Hello!

How have you been?

I’ve been getting ready for Thanksgiving, which I will spend this year in the low country near Beaufort, South Carolina. We’re going to fry a turkey and prepare a low country boil in the same pot. How wonderful. 🦃🦐🦀

OK, here’s what I have for you today:

• One big thing. A tour of the primal beliefs that shape your world; the science behind them; what they predict; how to measure your own; and how these deep assumptions shift over time. 👓

• You have to check this out. Sometimes a video works better. 📺

Let’s jump in! 🦘

1️⃣ ONE BIG THING

The primal world beliefs framework.

Long before philosophers debated human nature, they debated the nature of world itself.

Heraclitus saw constant change, Pythagoras saw beauty, and others saw suffering, order, conflict, justice, or indifference.

How can our greatest thinkers look at the exact same world and reach such contradictory conclusions?

In last week’s letter, I wrote about the “lenses” you use to interpret the world — the quiet assumptions working in the background of your attention.

These lenses shape far more of our experience than we tend to admit. They influence what we expect, what we fear, and what we believe is possible in life.

“You and I could be sitting next to each other. We could be from the same town. We could even be siblings who grew up with the same parents,” Jer Clifton says. “And yet we could dramatically disagree about the sort of world this is.”

Historically, psychology didn’t spend much time on this. It focused on personality traits, emotions, relationships, and behavior — everything happening inside or between people.

Primals are, in a sense, a priori. They come before almost everything psychology usually measures.

Sounds like an idea worth knowing more about, right?

A scientific answer to an ancient question.

In 2014, at the University of Pennsylvania, Clifton began the first systematic attempt to identify and measure people's beliefs about the world itself. This work is now housed within the UPenn Primals Project.

Instead of guessing the list, he collected it empirically — from hundreds of influential texts, 80,000 tweets starting with “The world is…,” commonly used world-describing adjectives, and thousands of survey responses.

Only after gathering all of that language did he and his team run the statistical analyses. The point was to let the underlying structure reveal itself rather than impose a theory from above. It took five years.

“We are trying to study world beliefs to figure out which ones tend to hurt you and which ones tend to help you, regardless of which one is true,” says Clifton. “We call these beliefs primal world beliefs, or primals. You can see our work as an attempt to figure out what are the basic underlying dimensions of worldview.”

The data converged on a stable pattern: 26 distinct beliefs organized into a simple three-layer framework.

“Moreover, the researchers found that each primal belief has its polar opposite, like the two ends of a teeter-totter. People are oriented – some more and some less – toward one end of the continuum or the other.”

The analysis uncovered several surprises:

1. These beliefs are stable across time – as stable as personality traits such as extraversion. (But they can be modified. Keep reading for more on this.)

2. You can’t determine someone’s world beliefs just by looking at them – i.e., these beliefs are seemingly unrelated to demographics such as gender, race, ethnicity or income.

3. A person’s primal world beliefs are massively predictive of how they live their life.

The Primal World Beliefs

The framework has three levels:

1. One primary belief at the top.

2. Three major secondary dimensions beneath it.

3. And 26 more specific beliefs beneath those dimensions.

1. The Primary Belief: Good vs. Bad

At the highest level sits a simple but powerful question:

Is the world basically good, or basically bad?

This isn’t about daily mood or whether you think life is easy. It’s the background sense of whether the world is, on balance, a place worth engaging with… a place where life tends to work, or a place you brace against.

This primary belief is the broadest filter in the entire system, a kind of quiet thesis about reality that sets the tone for everything underneath it.

2. The Three Secondary Dimensions

Beneath the primary belief are three major dimensions, the big organizing themes that shape how the world shows up to us. They work like dials, influencing what we expect from people, events, and daily life. The Primals Project explains:

• Safe vs. Dangerous. People who see the world as safe see a world of cooperation, comfort, stability, and few threats? Those who see the world as dangerous see one infused with misery, decay, and brutality.

• Enticing vs. Dull. Those who see the world as enticing see the world as a beautiful place with treasure around every corner. Those who see the world as dull see an ugly and boring world where exploration is unlikely to result in anything.

