While we’ve been busy navigating the coronavirus pandemic and all the daily challenges that has brought, a group of psychologists, led by Jeremy Clifton of the University of Pennsylvania, has reported on a new way of thinking about the beliefs and attitudes that govern our lives.  It seems to me that this research is potentially important for speakers to consider as they prepare their speeches for that day when we can start speaking to real, live human audiences again.

The researchers call what they have found “primals.”  They are fundamental orientational thoughts about what the world seems like to you.  There are 26 basic primals, and they cover beliefs like the world is mostly good, safe, and worth experiencing – or usually evil, unsafe, and best avoided.

Like the basic five personality traits that have been widely researched by psychologists, these primals appear to be stable over time, and deep-seated.  Are they fundamentally a product of your experiences, your environment, or are they genetic?  The researchers aren’t sure, yet, but these primals do develop early.  And they group together in clusters.  If you’ve got a basically positive outlook – you believe the world is safe, fun, and a nice place to play in, then you’re more likely to be grateful, trusting, growth-oriented, and happy.  If you believe the opposite, you’re more likely to experience the world as unsafe, more likely to be depressed, and more likely to see danger everywhere.

There are no big gender differences – both men and women experience the world as pretty much safe (or unsafe) in the same number.  And whether you grow up rich or poor doesn’t seem to matter, either as to whether you’re a believer in expanding the pie or fighting over the (finite) number of pieces.

But the most important belief is whether or not you think the world is a good place.  If you do, you have more and better friendships, better well-being, happier life outcomes, and on and on.

As I was pondering this research, it occurred to me that knowing how your audience was oriented on the good v evil world continuum, and other basic attitudes like that, would profoundly affect how they reacted to new ideas, calls for change, and action.  Openness to new ideas makes a great audience member, and the opposite makes for hard work.  Unless your message is that life is nasty, brutal and short.  Then, you’ll get all the negative folks in the audience nodding with agreement.

Of course it’s not as simple as that, but this research suggests that understanding some basic attitudes of your audience would make a huge difference in how you approached them, especially with messages of change.

Naturally, I want to know much more.  Given that these primals are deeply held from an early age, do certain professions attract certain flavors of primals?  Are accountants happier and more open than lawyers, or vice-versa?  How about creative people versus less creative professions?

Speakers are always bringing messages of change, in one form or another.  As this research makes clear, our reactions to change of almost any kind depend on our basic outlooks on life.  Knowing in advance what those outlooks are could make us much smarter in the way we approach our audiences.  And that goes for salespeople, teachers, politicians, and a host of other professions where connecting with groups of the public is important.

We need to know more about the primals, and how to determine where groups of people fall on these deeply human continua.  Professor Clifton, we want to hear more.

Here’s a link to the report: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeremy_Clifton2/publication/328180484_Primal_World_Beliefs/links/5c2bfd4e458515a4c7065f69/Primal-World-Beliefs.pdf