The goal of social research is to understand why groups of people think and behave as they do. Social structure, culture, genetics, an intelligent design crafted by a deity — what drives us? We may never know, exactly, but we do have theories.

While the genesis of our behavior is likely not one thing, and may be something we’ll never fully understand, at the Good People Research Company we believe the most accessible window to why we behave as we do is something we call a Guiding Narrative^®.

The Guiding Narrative is a story we tell ourselves about the world and how it works. It runs in our minds, in the background, 24/7. Most notably, the Guiding Narrative instructs us on cause and effect, and therefore on how to survive. It produces our values, mechanisms we use to ensure our survival by guiding us on how to interpret information and respond in an appropriate way to that information. The Guiding Narrative, then, tells us what to value for the purpose of ensuring our survival. Sort of a survival instruction manual.

Understand a person’s Guiding Narrative, and you’ll understand why a person has the values they do and how to treat them accordingly. It’s all in the story. No matter what story you tell another person, they will match it up in their minds against the story they tell themselves, their Guiding Narrative. Because of this, we’ve observed over 30 years of studying group behavior in diverse social settings and subcultures that the Guiding Narrative is the only story that matters.™

You can survey people all day long to try to understand what they want and why they want it. You can observe them, interview them, record their web browsing, content consumption, and purchasing behavior. You can use statistical modeling and machines to learn the relationships between all of these things and predict what a person will do or want next. What you will learn is a partial, eclipsed view of “what” people do or want or say they want. You may even learn why they think they want something or do something in particular.

But most if not all social scientists who do research on people will tell you that most people are not aware of why they do something and therefore can not tell you accurately when asked. So you are left with knowing what people do and guessing why they do it by looking at how different factors relate to one another.

You are left without real clarity unless you can surface and reconstruct their Guiding Narrative.

Remember, the Guiding Narrative is an instruction manual. Literally the instruction manual that people reference, largely subconsciously, when they make decisions of any kind. If you could read someone’s instruction manual, you would know more about why a person or group behaves as they do, even if they don’t.

And if you had access to this instruction manual, you could determine how to bring value to the person or group, perhaps more clearly than they could ever communicate to you.

At The Good People Research Company, we pursue the Guiding Narrative passionately. We understand it to be the essential codebook for human behavior, even if the Guiding Narrative itself is initiated and revised by another source, such as experience, education, culture, genetics or some divine, unknowable source. Again, it’s the only story that matters. It’s the one that the mind references. It is the most proximate source of our worldview.

We’ve developed an approach and methods to discovering, surfacing, and reconstructing human Guiding Narratives of individuals and groups and continually refine this approach with field experience. We also have developed a way to translate what we learn into practical, actionable insight and tools that serve the needs of executives, team leaders, marketers, product and experience designers, public servants and elected officials — anyone who wants to matter to good people.