Primal World Beliefs
University of Pennsylvania
“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, and yet we could dramatically disagree about the sort of world this is.”
—Jer Clifton, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist
The Opportunity
Jer Clifton, Ph.D., director of the Primals Project at the University of Pennsylvania, contends that humans have different fundamental beliefs about the world we all inhabit. And those beliefs can be a principal cause of why we think and behave very differently.
Since 2014, Clifton has been leading a breakthrough research effort to uncover and classify people’s fundamental world beliefs. He’s labeled these beliefs “Primals” because they are so fundamental, potentially influencing virtually everything we do.
From a massive inventory of data, Clifton reports a number of key discoveries, most notably the identification of 26 primal world beliefs.
The Approach
Armed with a better understanding of how world beliefs differ, it came time to introduce the idea of Primals to the world. With this new storehouse of knowledge we sought to visually cluster key ideas and concepts from Clifton’s research, leading to an introductory campaign designed for a broader awareness of Primals. Most notably, we focused our storytelling efforts around the insight that most of these 26 beliefs cluster into three main beliefs: 1) Safe (vs. Dangerous), 2) Enticing (vs. Dull), and 3) Alive (vs. Mechanistic).
Storytelling
Communications Strategy | Copywriting | Video | Photography and Visualization | Social Media Graphics | Infographic | Public Relations
Project completed as Chief Strategy Officer at Grey Matter Group
