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"Primal" Worldviews
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"Primal" Worldviews

Who are the optimists?

Sarah Constantin
Sep 6, 2022
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Share this post
"Primal" Worldviews
sarahconstantin.substack.com

There’s a fun new personality test making the rounds.

It’s based on the psychology research of Jer Clifton at UPenn, who’s been developing a new set of psychometric questionnaires based on asking people how they see “the world”, overall.

Do you think the world is a safe place or a dangerous place? Do you think people are mostly cooperative or mostly adversarial? Do you think the world is full of opportunities or mostly barren? Do you think the world is more stable or more chaotic? And so on.

The research team calls these “primal world beliefs”, or “primals” for short.

These questions overlap a lot with psychometric assessments of personality traits like extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. Unsurprisingly, neurotic people are more likely to see the world as a dangerous and hostile place.

So is the “primals” research direction just redundant with other personality and mood research? Or does it add something new?

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