The Human Needscape
As a consulting social scientist, it’s my job to tell clients how to shape messages to move people. The truth is, though, that most of the time, I don’t really have the tools to do that. The tools I have —mostly Nudge interventions —make it easier for people to do things they already want to do.
But my audiences don’t already want to take radical action on climate or demand an end to gerrymandering to rescue the democracy. My audiences don’t already agree with me; they don’t even agree with each other. The barriers to a better America are not inconveniences to be overcome with a little social pressure or an opt-out signup system; they are entrenched attitudes and narratives that need a comprehensive shift toward safety and justice.
We don’t have the psychological tools for narrative shift partly because academic incentives encourage scientists to create ever-more finely differentiated descriptions of what people are thinking. There is a whole literature, for instance, on the differences between Social Dominance Theory and Right Wing Authoritarianism (hint: they are very similar!).
We describe how people are thinking, but we’re still not great at predicting how people will think when we engage them, especially when we engage them on something they don’t already agree with. Consultants like me tend to bounce around from fad to fad (The Big 5 personality traits! Values! Morals! Implicit attitudes!) claiming that each is The Thing.
We don’t use a common framework for connecting all the fads into a coherent model, but there is one. It has been discovered over and over in biology, economics, psychology, and sociology. It’s a powerful foundation for all our thinking about how people receive and process our messages. Because it has had a lot of confusing, sciency names, I’m giving it a new one: the Human Needscape.
The Needscape helps us achieve survival needs such as food and shelter, and it is marked out by the two fundamental psychological tensions:
- Pursue vs. Protect: Pursuing good things vs. protecting what we have. To eat, we have to go out and get food. To live through the winter, we have to stay home and defend our food stores. If you’ve taken a science course, you have seen this dimension described as approach/avoidance, fight/flight, gain/loss, or prevention/promotion. Scientists have discovered this basic, limbic tension over and over.
- Me vs. We: Serving myself vs. working together with others. If I always work alone, I reap all the benefits of my labor but assume all the risks. If I always serve the common good, I might never get enough for myself. We are such social creatures that our transitions between individual and group identities are hard to notice, but psychologists know that we are always traveling back and forth trying to achieve what psychologist Marilyn Brewer called “optimal distinctiveness” .
Shalom Schwartz has described these dimensions almost exactly as they appear here, but they have been discovered and rediscovered all over the sciences because:
- The Human Needscape is real. It is a psychological structure that we can measure over and over again with different questions.
- It is fundamental. Literally. It is a foundation for thinking. These two tensions are not our only needs; but they are low enough in the cognitive order of operations that they map reliably to other cognitive constructs like values and goals.
- It is universal. Everyone operates in this space, so it can effectively profile very different audiences.
All those features make the Needscape a powerful basis for assembling data about narratives and reasoning about how different kinds of messages will appeal to different audiences.
The Human Needscape is Real
The Needscape is not a framework scientists created to simplify their ideas; it reflects a true “shape” of our motivations. I know that because it appears again and again in statistical analysis.
When I used statistics to analyze values data across sources, this same shape always arose. The statistics (principal components analysis) take many variables and simplify them into a few dimensions that they share. Here, I mapped 10 basic values from the European Social Survey into two dimensions.
This map doesn’t place the values on the Needscape; it derives the Needscape from the values.
The axes that naturally arise from pushing these values into two dimensions happen to be Pursue/Protect and Me/We.
Notice that Achievement falls closer to “Me” while Conformity falls closer to “We”. Security lands closer to “Protect”, and Self-Direction falls closer to “Pursue”.
Because the organization of the values is empirical (the statistics learned it from the data), not every value’s position perfectly matches our intuitions, but the quadrant locations reliably emerge again and again across measures of values. The World Values Survey asked some of the same values questions and also asked respondents to report the values they thought their children should hold. The chart below shows how all those values naturally fall on two dimensions which, again, clearly map to the Needscape.
The Human Needscape is Fundamental
The statistical analyses above show that the Needscape is reliable: the same shape emerges from values measured on two surveys. Reliability is nothing to sneeze at, especially in the era of the social psychology replication crisis, but that only tells us that Schwartz’s Basic Values are reliably related to each other.
The Needscape is more than the organization for those values though; It organizes all of our values and goals. The four quadrants of the space describe four categories of values that we can shift between as our specific needs change: Community, Security, Mastery, and Autonomy.
These quadrants describe points of view that different people have. I analyzed a big survey from the Peoria Project that did not include the Schwartz battery but did include questions on morality, social trust, justice, equality, and control over the future. Again, the statistical analysis did not look for the Needscape specifically, just for the two dimensions that best described the questions on the survey.
This mapping is a little less straightforward, obviously, since the questions were very different from each other. But the two dimensions are clearly anti-social Me on the left (“I do not believe in human goodness”) to pro-social We on the right (“People are essentially good”) and progressive Pursue on the top (“Foreign policy should NOT just look out for America First.”) and conservative Protect on the bottom (“It is WRONG to refuse to stand for the anthem.”).
This survey included internal and external locus of control (“I am in control of what happens to me” vs. “Success depends on luck”), and those appear on the conservative Protect side and progressive Pursue side of the circle respectively. That natural organization from the Peoria survey is consistent with what we know about conservative and progressive political psychology.
The mapping of survey responses hints at new hypotheses. The conservatives with higher internal locus of control are the Security-focused progressives. The specific progressives with higher external locus of control are Autonomy-focused progressives. This latter group may be the most likely to resonate with the “system is rigged” narrative that is core to some Democratic leaders’ thinking.
The Needscape is Universal.
The Human Needscape is is real and fundamental. It might not be the only important set of needs that organizes our thinking, but it is so consistently related to values and goals that I can measure it different ways and get similar answers, making it easy to organize theories about how people make decisions.
It is also universal. Everyone’s mind runs on these rails, so it applies to all audiences. Below are the Needscapes that naturally arise in World Values Survey data for Mexico, China, and the US. Some of the values themselves drift around, but the axes still mark out the Needscape in every country: Me near Stimulation and Wealth vs. We near Benevolence and Tradition; and Pursue near Benevolence and Creativity vs. Protect near Tradition and Conformity.
Some of the movement of the individual values is random variation in survey responses. Some might be meaningful differences between cultures in how specific goals meet needs. Wealth, for instance, occupies the Mastery quadrant in the US and the Autonomy quadrant in China. It is possible that being rich signals different things in capitalist and modern communist economies — protection from risk in one and access to opportunity in the other.
Hypotheses like these are just that: hypotheses. Data science is largely concerned with finding hints to follow up with directed investigation. However, the Needscape provides a landscape on which to layer data from different sources to find these hints of narrative connections and inform a comprehensive theory of persuasive communication across audiences, cultures, issues, and time.
