Do Negative Worldviews Lead to Political Instability?

If you believe something is bad, you are more likely to discover ways it is bad, which will reinforce your initial negative opinion, leading you to see more aspects of it as bad, and so on and so forth. The opposite happens when you see something as good.

The power of this feedback loop is one of the greatest insights of modern empirical psychology. It underlies stereotype research, mindset research, most of social psychology, and even the most-used form of talk therapy in the world (CBT).

But what if you see the whole world as a bad place?

I am a Penn psychological researcher who studies primal world beliefs, which are general beliefs about the world as a whole, such as the belief that the world is a dangerous place. Most primal world beliefs cluster statistically into the overarching belief that the world is a bad place—boring, dangerous, and ugly—versus a good place—full of beauty, value, and safety. This overarching primal world belief is called "Good world belief," but it could have just as easily been called "Bad world belief," and it appears to influence many things because it colors literally everything we ever encounter.

Source: Grey Matter Group

Where you fall on Good world belief theoretically influences how you interpret everything you encounter, placing you in an enormous feedback loop.

Past empirical research on how primal world beliefs shape politics has tended to focus on differences between the left and the right. In my own research, I've found that both sides assume the other side sees the world as bad, though there's actually little difference (though a big difference when it comes to other primal world beliefs). As a result, I've started to think Good world belief wasn't relevant to politics.

The figure reports average ’Good’ scores (on a scale of 0 to 5) for major party voters and MPI voters. Higher values are suggestive of more positive views of the world. Lower values suggest that respondents are more pessimistic of the world and view the world as a bad place. Source: Calculated from the TTPN Survey.

Source: Botha et al., 2025

However, a study by Dr. Ferdi Botha and colleagues at the University of Melbourne recently surveyed over 1,000 Australians and has found a clue concerning how Good world belief shapes politics. What they found is that Australians who saw the world as a bad place tended to reject all major political parties, preferring up and coming ones, often with little power or track record.

This correlational finding offers just a clue, but one I think is exciting: perhaps Good world belief doesn't influence where you fall on the left-right spectrum, but it does influence whether you reject both left and right.

If you see the world as a bad place, maybe everyone in power has got to go.

If so, the erosion of Good world belief across a society might predict eventual political instability, and even chaos, as a society sabotages its own (pretty good) institutions and services, leading to problems, reinforcing the belief the world is a bad place, and so on and so forth in a negative feedback loop.

How do we break the loop?

I'm not certain, but another important discovery in primal world belief research concerns when primals DON'T change: primal world beliefs rarely straightforwardly reflect the reality of the world or one's life. One study of over 16,000 people found that people who see the world as more abundant aren't usually more wealthy or live in rich neighborhoods. Another study found that when COVID made the whole world more dangerous (objectively) dangerous world belief did not increase.

If so, making the world better is likely never going to increase Good world belief.

So what does encourage Good world belief? Exciting research currently under review is beginning to suggest that primals are reliably changed by at least one thing: how people allocate attention. If you choose to (or have to because of your job) focus on the negative, you can start thinking the world is a bad place.

Based on these speculations, I have a suggestion for incumbents everywhere: Beware the slide of your society into seeing the world as a bad place. Laws can and should be passed to make your nation better. Of course! But know that no amount of making the world better is likely to increase Good world belief, and, if your party is in power, and your people begin to see the world as a bad place, perhaps you won't stay in power for long.

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It won't save you to create, say, a fantastic and efficient tax system. The people must somehow learn about it.

It won't save you to have an excellent education system. The people who see the world as a bad place will still assume the worst.

Instead, the way to combat negative world beliefs is likely to involve broad shifts in society's attention and getting messages out about thriving institutions and valuable services. How that can be done effectively and ethically is the million dollar question.

(And, if you succeed, an enormous side benefit is this: Good world belief is very important for wellbeing and mental health. But that subject is for a different post.)

In the meantime, Dr. Botha and colleagues' finding is starting to convince me I could be wrong: maybe Good world belief is important to politics and avoiding some of the self-defeating, cynical slides towards political instability that the world now faces.