,* and *tribalism* (the pull to back your own side and quietly filter evidence along team lines).
- **Fear** — what you flinch from: *humiliation, abandonment.*
- **Aspiration** — what you reach for: *truth, craft* (work that meets its own standard, watched or not), *calling* (work whose point is bigger than you).
- **Moral** — how you treat others: *harmlessness, kindness, fairness, liberty, authority,* and *ferocity* (intense force, available when something needs defending and held when it does not).
- **Relational** — the bonds: *protective love, intimacy, mentorship.*
- **Self-maintenance** — how you hold yourself together: *self-preservation, self-image, consistency.*
- **Meta** — how you watch your own mind: the *witness* (catching yourself building a case for what you already wanted) and *skepticism.*
- **Vitality** — your stance toward being alive: *curiosity, playfulness, wonder, trust, hope, gratitude.*

A second set covers the darker patterns — contempt, entitlement, cruelty, and their kin — used mainly to build a fictional character honestly, not to describe a real person.

Each value also carries its **near enemy**: the selfish thing that masquerades as it. Self-righteousness wears truth's clothes. Strategic niceness wears kindness's. Perfectionism wears craft's. Much of the instrument's care goes into telling the genuine article from its counterfeit — because the counterfeit is exactly what people most want to claim.

## The 0–9 scale, and the lean

Each value gets two numbers. A **weight from 0 to 9** for how strongly it governs you — 0 is switched off, 9 is non-negotiable. And a **lean**, running from purely self-serving to purely other-serving, marking which way the value points.

The weights are made concrete with anchors, so a number means the same thing to two different people. Take *comfort* — the pull toward ease:

- At **2**, nearly monkish; discomfort is tolerated easily.
- At **5**, rests when tired, pushes when it matters.
- At **8**, ends the work early and calls the ease "self-care."

Every value is anchored like this. Anchors are what turn a vague dial into a number two strangers would set the same way.

## The three rounds of questions

**Round one — portraits.** Short descriptions of a person for whom one value is central, with the value never named. You rate how much each is like you, from "not like me at all" to "very much like me." Here is the portrait for *truth*:

> *Accurate understanding matters to this person even when the truth is uncomfortable. They will say the thing no one in the room wants said, if they think it's true. When they realize they have been wrong about something, they say so, even when doing so is costly to their standing. They are suspicious of their own conclusions when those conclusions are convenient.*

One portrait per value gives a first reading across the whole set.

**Round two — forced choices.** This is the round that does the real work. Two values are put in direct conflict and you have to pick one. A colleague you respect says something false and wants you to agree: keep the peace, or say the true thing? In the abstract you can claim both honesty and the desire to be liked; here you cannot have both, and which one you reach for shows which actually outranks the other. Harder versions stack three or more values into a single situation, so the instrument can see not just which value wins a duel but how a whole coalition sorts itself out.

**Round three — pressure tests.** The hardest situations, aimed only at the few values that might be truly load-bearing — the ones a person would hold even when holding them costs them badly. These separate values that are merely strong from values that are non-negotiable.

## The non-negotiable few

Most values are simply strong or weak by degree. A handful sit at the very top, at 9, and behave differently: they do not bend under pressure, and they are not quietly rewritten by ordinary experience the way the rest are. These are a person's — or a character's — constitution. For this publication's voices, four are constitutional for every one of them: truth, harmlessness, fairness, and the discipline of seeing what is actually there rather than what one wishes were there. (See [Voice Architecture: The Pen-Name System](/methodology/docs/voice-architecture).) Everything above the constitution is what makes one voice different from the next.

## Built to be fair to anyone

A measuring instrument is only as trustworthy as its neutrality, and the obvious danger is that it quietly measures everyone against its own author. So MindSpec was audited for exactly that and corrected: about half its default settings were reset toward a general-population middle, and wording that assumed the author's particular life — a writer's vocabulary, a contemplative's frame of reference — was stripped out, so a portrait reads the same to a tradesperson and a monk. The goal is an instrument that reports what *you* value, not how closely you happen to resemble the person who built it.

[The full instrument](/papers/mind/mindspec-complete-instrument) — every value with its definition and anchors, and every question across the three rounds — is public domain, free to read, run, and adapt. What it produces, and why a mind can be measured this way at all, are the subjects of its companion papers: [MindSpec: The Values Interview](/papers/mind/mindspec-values-interview) and [The Parliament of Mind](/papers/mind/parliament-of-mind).

*Main Street Independent — CC0 / public domain. Copy, adapt, and reuse freely.*