CIM CONVENTION 2022
INTRODUCTION
Your purpose in life reveals what is important to you once the everyday details have been stripped away. Is it better to be happy? Or kind? Or adventurous? Whilst the way you answer is very individual, the way that groups of people answer tells us surprising things about the culture of those groups. Our research shows that the way people answer this question is significantly correlated with both personality type and
the way people experience life: whether they find life stressful or fulfilling or uncertain. By comparing the way the attendees of the CIM 2022 Convention answered this question with the answers from the “general population” (using normative data from our previous research), we can gain insight into how that group differs from average in these important respects.
RESULT S OF THE EXPERIMENT
A total of 335 attendees from the CIM 2022 Convention took part before the meeting started. They were asked …
When looking back at your life would you like it to have been...
Convention goers were given the following options:
MEANINGFUL ADVENTUROUS WITHOUT FEAR PURPOSEFUL1 HAPPY
AUTHENTIC INSPIRED USEFUL WISE DIVERSE SUCCESSFUL HEALTHY KIND CAREFREE PLEASUREABLE VALUABLE WEALTHY FREE SAFE EASY
1 “Purposeful” was removed from the analysis comparing the CIM 2022 population with the general population as it was presented in a non-comparable way.
The responses of all the CIM 2022 Convention attendees are shown below, ordered by frequency (responses are shown as a proportion of the total).
An alternative representation of the CIM 2022 attendee responses, with size of word representing frequency.
The results from the CIM 2022 Convention were compared with a population sample of adults from around the world (n=408) who were asked the same question, with the same response options.
As before, below is an alternitive representation of the normative responses, with size of word representing frequency.
GENERAL POPULATION VS CIM 2022 ATTENDEES
The three most frequent choices in the general population were “Happy”, “Meaningful” and “Adventurous”.
This differed significantly to the CIM 2022 Convention attendee response distribution in the following way.
In the broader population, “Happy” was the most frequent choice of life purpose. Whereas in the CIM 2022 Convention population, it was the 4th most popular2, being selected with less than half the frequency of the general population. Other purposes chosen less often in the CIM 2022 population (again at less than half the frequency of the general population) were “Successful” and “Safe”.
“Meaningful”, “Adventurous”, “Without Fear” and “Authentic”, were all chosen significantly more often by the CIM 2022 Convention attendees than the general population.
From our previous research, we know that the choice of life purpose is significantly correlated with several important things.
Firstly, can we tell anything about who a person is, or how they experience life by the life goals that they choose?
2 In fact the 5th most popular, before “Purposeful” was removed from the analysis for reasons previously given
1. Experience of life
In our general population sample, people who chose “Happiness” as a life goal, on average experienced less joy, fulfillment, and creativity than those choosing other goals. Conversely, they also experienced more stress, uncertainty and anxiety, than those choosing other goals.
Conversely, those choosing “Adventurous” (the second most popular selection in the CIM 2022 population) as a life goal perceived themselves to experience lower stress than the rest.
The CIM 2022 Convention population also chose “Authentic” at frequencies greater than the general population. In the general population sample, people choosing this life goal experienced more joy, creativity and fulfilment and less stress and anxiety than others.
2. Personality types
Again in our general population sample, those whose purpose was to be “Happy” were, on average, more introverted than people choosing other purposes.
Those who chose “Authentic” were more extraverted, sympathetic and open, and less neurotic than others.
We are unable to say if these correlations are causal - i.e. we don’t know, just from our data, if aiming to be adventurous makes you happier or aiming to be happy makes you more stressed. It is possible that happier people are more likely to want to adventure, and those that are stressed want happiness. It does, though, allow us to make a measure of the culture of a group of people in comparison to the general population.
THE MEANING OF MINING
One major theme of the conference was that the ‘idea’ of mining - by which we mean all the subconscious associations that culture has with mining and the mining industry - has a broadly negative perception in the minds of the public. There is, therefore, clearly a need and desire to change perceptions of mining.
As a first step, we need to start to understand the perception of what mining means. The conference presented an opportunity to simply ask people closely associated with the mining industry what mining means to them, reasonably anonymously, with no preamble or prime.
Therefore we asked 335 attendees of the CIM 2022 Convention:
What does mining mean to you?
And asked them for a few words that captured their thoughts. The results are visualised simply below.
In the same way that the brain creates meaning from behavioural feedback from the world, the meaning of mining is ultimately defined by the actions of all stakeholders. We wanted to understand the extent to which these actions were aligned with how the conference goers perceived mining.
So we asked them two things: To reflect on how closely aligned
a) their individual actions were, and then b) the mining industry’s actions were…
...with their perceived meaning of mining stated above.
Results are compared below:
(Note the scale ranges from 0 to 1 where a distance of 1 would represent the greatest possible distance between actions and meaning, and 0 would be actions and meaning being totally consistent.)
It is clear that the actions of both the individual and of the industry as a whole are both partially inconsistent with what mining means to attendees of the CIM 2022 Convention. This raises a number of questions: how can we decrease both these distances? If actions are inconsistent with meaning, what are the other sources of the meaning of mining? How does the meaning of mining differ between different groups (between industry insiders and broader populations for example). These questions remain unanswered.
