UC Santa Barbara

When we survey the current theoretical landscape, we find two distinct approaches to the analysis of worldviews. The systemic approach centers on responses to fundamental worldview questions (aka “big questions”); the cognitive‐behavioral approach focuses on the processes that give rise to behaviors that express worldviews. If we think of worldviews as subjective representations of the environment, that is, subjective “worlds,” we can think of the first approach as a means of eliciting, documenting, and comparing “worlds‐made” and the second as a framework for understanding the nonconscious processes of “world‐making.” It is not clear, however, how the two approaches are related. If human answers to the fundamental worldview questions are simply reflective additions to underlying cognitive processes, we would anticipate that worldview conflicts could be resolved relatively easily. If the implicit answers are embedded in nonconscious processes that are presupposed by various ways of life, we would expect that the process of resolving conflicts would be much more complex. An evolutionary approach, which views world‐making as an evolved capacity, not only suggests that the latter is the case, but also offers a way to integrate the two approaches. If, as an evolutionary approach would suggest, all mobile organisms must implicitly answer basic, species‐appropriate versions of the big questions in order to survive, then we can integrate the two approaches by defining worldviews in terms of simplified big questions that allow for both proximate and ultimate answers. This allows us to embed the systemic framework in an agent‐based cognitive‐behavioral process grounded in the everyday life and behavior of humans and other animals. The article is divided into three parts. The first demonstrates how we can use simplified versions of the big questions to integrate the systemic and cognitive‐behavioral approaches, ground the big questions in ways of life, and shift between systemic and agent‐based perspectives. The second offers more refined analytic concepts—modes, scale, and scope—for characterizing this dynamic, multilevel approach to worldviews. The third offers several comparisons to illustrate the benefits of this more‐nuanced approach in the context of conflict resolution.