Is the World a Meaningful Place?

Andrew and Jer Clifton have known each other for close to fifteen years, since a shared master's program long before either of them had built what they've built since. That friendship shows up in the texture of this conversation, but it's also, in a strange way, the whole point of Jer's research. He studies what he calls primal world beliefs: the deep, mostly unexamined assumptions each of us carries about what kind of place the world is. And one of his central findings is that we're consistently bad at telling the difference between who someone is and what they believe about the world they're standing in.

Primal World Beliefs

Jer's favourite way to explain a primal world belief starts with a thought experiment. Imagine a dog acting scared in a room. Is that dog dispositionally fearful, or is it a perfectly ordinary dog that happens to believe this particular room is dangerous? With a dog, you can test it by moving it to a different room and watching what changes. With a person, you can't. You only ever get to observe someone inside the one world they've got. So when someone seems anxious, or curious, or withdrawn, it's tempting to read that as a fixed trait, when it might really be a reaction to something more basic. It could be their answer to the question of whether the world itself is a good place to be in.

Jer and his lab at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center have identified 26 of these primal beliefs, most of which collapse into three broad ones: whether the world is Safe or Dangerous, Enticing or Dull, and Alive (it feels imbued with intention) or inert. All three correlate with each other and roll up into something like one mega-question: was I born into a good world or a bad one?

One of the beliefs living inside "Enticing" is what Jer calls meaningful world belief. Does the world at large contain many things that matter, or few? People can score high on meaning in their own life while believing the wider world is basically empty of anything that matters. As it turns out, that specific combination matters quite a bit.

Beliefs You Didn't Know You Had

Primal world beliefs aren't fixed the way the name might suggest. Jer's collaborator Edward Lemay, at the University of Maryland, has found that these beliefs actually fluctuate day to day within a narrow band of something like 14%. On a day you happen to see the world as a harsher place, Lemay's research finds you're also likely to see your own partner as less kind and less competent that day, and your partner tends to notice the shift too. It isn't really about your partner, but it's a lens you're both looking through without realizing it.

Strangely, the big events we'd expect to reshape these beliefs mostly don't. Jer says his data consistently shows that a spouse's death, a cancer diagnosis, even sudden wealth rarely move someone's baseline primal beliefs much. His read is that almost nobody sets out to change these beliefs, because almost nobody knows they have them, or that there's a choice involved at all. But when we do become aware of our world beliefs, it may be easier than we think to change them.

The Surprising Culprit

The paper at the center of this episode grew out of a hunch from Jer's collaborator Daniel Snook, who wanted to know whether primal beliefs could help explain violent extremism. Together with Jer and his colleague Nick Kerry, they went in with a specific hypothesis: extremists would likely see the world as more Dangerous, and more Alive. The latter because a felt sense that the world urgently needs something from you lines up neatly with the mindset of, say, a suicide bomber convinced of a cosmic mission.

Both hypotheses were wrong. Across the studies, Safe and Alive beliefs barely mattered. The belief that consistently, repeatedly separated violent extremists from everyone else was meaningful world belief. Extremists don't see the world as more threatening than the rest of us. They see it as significantly more empty of things that matter.

The research pulled from a genuinely wide set of populations, deliberately spanning the political spectrum: it looked at violent extremism among U.S. Democrats, Republicans, environmentalist activists, and Black Lives Matter activists.  It also explored Kazakhstani prisoners convicted of terrorism with prisoners convicted of unrelated violent crimes. Even holding violence constant, meaningful world belief sharply separated the two groups. Believing that the world is empty of things that matter seemed to spark a deliberated choice to turn a cause into violence.

Jer argues that if you see the world as largely barren of meaning, the few things that do matter can take on overwhelming importance. They may begin to seem worth protecting or pursuing at almost any cost, while destruction feels less costly because little of value appears to be at stake. It’s a bleak logic. It doesn’t make extremist violence moral or justified, but it does make it intelligible: less a senseless loss of control than an expression of a coherent, if devastating, worldview.

An Intervention Built From Photographs

The next phase of research was an attempt to actually shift meaningful world belief, and see whether violent extremism moved with it.

