What do you actually value in research? (a tiny tool)

Do you know what your research values are? Would you rather get rich and work on a topic you hate, or take a pay cut to work on something you love?

Discussing such dilemmas is a great icebreaker — and a mirror. The original Would you rather? questions are Charlotte Range’s — thank you! To reflect both, I built Research Values, a web-based game (all data stays local).

It has two modes (and some field-specific questions):

1. A scored mode helps you better understand your trade-offs — curiosity vs real-world impact, rigor vs novelty, depth vs breadth, autonomy vs security, integrity vs expedience, and five more — and draws you a “research-values fingerprint,” flagging the axes where you genuinely split as live tensions rather than pretending to resolve them.
2. An icebreaker mode: two options, random order. Built for fun at lab retreats and seminars — or simply to replace small talk with meaningful-yet-fun discussions.

Happy self-exploration — and enjoy!