Testing If Primal World Beliefs Reflect Experiences—Or at Least Some Experiences Identified ad hoc

Abstract

Do negative primal world beliefs reflect experiences such as trauma, crime, or low socioeconomic status? Clifton and colleagues recently suggested that primals-defined as beliefs about the general character of the world as a whole, such as the belief that the world is safe (vs. dangerous) and abundant (vs. barren)-may shape many of the most-studied variables in psychology. Yet researchers do not yet know why individuals adopt their primals nor the role of experience in shaping primals. Many theories can be called retrospective theories; these theories suggest that past experiences lead to the adoption of primals that reflect those experiences. For example, trauma increases the belief that the world is dangerous and growing up poor increases the belief that the world is barren. Alternatively, interpretive theories hold that primals function primarily as lenses on experiences while being themselves largely unaffected by them. This article identifies twelve empirical tests where each theory makes different predictions and hypothesizes that retrospective theories are typically less accurate than interpretive theories. I end noting that, even if retrospective theories are typically inaccurate, that does not imply experiences do not shape primals. I end by offering a conceptual architecture-the Cube Framework-for exploring the full range of human experience and suggest that, though psychologists have historically focused on negative, externally imposed experiences of short-duration (e.g., trauma), positive, internally driven, and longer-term experiences are also worth considering.

Negative Cognitions and Emotional Distress Following Job Loss: Development and Validation of the Beliefs About Loss of Work (BLOW) Scale

“…It is conceivable that these types of dysfunctional cognitions form the basis of an individual's view of the world, the self, and the others (Clifton, 2020). If a person believes the world is a dangerous place to live in and that one should always keep their guard up, there is an increased chance they also possess characteristics of neuroticism (Dweck, 2017).…”

Primal world beliefs correlate strongly but differentially with character strengths

“…Primals may be rather stable lenses through which individuals interpret the world and thus hardly malleable by new experiences. For example, one may expect that high income relates to seeing the world as a more abundant place, but this has not been substantiated by empirical data (Clifton, 2020c). On the other hand, we can already look back on literature that documents changes in beliefs that we may now label as primals, such as the findings discussed by Dweck (2017) and Beck (e.g., 1967Beck (e.g., , 2009.…”

“…Third, there is, to date, only sparse evidence that supports the idea that primals can be changed (Clifton, 2020c). Primals may be rather stable lenses through which individuals interpret the world and thus hardly malleable by new experiences.…”

Modeling Latent Dimensions of Human Beliefs

“…Indeed, human perceptions or general beliefs have been a long-running research topic for psychology and social science, with recent work turning to Twitter, among other sources, to better understand general categories of "primal world beliefs", or "primals". (Clifton et al 2019;Clifton 2020;Stahlmann et al 2020). In these studies, primal world beliefs were explored by having experts read through a large collection of texts comprising of sacred texts, novels, speeches, treaties, films text and thoroughly analyze human's major beliefs about the world.…”