What are Worldviews
Worldview is a colored lens through which we see the world. It’s our perspective formed as a result of the environment, people around us, and the biases we hold.
It’s our truth.
Using this framework of ideas and filters, we interpret everything that happens in the world and around us
The word “worldview” comes from the German word Weltanschauung.
Worldviews can be:
- Attitudinal – Is the glass half full or half-empty?
- Idealogical – your beliefs and values
- Philosophical – your views on the fundamental questions of existence, values, and knowledge
- Religious – practices and behaviors determined by the religion you follow
Cultural Theory of Worldviews
According to the Cultural Theory, put forth by anthropologist Mary Douglas, worldview is made up of cultural bias, social relations, and the ‘myth of nature’.
- Cultural bias is shared beliefs and values
- Social relations are social organizational forms
- Myth of nature is a perspective of the natural world
Societies and individuals can be classified into 4 worldviews across the two dimensions of social relations – group and grid.
The group dimension indicates how strong the individuals’ behaviour is constrained by the group or how strong the group boundaries are.
Grid dimension indicates how strong or binding is the individual’s behaviour based on their status or role in the “system”.
A person who believes in a hierarchical world think his/her role is defined by the position in the hierarchy and has to act within the boundaries defined by the group. An individualistic person would be the exact opposite not constrained by the hierarchy or be a part of any group.
A person with an egalitarianism worldview believes in the community and the need to look out for other, while retaining a strong sense of personal freedom.
Each worldview represents how people organize, perceive, rationalize social relations, and constructing a bias about the interaction between society and the natural world. This guides their thoughts and actions with regard to nature.
People of distinct worldviews have a different ranking of risks and preferences.
The impact of worldviews on sustainable mobility – this paper uses the Cultural Theory to explain why it is important to consider worldviews and how we need to adapt the messaging to different worldviews to spread the idea of sustainable mobility. This paper suggested the adoption of “clumsy solutions” that takes into account all the different worldviews and their impact on individual behaviours and choices. As opposed to “elegant solutions” which take the single problem-single solution approach which optimizes for only one worldview.
You can read more about how this understanding of worldviews impacts policy and governance of sustainable mobility.
While reading about worldviews, I came across Annick De Witt, a Dutch researcher, who has done some interesting work in this space. There is a short test you can take on her site to find out your worldview. (Mine was post-modern and negative on the traditional worldview).
Worldviews and marketing
Understanding worldviews might be the first step to influencing and bringing about change. The subject could be an individual, a group, an industry or the government.
If worldviews influence how we see the world, interact with it and the decisions we make as a result, then understanding it is the first step.
As a marketer, you are always digging for information and insights on the customer. The worldviews of customers matter.
In fact, as Seth Godin advocates in his book ‘All Marketers are storytellers“, marketing only succeeds when you find enough people with similar worldviews that come together which allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively.
You can now frame a story that matches the worldview of your audience.
Frames are elements of a story painted to leverage a worldview a consumer already has.
George Lakoff on political discourse
Fox news is a great example of this. They took the conservative audience, an underserved market at that point, created a frame and narrative and told stories that fit it. They consistently rank as #1 channel on cable in the US today.
Here are my notes on the topic of worldviews and frames from Seth Godin’s book:
No amount of advertising or growth hacking without addressing the worldviews of the target audience is going to achieve results
You might generate leads with marketing tactics and using clever hacks, but growth comes from engagement. With the wrong audience, you may never achieve the true potential of the business.
Can you change worldviews
Once our views are formed, we rarely change them. Instead, we like to build a moat around it and protect ourselves from being attacked by opposing worldviews. (Self-affirmation)
There are numerous studies that show how confirmation bias and groupthink make it hard for us to change opinions once they’re e formed.
It seems that we reevaluate our worldviews only when we have a traumatic experience. Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit also talks of how habits are interrupted by traumatic events. It would be interesting to explore the intersection of worldviews and habits.
Given our stubbornness to change, it would be foolish for marketers to think we can change the worldviews of customers. It is an expensive proposition.
Politicians are great at using existing worldviews and building narratives to align with those worldviews.
Self-affirmation and Cultural Cognition are two areas of study that give us some insights into how we can influence people to change their views. Studies show that before you attempt to change someone’s mind if you make them feel good about themselves first, they are more open to changing their views. So the less threatened we feel, the more likely we are to change our opinions.
A political party builds a narrative, digging into a mythical past, boosts your self-image, and makes you feel good. They then follow it up with messaging that changes your worldview and you start to agree with everything they are proposing, even if it is detrimental to society. To insulate you further from opposing points of view, they create a story around victimhood and make you feel threatened. Sounds familiar?
How do you find people with similar worldviews
Talking to people? Exploring the different subcultures that exist in the world will open a window into the many worldviews that exist. Online forums, subreddits, and discussions between a group of people in a community are perfect places to study the worldviews.
