Chapter 9: Assigning People to Empirically Uncovered Mind-sets: A New Horizon to Understand the Minds and Behaviors of People

The present chapter introduces newly developed and now available techniques to assign ‘new individuals’ to mind-sets emerging from previous studies using the emerging science of Mind Genomics. The approach can be likened to the discovery of basic colors (the ‘science’) followed by the creation of ad hoc ‘colorimeters’, empowering the researcher to expand the original discovery, perhaps made with dozens or hundreds of respondents, to categorize new people, in the thousands, millions, or more. The chapter illustrates the ‘thinking’ and application’ using a case history with data, conducted in a short, convenient, affordable period of 12 hours with respondents in the USA, yet with the possible expansion of the results world-wide. The study, easily done anywhere in the world with an affordable sample, generates mind-set membership for each respondent. The chapter focuses on the approach to create the assignment rule, with the focus being ease, speed, simplicity, affordability, and scalability. Although, most of the algorithms evaluated in the development of the method provided satisfactory accuracies, the algorithm incorporating partial least squares discriminant analysis proved to be the most accurate. The detailed evaluation of the model revealed the most important elements emerging from the Mind Genomics study, responsible for differentiating among the mind-sets. The proposed method, embodied in a new technology [personal viewpoint identifier (PVI)], expands the reach of Mind Genomics, to produce not only data about mind-sets for the topics of everyday life, but also the ability to expand the reach of the data, creating predictive models. As noted at the beginning, Mind Genomics now expands from the limited laboratory world, comprising perhaps hundreds of people, to the entire world comprising billions of people.