Shalom H. Schwartz

Shalom H. Schwartz was born in 1936 in Hempstead

Schwartz was born in 1936 in the United States. His mother taught Hebrew and his father was a Conservative rabbi. As a youth he studied at a yeshiva for about two years.

He earned a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Columbia University and studied Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was also ordained as a rabbi. He completed a master's degree in social psychology at Columbia in 1962. In 1967 he received his PhD from the University of Michigan, with research on social obligation and altruistic behavior.

He then joined the sociology department of the University of Wisconsin and became a full professor in 1973. In 1979 he moved to Israel with his wife Pnina and their three children and joined the psychology department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He headed the department from 1984 to 1986.

In the 1980s he developed the Theory of Basic Human Values with Wolfgang Bilsky, along with scales to measure values. His value scales have been translated into over 50 languages. He was president of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology from 2004 to 2006.

After retiring, he continued his research on values. From 2011 to 2016 he was scientific supervisor of a research laboratory at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.