Examining the Relationship Among Beliefs about the Arts, Arts Engagement, and Primal World Beliefs

Primal world beliefs are beliefs about the world thought to be stable and general; however, recent evidence suggests there may be ways in which they may be changed. Across two exploratory studies (N = 5,551), we examine engagement with the arts and their connection with primals. In Study 1, across three samples, we explored correlational relationships between primals and attitudes toward the arts and arts engagement behavior, finding that key primal world beliefs were consistently linked with the arts items. In Study 2, we conducted a five-week long visual art intervention experiment to examine potential changes in primals based on psychoeducational priming for certain methods of engaging with the art (i.e., focusing on art technique, social connections, or perspective taking). Although the experimental conditions did not differentially change primals, Good world belief increased and Hierarchical decreased. Further, key individual differences (i.e., openness to experience, aesthetic appreciation) predicted who was more likely to exhibit changes in primals following an art intervention. These studies provide initial evidence of the relevance of the arts in the study of primal world beliefs and provide suggestions for future work on this topic, including practical ways for changing primal world beliefs via arts engagement.