• Alive vs. Mechanistic. People who see the world as alive see life as a relationship with an active universe that plans, reacts, talks to us, and wants our help. Those who see the world as mechanistic see the universe as a mindless machine with no plans or desires.

3. The 26 Tertiary Beliefs — The Detailed Texture of a Worldview

Under each secondary dimension are more specific beliefs—the everyday, unnoticed expectations: Do things make sense, or do they fall apart? Do people cooperate or compete? Does life reward effort or ignore it?

Five additional beliefs sit outside these clusters but meaningfully shape how the world feels.

Here is the full structure visually:

I created a detailed description of all of 26 tertiary beliefs (e.g., is the world just or unjust, interesting or boring). It is a bit long, so have included that at the very end of this letter if you are interested in reading more.

Why the primals predict so much.

The primals influence what we notice, what we expect, what we fear, and what we assume is possible. They color our explanations for why things happen and guide the reactions that follow. They are quiet, stable filters, and those filters end up steering large parts of emotional life and behavior.

The research behind this is unusually strong. Across numerous large samples — police officers, soldiers, attorneys, and more — negative primal beliefs (i.e., the world is dangerous, dull, and/or mechanistic) almost never correlate with positive life outcomes. In 99.7% of these observed relationships, negative primals were linked to measurably worse life outcomes, such as job satisfaction, depression, negative emotions, and life satisfaction.

A darker worldview doesn’t protect people. It strains them. (See this research paper for more: “Parents think—incorrectly—that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is likely best for them.”)

The primary belief — whether the world is fundamentally Good or Bad — carries one of the strongest relationships in the entire model.

The foundational research done on primals found this core belief is very strongly correlated with well-being (r = .66). People high in Bad-World beliefs tend to feel that happiness is unlikely or fleeting because the world itself seems tilted against them.

That expectation becomes self-reinforcing.

The secondary dimensions show similarly strong relationships:

• Enticing correlates with curiosity (r = .61) and gratitude (r = .69). People who see the world as dull are far less likely to seek out new experiences (r = –.58).

• Safe predicts interpersonal trust (r = .52). A Dangerous-World belief primes vigilance rather than connection.

• Alive connects strongly with purpose. A strictly mechanistic view of the world often goes hand in hand with the sense that life lacks meaning.

One of the most important findings is that primary beliefs can explain more variance in well-being than the “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The primals work suggests that many personality traits, including those categorized within the Big Five, may actually be "context-specific reactions" to underlying perceptions of the world (where we think we are), rather than pure expressions of "who we are" (which personality traits generally measure).

Personality still matters, but primal beliefs help explain why certain personality patterns appear in the first place. They are not descriptions of who you are. They are expectations about the world you think you’re living in.

And because these expectations guide how reality feels, they end up shaping life in profound ways.

Here’s the real eye-opener: As Clifton says, it’s tempting to assume that “people who have crappy lives are going to see the world as a crappy place and be depressed—gosh, why do we need all these researchers to do all this nonsense?”

But as he explains, the data shows “that’s just objectively false. We find that lots of people with amazing lives see the world as a bad place, and lots of people with objectively really bad lives see the world as a really good place.”

Discover your own primals.

If you want to understand how you see the world, you can measure your own primal beliefs. The assessment is free, and the full 99-question version provides the most accurate picture. I recommend it over the short one.

You can take it here.

Most people recognize themselves instantly — not because their results are surprising, but because they finally have language for patterns they’ve carried for years.

Once a belief is named, you start noticing where it shows up. You notice the expectations you bring to conversations, or the assumptions you make in moments of uncertainty.

Can primals change?

Primal beliefs are steady, but they are not immovable. They don’t swing with the mood, and they rarely shift quickly. Most form early and then hold steady across long stretches of life.

But they can change when people repeatedly encounter experiences that contradict their expectations.

Awareness is often the first step. When you can see a belief as a lens rather than a fact, you have just enough distance to question whether it still fits. And while no interventions are designed specifically to shift primal beliefs, many established techniques overlap with the same mechanisms: cognitive reframing, strengths-based approaches, meaning-making practices, and certain forms of therapy.

