My most recent piece at Psych Today…

FUNDING OPP: $5k honoraria for PhDs/PhD students for lit reviews on self beliefs studied in 8 disciplines: Asian Studies, African Studies, Latin American Studies, Philosophy, Art History, Comparative Religion, Anthropology, and Literature. For details: tinyurl.com/y5e37f33

Job-Opportunity: We are hiring a research manager to coordinate an exciting new effort at the Penn Primals Project. Please share! wd1.myworkdaysite.com/recrui…

And we have an exciting new experimental study in the works showing that the this big correlational relationship is, at least partly, causal (i.e., decreasing Hierarchical world belief makes people more politically liberal in general). Stay tuned!!!

Are you a clinical psych prof keen on primals? A bright pre-doc (Stanford RA @AliaCrum lab) is seeking PhD advisor to create/test a primals-focused CBT option. Its a key application of primals research. Nobody's done it yet. Happy to advise project if desirable. Please reach out.

People have difficulty accepting that people they know well (spouses, siblings, etc) change and grow, and old true views are now false. But we do the same for the world. The world you first discovered in childhood may not be the world today.

Important new research featured today: In short, most people think that positive views on the world should correspond to objective indicators of privilege (like being rich) and most of us are wrong.

Believing the world is a good place strongly correlates w/ wellbeing, but could Good world belief just reflect enjoying a privileged life? Important new paper says no. Actual relationships in ~15k people 12x less than what 500 researchers predicted.🧵 doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12877

For just being correlational, interesting and useful first look at primals and moral foundations. Main findings: 1) "Seeing the world as safe rather than dangerous does not predict morality." Enticing performed better. More evidence we overestimate dangerous world belief in politics. 2) However, "our most substantial finding" was that Alive world belief was very related to morality (except fairness!), even when taking fundamentalism and intrinsic religiosity into account. They quote the philosopher Taylor : "Living in an enchanted world…was inherently living socially" 3) Given this, future political attitudes research needs to look closely at Alive, but also Hierarchical world belief. The latter isn't mentioned but is the primal most correlated with political attitudes. My main takeaway: if you don't understand what it's like to see the world as Alive, then you may struggle to understand the perspective of people with alternative moral values. doi.org/10.1080/13674676.202…

Deaths of despair are rapant (suicide, addiction...). Many blame injustice/demographics and say improving objective life conditions will heal us. But data can tell a different story. New PlosOne study of 16,000 finds that, compared to demographics, basic beliefs about self and world were much better predictors of hopefulness, especially primal world beliefs (that the world is safe, enticing, and alive versus dangerous, dull, and mechanistic). Mindsets matter. Addressing objective life conditions is important, but let's not teach that the world is a bad place in the process.

I just found out that a couple dozen practitioners have already developed some cool primal world belief interventions (for coaching, classrooms, nature walks, etc.). This intervention work is critical and the Penn Primals Project wants to support this growing community and important work. Down the road, we'd love to foster sharing best practices, host a conference to workshop ideas, maybe even find funding to test some interventions empirically, etc. But, as a first step, we want to just get a better sense of who is doing what where. So, if you're applying primals research, please message @PrimalsResearch to tell us about it. Please pass this note along to anyone you know applying primals research. Thanks! We don't want to leave anyone out in the cold! : )

I'm giving an academic talk at Duke (Durham, North Carolina) June 27th on primal world belief research. General public welcome.

Job opportunity for PhDs in psych: Foundation wants a psychologist to apply/translate wellbeing/performance research in military/veteran contexts. The supervisor reached out cause he felt someone interested in primals might be great. careers-hjf.icims.com/jobs/3…

We've made a Penn Primals Project donations page! All donations go to empirical discoveries on how primal world beliefs like "the world is dangerous" impact depression, wellbeing, suicide risk, relationships, and politics. Any amount makes a difference. myprimals.com/donate-to-the-…

I said this in a 2020 paper, and it continues to be the case: No study has yet examined whether changes in primal world beliefs mediate the well-being effects of existing positive psychology interventions.

Been waiting to share cause appearing in friends podcast feeds unannounced is priceless but: Hidden Brain (most popular science podcast in the world) featured my research last week and nailed it. These people are masterful storytellers. hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-…

Its so lovely to see a personal little thought exercise my 20 year old self came up with resonate with people nearly 20 years later. (Note: the leaf exercise remains just a personally meaningful exercise, empirical data collection in process)