It turns out that most people in our studies—and perhaps you, too—hold 22 distinct beliefs about the world as a whole. That’s a lot. Fortunately, most of these cluster into 3 overarching beliefs called Safe, Enticing, and Alive. In turn, these 3 overarching beliefs cluster into 1 overarching belief about whether the world is a fundamentally good or bad place, called Good. Researchers call these 26 beliefs primals or primal world beliefs.

How We Identified Primals

We began by carefully defining what does and does not count as a primal. We then conducted 10 projects to identify potential beliefs:

Textual Analysis

•  We analyzed 80,677 tweets about the world as a whole from a database of 2.24 billion tweets.
• We examined and organized 1,727 quotes from 358 of the most influential texts in global human history (treatises, sacred texts, films, political speeches, and novels).
• We classified the 840 most-used adjectives in contemporary American English based on a database of 560 million words.

Focus Groups

• We conducted 10 focus groups among American adherents of the four major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism).
• Partners at Tsinghua University in Beijing conducted 2 focus groups in Chinese contexts.

Literature Review

•  Five experts compiled a 415-page review of six academic disciplines: psychology, philosophy, political science, cultural anthropology, art history, and comparative religion.
• We conducted a systematic process to identify primals that are theoretically relevant to 24 character strengths and 10 positive emotions.

Conceptual Analysis 

•  We hosted a retreat at the University of Pennsylvania with some of the world’s top psychologists and thinkers. 
• Tsinghua partners in Beijing conducted expert interviews and hosted a similar retreat of eminent scholars in China.
• We managed a five-stage, iterative process to create a primals classification involving 75 drafts and input from 70 researchers around the world.

Through these 10 projects, we identified many candidates for primal world beliefs. Then we used a variety of statistical methods to determine how all these candidate primals clustered within actual people, which one’s were statistically redundant, which ones were not psychologically meaningful, and so forth.

In 2019, we published our results in Psychological Assessment, the world’s most prestigious psychology measurement journal, to demonstrate that we’re measuring something real. Our paper makes the following two conclusions:

• First, the Primals Inventory (the 99-question version) is a robust, scientifically validated measurement tool for the samples we examined (Americans)
• Second, primals may exert an enormous influence on human behavior.

Find the free full-text version of the foundational 2019 paper here.