Not everyone in a community share the worldview and that’s an important nuance to understand.
If you’ve narrowed down on a group and want to investigate their worldviews, interviewing 3-5 people and creating buyer personas might be a useful approach.
Create your brand positioning that aligns with the worldviews and messaging that uses the language of these worldviews.
Why we failed to sell an education product to schools
We built a social learning platform for schools way back in 2011-12. It failed to take off. There were many mistakes we made as first-time entrepreneurs. But looking back, I realize we failed to understand the worldview of the school administration and the teachers adequately.
The worldview of the school management is based around academics. There are a few exceptions, but thanks to the examination driven system, most schools optimize the running of the school for getting the best results in exams.
Our product was trying to sell the idea of making learning a social and engaging experience. And for the product to have worked we needed the teachers on board. The worldview of most teachers is that of completing the syllabus, sticking to the schedule and helping students ace the exams.
So when they saw the demo of our product, they wondered how much extra work this was going to be and if they would have to stay after class hours to use it.
Not many education startups have succeeded in the formal education sector since then. The ones that have in some cases have done so through addressing the school’s desire to sell itself as a modern, technology-driven elite school. Who cares if the technology is just a projector in a classroom.
Moving up the value chain
Since we transitioned from a product to a services over the years and launched Pixelmattic in 2015, we’ve always wondered how we can move up the value chain.
You can read more about why we created Pixelmattic and the lessons behind positioning it as a niche brand here:
Applying the worldview framework to the kind of inquiries we have received for websites over the years, it’s clear that there are essentially two kinds:
- A worldview that looks at a website as a billboard to add some basic information which is hygiene for the business. The client doesn’t really expect the website to generate any business for them.
- A worldview in which the website is a crucial and integral part of their business. The website, therefore, needs to be aesthetically good looking, load fast, rank in Google, and generate leads.
The scope for doing creative and interesting work with the second worldview is far higher. So instead of trying to change the minds of clients who don’t believe the website can be an integral part of their digital strategy, we’ve instead focused on the latter.
We’re currently in the process of refining our approach to focus on selling collaboration and growth. Not commodities like websites and SEO.
And this time around, unlike our mistakes with the product, we are going to carefully study and align our marketing to the worldviews of our target audience.
Politics and worldviews
We live in a polarized world today. Politicians have used a deadly combination of data, marketing and psychology to create vote banks at the expense of social harmony.
The media has helped define the Overton window around a range of issues which were previously considered extreme. We’ve normalized hate in our public discourse.
Here’s George Lakoff dissecting Trump’s communication strategy:
The mistake, George Lakoff says, that the progressives in the US make is to rely on logic to counter the narratives. You can see the same issues in the Indian political landscape as well.
Annick DeWitt analyses the political landscape through the prism of worldviews. She classifies worldviews as follows: traditional, modern, post-modern, and integrative.
With western civilization, you can trace the evolution from a traditional worldview dominated by religion to a modern worldview after the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment, driven by mostly scientific and rational beliefs.
In the last century, we’ve seen the formation of postmodern worldviews with rise of feminism and the fight for gender rights, originating predominantly from the cultural elites in academic circles, and advocating for more than just rational beliefs that include creativity and self-expression among other things.
“one reason that stands out is the ways in which the more traditional (bridging to modern) oriented segments of society have been feeling encroached upon, and threatened by, the emergence of more postmodern views and values”.
Annick De Witt
A newly emerging work seeks to bring the polarized world together by creating an integrative worldview.
Climate change is a hotly debated and polarizing topic because it is mainly presented in scientific terms and since a large section of society process information through different beliefs, the message seems jarring giving rise to conflicts.
Bernie Sanders built a large, passionate following during his campaign by appealing to people with postmodern worldviews. The postmodern arose because of some of the shortcomings of the modern worldview with its supposed focus on money, materialism and wealth creation. This critical view puts postmodern worldview on a conflict path with the other worldviews.
Trump on the other hand primarily appeals to a mix of traditional and modern worldviews. The BJP in India does the same.
The success of Trump and Sanders political campaigns show that politicians appeal to the extremes and then hope to carry that message across those in the middle and bring enough of them onto their side.
In India, the right is made up of people with traditional (the conservative hindu) and modern worldviews (the business folk). The decline of Congress, among many other factors, can also be attributed to their lack of clarity on which worldview they espouse.
Challenge your own worldviews.
A polarized world is not a sustainable one. Looking at the world through the prism of worldviews can help make sense of the diverse opinions and one’s own biases.
An integrative worldview where we acknowledge the concerns and beliefs of everyone while building an equitable and just world might be the way forward. One can only hope.
Whatever worldview you currently hold, it’s always good to question some of the beliefs, develop more empathy for the other, and resolve our cognitive dissonance constructively.