The intervention runs ten days, five to ten minutes a day. For the first nine, participants take three photos daily of different things like ordinary infrastructure most people never think twice about, and in the evening, journal briefly about why one of those things actually matters. On the tenth day, they look back across all nine days of photos and ask themselves: is this everything meaningful in the world, or just the tip of an iceberg? Then they're asked to consider what matters to other people, and finally, what kind of world this all adds up to.

Jer describes the design goal as being "architects of epiphany.” The aim is not delivering an insight, but engineering the conditions for someone to arrive at one themselves. It worked. Tested on a a sample of Republicans who endorsed the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, the intervention held up weeks later: people who shifted their meaningful world belief also showed reduced support for violent extremism. A second test in the general population produced a subtler result. Violent extremism still dropped, but the shift in meaningful world belief itself was smaller, likely because most people already start fairly high on the scale, leaving less room to move. Jer's team is now refining the design, including plans to build in longer-term reminders, like revisiting the photos every few months, to help the shift stick.

Meaning at Work

During the 2009 recession, Jer was working at a coffee shop, hating it, and a coworker reframed the job for him. His coworker said that some customers couldn't afford a vacation that year, but they could afford a fancy drink, and making it for them was the closest thing to a vacation they were going to get. It shifted how Jer saw every interaction that followed, from quiet judgment to something closer to: you matter, and I hope this helps.

That is essentially meaningful world belief applied at the smallest possible scale, and Jer thinks it scales up in a few concrete ways at work:

1. Assuming that your interactions with clients, colleagues, and direct reports actually matter, to them and to you, rather than treating them as transactional.

2. Believing your product or service matters, even when it seems mundane: if you sell water, he points out, you're selling hydration, and hydration matters.

3. How do people treat each other? Jer's research connects high meaningful world belief to simple prosociality… being a giver, noticing your colleagues' value, treating your reports like people whose work counts.

As he puts it, it's hard to convincingly act like someone matters to you if you don't actually believe it. Most of us aren't good enough actors to fake that for long.

The Golden Mean

Andrew pushes back gently, in the way this podcast often does: what about the flip side? Plenty of guests on this show describe being so consumed by meaningful work that it costs them their boundaries, their relationships, their health. Isn't there a risk that all of this just supercharges that same obsession? Or worse, that it gets weaponized as a kind of corporate "greenwashing," convincing people their underpaid, poorly structured job is meaningful instead of actually fixing it?

Is the founder who burns out chasing their own mission too consumed with a meaningful world belief? Is the internal activist who tries to take down the system too committed to their singular cause, believing that nothing else  is worth protecting? 

Jer corrects Andrew. High meaningful world belief works differently: it means assuming that a great many things matter, not just your thing. That has a built-in check against obsession, because your project now has to share space with everyone else's projects, all of which you also believe count. It doesn't eliminate the risk of exploitation dressed up as purpose. Jer is honest that any useful psychological construct can be misused, but he believes that primals used well point us toward balance rather than intensity.

What Comes Next

Some AI labs have reportedly begun training large language models on something like primal world beliefs to make them feel more relatable. The same logic, Jer notes, that makes fictional robots feel alive to us. A character who reads the world as enticing and full of treasure comes across entirely differently than one who reads every sound as a threat to shoot at, even if neither has anything resembling a real inner life.

Jer has recently been brought on as an advisor to an AI startup exploring exactly this, with a specific safety angle in mind: an AI with a strong, built-in "meaningful world belief" might be structurally harder to convince that a destructive means could ever be justified by a good end, precisely because it assumes so much else in the world matters too. It's early, speculative work, but it's a fitting close to a conversation that started with a dog in a room and ended with a question about what we might want our machines to believe about the world we've built.

If you want to find out where you personally land on any of this, Jer's lab has put together a free, validated scale at myprimals.com. It only takes a few minutes, and, per the entire theme of this episode, you might learn something about yourself you didn't know you believed.

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Primal World Beliefs Inventory and free assessment at myprimals.com

• Jer Clifton's 2019 Psychological Assessment paper introducing primal world beliefs

• Edward P. Lemay Jr., University of Maryland, on the day-to-day fluctuation of primal beliefs and their effect on relationships

• Jer's research team's study connecting meaningful world belief to violent extremism across multiple populations, including January 6th supporters and a sample of Kazakhstani prisoners