Jeremy D W Clifton
Biographic Data
| ID | 5016416 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeremy D W Clifton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeremy D W |
| FAMILY NAME | Clifton |
| SIGNATURE | CLIFTON J D W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3185-3105 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Robot Primals
Roboticists are continually improving the quality of social robot behaviors and interactions with humans. This is a major goal of the field of social robotics, which seeks to create socially competent robots and improve their overall acceptance. Toward this effort, we propose the utilization of primal world beliefs (i.e., beliefs about the character of the world) to design behaviors that are relatable, intuitive, and based on an internal motivati…
World Beliefs Moderate the Effects of Trauma and Severe Illness on Emotional Distress
OBJECTIVE: Severe illness and trauma can cause significant psychological distress, but individuals differ in their responses. This research tested whether world beliefs-fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world-moderate the relationship between negative life experiences and emotional distress. METHOD: Study 1 compared individuals with chronic illnesses (cystic fibrosis or cancer) to healthy controls on measures of anxiety, depression,…
Rubbing off on each other
Primals are beliefs about the world's basic character (e.g., good, safe, enticing, or alive) that are associated with well-being and behavioral patterns. But primals' developmental origins remain mysterious, hampering theoretical understanding and clinical efforts to change primals. The current preregistered study of 905 families from 11 cultural groups adopts bioecological theory to examine (1) variance in primals accounted for by individual, fa…
Precursors of young adults' world beliefs across cultures
Predictors of Young Adults' Primal World Beliefs in Eight Countries
Primal world beliefs (“primals”) capture understanding of general characteristics of the world, such as whether the world is Good and Enticing. Children (N = 1215, 50% girls), mothers, and fathers from Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States reported neighborhood danger, socioeconomic status, parental warmth, harsh parenting, psychological control, and autonomy granting from ages 8 to 16 years. At age 22 y…
Primal World Belief Research, for Skeptics
Sometimes skeptics are tempted to dismiss world beliefs as meaningful phenomena. Such dismissal, we argue, is a mistake. How beliefs about many broad topics impact behavior is well-established. Psychologically rich world beliefs have also peppered the cultural milieu for centuries. Multiple, decades-old literatures have already established psychometrically the existence of world beliefs, proposed effects, and developed sufficient theory to define…
Despite popular intuition, positive world beliefs poorly reflect several objective indicators of privilege, including wealth, health, sex, and neighborhood safety
OBJECTIVES: We tested whether generalized beliefs that the world is safe, abundant, pleasurable, and progressing (termed "primal world beliefs") are associated with several objective measures of privilege. METHODS: Three studies (N = 16,547) tested multiple relationships between indicators of privilege-including socioeconomic status, health, sex, and neighborhood safety-and relevant world beliefs, as well as researchers and laypeople's expectatio…
Psychologists return to the first question of Western philosophy
When ancient humans gained the ability to investigate abstract questions, what first question did they pose? This article offers a novel, sweeping, historical analysis with important implications for psychological theory. The story begins with identifying the first question in Ancient Greek philosophy as "Where am I?" with particular interest in the world's overarching basic traits. For example, Pythagoras proposed the world was defined by beauty…
Beliefs that influence personality likely concern a situation humans never leave
Many of us-60% of humanity, according to one study-would like to change some of our personality traits, such as decreasing pessimism or neuroticism. Dweck (2008) proposed that traits might be altered by changing beliefs. However, novel beliefs must be identified, she contends, because currently studied beliefs are empirically inadequate (e.g., low correlations to broad personality traits) and because a belief's influence on behavior is usually co…
Improving Scale Equivalence by Increasing Access to Scale-Specific Information
Measures of the same phenomenon should produce the same results; this principle is fundamental because it allows for replication—the basis of science. Unfortunately, measures of a psychological construct in one language can often measure something a bit different in another language (i.e., low “scale equivalence”). Historically, the problem was thought to stem from insufficient knowledge of best-practice translation procedures. Yet solutions base…
Belief in a Dangerous World Does Not Explain Substantial Variance in Political Attitudes, But Other World Beliefs Do
Decades of research suggest a correlation between belief in a dangerous world and political conservatism. However, research relied on a scale that may overemphasize certain types of dangers. Furthermore, few other world beliefs have been investigated, such that fundamental worldview differences between liberals and conservatives remain largely unknown. A preregistered study of nine samples ( N = 5,461; mostly US Americans) found a negligible asso…
Resilience of primal world beliefs to the initial shock of the Covid ‐19 pandemic
INTRODUCTION: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior, and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after disruptive events. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to test whether dramatic world changes…
The Eudaimonic Turn
The history of the world is in part the story of competing trends of thinking, of zeitgeist, as Hegel calls them, which come to dominate an age. In the last 150 years, the largest development in ou
Predictors of Young Adults' Primal World Beliefs in Eight Countries
Primal world beliefs (“primals”) capture understanding of general characteristics of the world, such as whether the world is Good and Enticing. Children (N = 1215, 50% girls), mothers, and fathers from Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States reported neighborhood danger, socioeconomic status, parental warmth, harsh parenting, psychological control, and autonomy granting from ages 8 to 16 years. At age 22 y…
Beliefs that influence personality likely concern a situation humans never leave
