Mind Programs
Prototype · v0.1
Cultural cognition profiler

What programs is this person actually running?

A tool that maps the decision rules, perception filters, and causal models a person executes without thinking — grounded in cross-cultural survey data and their own language.

— I —

The problem.

Most of how a person interprets a situation, weighs a decision, or responds under stress is not deliberated. It runs on installed cultural code: programs absorbed from family, schooling, religion, language, and place. These programs are mostly invisible to the person running them and entirely invisible to anyone meeting them for the first time.

For negotiations, leadership, cross-cultural meetings, or building relationships across difference, knowing the stack matters. The tool below articulates the most likely programs a person is running, based on where they're from, what they've lived through, and what they actually say.

— II —

How it works.

Three stages. Two sources of evidence. One ranked profile per subject.

i
Cultural prior
From a subject's demographic and life history, compute a weighted exposure across cultural macro-regions. Combined with a curated inventory of mind programs, this yields a baseline estimate of which programs are likely loaded.
Cross-cultural survey data
ii
Corpus evidence
When available, the subject's own writing or speech is scanned for the idioms, phrasings, and references that signal specific programs in operative use. This separates what culture suggests from what the person actually deploys.
Social writing · Transcripts
iii
Combined profile
Prior and evidence combine into a ranked profile of likely-loaded programs, with contested programs flagged as sites of internal tension and tightly-paired programs grouped as clusters that move together.
Profile · Narrative brief
— III —

The cultural distribution layer.

Beneath the profiling tool sits an inventory of mind programs and their distribution across cultural macro-regions. Each program below is anchored on real cross-cultural survey data. Click a program to see where it concentrates.

Programs
Divine providence
Causality & agency
Outcomes flow from divine will or cosmic order
Prevalence
Hover a region for detail
On the data. Distributions are curated at the cultural macro-region level. Within-region variance is real; finer-grained splits are part of the ongoing build.
— IV —

One person, one karyotype.

All 45 programs across 11 cognitive “chromosomes” rendered on a single canvas. Without a profile loaded, you see the inventory baseline. Load a subject and the same canvas redraws into a personal fingerprint — bar length encodes how strongly each program is loaded, bar color encodes which culture drove that loading.

Cognitive karyotype