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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Feb 4, 2026

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation of the Posterior Medial Frontal Cortex to Experimentally Reduce Ideological Threat Responses

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Primal world beliefs.

Jeremy D W Clifton¹, Joshua D Baker¹, Crystal L Park²

¹Department of Psychology.

Psychological Assessment

|October 10, 2018

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study introduces primal world beliefs (primals), exploring how views of the world

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Personality Psychology
Clinical Psychology

Background:

Aaron T. Beck's cognitive theory highlights self, future, and environment beliefs influencing behavior, yet environmental beliefs are understudied.
Primal world beliefs (primals) represent fundamental perceptions of the world's character, such as "the world is interesting" or "the world is dangerous."

Purpose of the Study:

To develop and validate a comprehensive measure of primal world beliefs.
To investigate the psychometric properties and nomological network of these beliefs.

Main Methods:

Systematic identification of candidate primals from diverse text sources.
Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (N > 1400) to establish scale structure.
Concurrent validity, sequence effect, and long-term test-retest reliability (up to 19 months) assessments.

Main Results:

The 99-item Primals Inventory (PI-99) measures 26 distinct primals, organized into three overarching dimensions: Safe, Enticing, and Alive.
These dimensions explained approximately 55% of the common variance in beliefs.
The PI-99 demonstrated strong psychometric properties, including high internal consistency (mean α = .93) and excellent stability over time (2-week to 19-month test-retest correlations averaged .77).

Conclusions:

Primal world beliefs are robust, stable, and significantly correlated with key personality and well-being variables.
These beliefs offer incremental predictive validity over the Big Five personality traits for life satisfaction, transcendent experiences, trust, and gratitude.
The PI-99 provides a valuable tool for research into the profound impact of world beliefs on psychological functioning.