The University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, with support from the Templeton Religion Trust, is pleased to announce the Primals Research Awards. Our goal is to promote new empirical research exploring how primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are formed, maintained, change, or influence nontrivial outcomes or psychological processes. As recently introduced (Clifton et al., 2019; https://tinyurl.com/y4m62r7k), primals are basic perceptions of the general character of the world as a whole, such as the world is dangerous and the world is interesting, that correlate with many behaviors and wellbeing-related variables.

We are awarding one $250,000 award and two $125,000 awards that will be administered over 24 months (July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2024) to Principal Investigators proposing to examine primals from any of the following eight disciplinary perspectives:

1. Clinical Psychology
2. Positive Psychology
3. Health Psychology
4. Organizational Psycholog
5. Political Psychology
6. Personality Psychology
7. Social Psychology
8. Developmental Psychology

Project leaders are Dr. Jeremy Clifton and Dr. Martin Seligman. Advisors are Dr. Crystal Park and Dr. Alia Crum. Letters of Intent (2 pages max) are due Sept 26, 2021. See full details here: https://tinyurl.com/b3mma5c3

Eligibility

Principal Investigators must have a PhD and be in a contracted faculty position at an accredited college or university (exceptions will be considered on a case-by-case basis). The competition is international. Only one proposal will be accepted per Principal Investigator.