Change usually starts small. A moment of ease in a situation you expected to be hard. A moment of goodwill in a world you thought was indifferent. A decision that turns out better than you feared. These small disconfirmations accumulate and loosen the grip of an old belief.

The research is still young, but the evidence so far suggests this: primal beliefs can move when experience consistently pushes against them. They’re stable, but not fixed.

The old question, seen anew.

As I asked last week: What sort of world is this?

Philosophers debated it for centuries, each offering their own sweeping interpretation. Clifton’s work doesn’t replace those ideas. It explains the assumptions behind them and the assumptions behind the ones we each carry.

The framework gives you a way to see the architecture of your own worldview: the broad strokes, the smaller pieces, the patterns that shape how reality appears.

With the primals framework, you can see our own lenses. You can see the part of you that sees.

Some of you may recognize this idea from meditative practices. When you focus on your own awareness, you can begin to wonder, “Who is this observing the observer?”

Most people notice their thoughts and reactions, not the assumptions underneath them. Primals are the “seer behind the seeing” — the background interpretations shaping the foreground of experience.

Thanks for reading. As a reminder, the full list of tertiary primals is below.

I’m taking next Sunday off for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.

See you back here in two weeks!

Kevin

The Tertiary Primal Beliefs

Below are the 26 world beliefs that add detail to the three secondary dimensions. Each belief provides a more specific way people interpret reality within the broader categories of Safe, Enticing, and Alive. Understanding these beliefs helps explain how individuals develop unique and nuanced worldviews.

A. Safe vs. Dangerous

• Intentional vs. Random. Do things tend to happen for reasons, or do events feel accidental and unstructured?

• Just vs. Unjust. Do outcomes usually unfold fairly, or does life feel stacked or arbitrary?

• Cooperative vs. Competitive. Is the world a place where people naturally help one another, or where everyone fends for themselves?

• Harmless vs. Threatening. Does the world feel basically safe unless proven otherwise, or like something you must guard against?

• Stable vs. Chaotic. Do things hold together reliably, or do they fall apart easily?

• Satisfying vs. Depriving. Does the world tend to meet your basic needs, or does it withhold what matters most?

B. Enticing vs. Dull

• Interesting vs. Boring. Does the world naturally draw your attention, or is curiosity effortful?

• Beautiful vs. Ugly. Do you regularly notice beauty, or does it feel rare?

• Rich vs. Bland. Does the world seem full of depth and texture, or simple and flat?

• Altruistic vs. Selfish. Do people generally care about one another, or look out for themselves first?

• Pleasurable vs. Painful. Is daily life more often enjoyable or uncomfortable?

• Rewarding vs. Punishing. Do your efforts usually pay off, or does the world feel indifferent to what you put in?

C. Alive vs. Mechanistic

• Meaningful vs. Meaningless. Does life feel infused with purpose, or empty of it?

• Intentional vs. Arbitrary (World-Level). Do events seem guided by underlying reasons, or do they just unfold?

• Fateful vs. Coincidental. Does life follow larger patterns, or is it governed by chance?

• Spiritual vs. Material. Is there more to the world than what can be measured, or is reality strictly physical?

• Sensitive vs. Indifferent. Does the world respond to your actions, or remain unmoved?

• Improving vs. Declining. Is the world getting better over time, or worse?

D. Independent Primals

• Acceptable vs. Rotten. Is the world basically okay, or fundamentally broken?

• Simple vs. Complex. Is the world easy to understand, or intricate and layered?

• Easy vs. Hard. Do things tend to come together with reasonable effort, or is everything an uphill climb?

• Small vs. Vast. Does the world feel navigable and intimate, or expansive beyond grasp?

• Interconnected vs. Fragmented. Do things feel linked and coherent, or scattered and separate?

These beliefs rarely operate in isolation. Most people hold a consistent pattern across clusters — a kind of cognitive fingerprint — that shapes how the world appears to them. These clusters include primary, secondary, and tertiary beliefs; tertiary beliefs are subtle, often unconscious assumptions that influence our day-to-day judgments. Those patterns influence what we expect from life, where we place our attention, and how we interpret the very same events differently from others.