Contrary to popular intuition, a recent scientific study has found that our beliefs about the world are not strongly tied to our personal life experiences. The study, published in the Journal of Personality, defies the common assumption that people from privileged backgrounds are more likely to have a positive outlook on life. Instead, the research suggests that personal experiences may have a less significant influence on our beliefs about the world than previously thought.
The motivation behind this study was to explore and better understand the relationship between an individual’s life experiences and their primal world beliefs, a concept in psychology that refers to the fundamental beliefs or assumptions that individuals hold about the nature of the world.
“This project was the idea of my colleague Jer Clifton, who is co-author on this paper,” said study co-author Nicholas Kerry, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center. “While running numerous studies on people’s beliefs about the world, he noticed that many people seem to attribute their own beliefs to their upbringing (e.g. ‘I see the world as a dangerous place because I grew up poor’). ”
“Similarly, people who expressed positive beliefs on social media (e.g. ‘the world is a good place’) were sometimes told that their beliefs must be the result of their privileged circumstances or experiences. But it was unclear whether these were isolated anecdotes or commonly held assumptions, and also whether they correspond to reality.”
“Accordingly, we designed several studies to test a) whether laypeople and researchers really do have the intuition that beliefs are strongly related to experiences and circumstances, and b) whether this intuition is correct. We found that many people—both laypeople and researchers—do seem to expect big relationships between personal experiences and beliefs about the world, but we found that these relationships are actually much smaller than people expect.”
In the first study, the researchers surveyed 494 laypeople and 486 researchers to gauge their expectations regarding the relationship between privilege and world beliefs. This step helped establish the common assumptions that people have about how personal experiences shape our views of the world.
In the second study, the researchers analyzed data from a massive sample of 14,481 individuals. They explored various factors associated with privilege, including gender, wealth, health, and living conditions, and their correlation with primal world beliefs. Importantly, they compared these correlations with the expectations expressed by the surveyed participants in the first study.
The third study focused on the impact of traumatic experiences on world beliefs. This study included 1,086 participants, including cancer survivors, people living with cystic fibrosis, and those who had caused accidents resulting in death or injury. The researchers sought to understand how individuals who had faced such traumatic events perceived the world.
The researchers found that the commonly held belief that privilege leads to more positive worldviews is not strongly supported by the data. Contrary to expectations, there were weak correlations between indicators of privilege (being male, being wealthy, avoiding health issues, etc.) and positive primal world beliefs.
“I think this study suggests that the way we see the world is not as closely rooted in our circumstances as a lot of people think,” Kerry told PsyPost. “It may remind us not to make assumptions: knowing that someone sees things positively does not mean that they have not experienced adversity.”
The strongest relationship found in the study was between experiencing childhood trauma and the belief that the world is a dangerous place. Individuals who had faced trauma tended to have more negative worldviews, aligning with “Shattered Assumptions Theory,” which suggests that traumatic events can shatter positive world assumptions and lead to mental health issues like depression.
The study also found that individuals living with health conditions like cystic fibrosis or cancer did not necessarily view the world as worse or more unjust than others. Even current cancer patients had only slightly more negative worldviews than healthy controls.
“I think it was especially interesting that serious illness wasn’t associated with substantial differences in worldviews,” Kerry said. “For example, people with cystic fibrosis saw the world just as positively as a control group. And while people who currently had cancer saw the world as slightly less good and safe than controls, the difference was modest and this difference was not present among cancer survivors, suggesting that people’s beliefs are pretty resilient in the long-term.”
The study suggests that personal experiences might have less influence on world beliefs than commonly thought. However, this does not mean that life experiences have no impact whatsoever on one’s beliefs about the world.
“This is correlational work that examines averages across large groups of people,” Kerry explained. “It is possible that, for some people, experiences may have profound influences on the way they see the world. Our research simply suggests that the experiences we studied here do not routinely have large effects on most people.”
The study, “Despite popular intuition, positive world beliefs poorly reflect several objective indicators of privilege, including wealth, health, sex, and neighborhood safety“, was authored by Nicholas Kerry, KC White, Mark L. O’Brien, Laura M. Perry, and Jeremy D. W. Clifton.
