Lifemind's application of Market Pluralism is based on over a hundred years of research in social psychology, social anthropology, and cultural geography. LIfemind  employs a Worldview Database to generate results based on hundreds of research papers from these disciplines.

​

​

​

​

 

 

The "father" of social psychology, French sociologist Emil Durkheim (1858-1917) was the first academic to look at human behavior in groups in the 1920s and coined the phrase "collective conscience" - which is at the core of lifemind's model - how your customers and markets think. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

British social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921-2007) carried Durkheim's work forward beginning in the 1970s with her influential book, Natural Symbols (1970). In this work, Douglas lays out a framework for understanding group behavior called "Group-Grid." Group-Grid identifies four culture types that can describe accurately broader groups of people. The four culture types are Positional, Egalitarian, Individualist, and Fatalist.

​

Positional culture is marked by hierarchy, stability, and reliability. Egalitarian culture is marked by equality, innovation, and perpetual improvement. Individualist culture is marked by competition and meritocracy. Fatalist culture is marked by lack of control and unpredictability. This framework has been employed in thousands of studies in social psychology. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Each of these four groups operate differently with distinct values, priorities, and ways of thinking. Douglas and other social anthropologists identified America as having an underlying streak of Individualist culture as a result of immigrants leaving their home countries in order to seek new opportunity. This is blended with the Egalitarian culture, which loosely correlates to American liberalism, as well as the Positional culture, which loosely correlates to American conservatism. The lifemind model for "Life Outlook" combines all three of these cultures encoded geographically to deliver distinct values that help your business align with your markets. Life Outlook values are supplemented with two more distinct sets of values: regional and generational.

​

​

​

​

​

​

Wilbur Zelinsky (1921-2013) is a renowned cultural geographer who's classic work, The Cultural Geography of the United States (1973), introduced a profound new way of thinking about regional cultures that would influence hundreds of scholars and authors. He introduced  the principle of "effect of first settlement," which states that original settlers of any geography had profound influence on its culture even if their number was small and came into the area hundreds of years ago. New arrivals to these areas often adopt the existing culture unless a new group overwhelms the population. 

​

​

​

​

​

 

The result is that you can trace today's regional cultures to original immigrants and settlers to understand regional values. Lifemind uses DNA research, census data, and historical research to determine where distinct cultures lie in America, enabling your business to more precisely align with regional values. These distinct cultures are reflected in our copyrighted Digital Marketing Region (DMR) map. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

Tying Market Pluralism together is the idea of "Value Pluralism," which at the heart of work by Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997). Berlin believed that there were a finite number of values among humans and the world was made up of groups in the form of "Value Pluralism." Lifemind uses this idea together with more than a hundred years from diverse academic research to fuel Market Pluralism for business application. 

​

As Berlin noted in one of his last interviews:

​

"I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite -- let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.."