Working Mentalities

By Matthijs Rotte on 15 April 2009

Following up on graduation, we are still in the process of defining a workable way of logging Mentality. After a couple of months we’ve decided that we’re sticking to our six mentalities for now; Conformism, Sociality, Ambition, Hedonism, Creativity and Perfectionism. We are very much aware that this list can look incomplete at first glance, however, for now, it makes a good basis for further research. As we go along we may very well find that there’s one or maybe a couple, missing. The thing is: our definition of these mentalities are different from the way most people would interpret them. For that matter, when we first started of we interpreted them differently within the research group. We finally came to a consensus. So these can very well only be “working” mentalities.

Parallel to the mentality research is the research for the biggest radio station in the Netherlands; radio538. Their question is how they can get youths in the Netherlands to listen to the radio more. Their audience has an average age of 36y now. It’s not that radio538 wants to lower this, but they constantly need new (young) listeners in order for radio538 to have a bright future. They provided us with what data they have on youths listening to radio538 and I must say; it is a lot. However, al these studies sometimes show very different numbers. We have long been in the process in figuring out which numbers meant what, and what we can use and what to discard.

In a MTV report called: “The golden age of youth” there is talk about the threenager, for our research on mentality this a very interesting report. If threenagers and teenagers are behaving in the same way, does it mean they share a mentality? Or does it mean that they have a totally different mentality but behave in the same fashion. I think the latter is true, although we need the research to back this up. I think that youths are finding their identity by showing this “hedonistic” behaviour and the threenagers are doing it to show their identity in this strongly individual world. In other words the teenager is trying to join a group and the threenager is trying to say: “I’m still younghearted”. Either way it is very interesting what the motives of these groups are. And for that matter, what the driving force is behind this. Could it be their mentality?

tagged with: mentality, research