Many of us-60% of humanity, according to one study-would like to change some of our personality traits, such as decreasing pessimism or neuroticism. Dweck (2008) proposed that traits might be altered by changing beliefs. However, novel beliefs must be identified, she contends, because currently studied beliefs are empirically inadequate (e.g., low correlations to broad personality traits) and because a belief's influence on behavior is usually co…
The Eudaimonic Turn
The history of the world is in part the story of competing trends of thinking, of zeitgeist, as Hegel calls them, which come to dominate an age. In the last 150 years, the largest development in ou
Improving Scale Equivalence by Increasing Access to Scale-Specific Information
Measures of the same phenomenon should produce the same results; this principle is fundamental because it allows for replication—the basis of science. Unfortunately, measures of a psychological construct in one language can often measure something a bit different in another language (i.e., low “scale equivalence”). Historically, the problem was thought to stem from insufficient knowledge of best-practice translation procedures. Yet solutions base…
Belief in a Dangerous World Does Not Explain Substantial Variance in Political Attitudes, But Other World Beliefs Do
Decades of research suggest a correlation between belief in a dangerous world and political conservatism. However, research relied on a scale that may overemphasize certain types of dangers. Furthermore, few other world beliefs have been investigated, such that fundamental worldview differences between liberals and conservatives remain largely unknown. A preregistered study of nine samples ( N = 5,461; mostly US Americans) found a negligible asso…
Resilience of primal world beliefs to the initial shock of the Covid ‐19 pandemic
INTRODUCTION: People hold general beliefs about the world called primals (e.g., the world is Safe, Intentional), which are strongly linked to individual differences in personality, behavior, and mental health. How such beliefs form or change across the lifespan is largely unknown, although theory suggests that beliefs become more negative after disruptive events. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to test whether dramatic world changes…
Primal World Belief Research, for Skeptics
Sometimes skeptics are tempted to dismiss world beliefs as meaningful phenomena. Such dismissal, we argue, is a mistake. How beliefs about many broad topics impact behavior is well-established. Psychologically rich world beliefs have also peppered the cultural milieu for centuries. Multiple, decades-old literatures have already established psychometrically the existence of world beliefs, proposed effects, and developed sufficient theory to define…
Despite popular intuition, positive world beliefs poorly reflect several objective indicators of privilege, including wealth, health, sex, and neighborhood safety
OBJECTIVES: We tested whether generalized beliefs that the world is safe, abundant, pleasurable, and progressing (termed "primal world beliefs") are associated with several objective measures of privilege. METHODS: Three studies (N = 16,547) tested multiple relationships between indicators of privilege-including socioeconomic status, health, sex, and neighborhood safety-and relevant world beliefs, as well as researchers and laypeople's expectatio…
Psychologists return to the first question of Western philosophy
When ancient humans gained the ability to investigate abstract questions, what first question did they pose? This article offers a novel, sweeping, historical analysis with important implications for psychological theory. The story begins with identifying the first question in Ancient Greek philosophy as "Where am I?" with particular interest in the world's overarching basic traits. For example, Pythagoras proposed the world was defined by beauty…
Beliefs that influence personality likely concern a situation humans never leave
Many of us-60% of humanity, according to one study-would like to change some of our personality traits, such as decreasing pessimism or neuroticism. Dweck (2008) proposed that traits might be altered by changing beliefs. However, novel beliefs must be identified, she contends, because currently studied beliefs are empirically inadequate (e.g., low correlations to broad personality traits) and because a belief's influence on behavior is usually co…
World Beliefs Moderate the Effects of Trauma and Severe Illness on Emotional Distress
OBJECTIVE: Severe illness and trauma can cause significant psychological distress, but individuals differ in their responses. This research tested whether world beliefs-fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world-moderate the relationship between negative life experiences and emotional distress. METHOD: Study 1 compared individuals with chronic illnesses (cystic fibrosis or cancer) to healthy controls on measures of anxiety, depression,…
Rubbing off on each other
Primals are beliefs about the world's basic character (e.g., good, safe, enticing, or alive) that are associated with well-being and behavioral patterns. But primals' developmental origins remain mysterious, hampering theoretical understanding and clinical efforts to change primals. The current preregistered study of 905 families from 11 cultural groups adopts bioecological theory to examine (1) variance in primals accounted for by individual, fa…
Precursors of young adults' world beliefs across cultures
Predictors of Young Adults' Primal World Beliefs in Eight Countries
Primal world beliefs (“primals”) capture understanding of general characteristics of the world, such as whether the world is Good and Enticing. Children (N = 1215, 50% girls), mothers, and fathers from Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States reported neighborhood danger, socioeconomic status, parental warmth, harsh parenting, psychological control, and autonomy granting from ages 8 to 16 years. At age 22 y…
Robot Primals
Roboticists are continually improving the quality of social robot behaviors and interactions with humans. This is a major goal of the field of social robotics, which seeks to create socially competent robots and improve their overall acceptance. Toward this effort, we propose the utilization of primal world beliefs (i.e., beliefs about the character of the world) to design behaviors that are relatable, intuitive, and based on an internal motivati…
Psychology (12 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (6 works) · Developmental psychology (6 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (6 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (3 works)