Arnold Mitchell (February 18, 1918 – July 17, 1985) was a social scientist and consumer futurist who worked for

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

and created a noted

psychographic Psychographics is a qualitative methodology used to describe traits of humans on psychological attributes. Psychographics have been applied to the study of personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles. Two approaches to ...

methodology, Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles (VALS).

Early life and education

Arnold Mitchell was the son of economist

Wesley Clair Mitchell Wesley Clair Mitchell (August 5, 1874 – October 29, 1948) was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades. Mitchell was referred to as Thor ...

and educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell.

Career

Mitchell coauthored a report on ''Voluntary Simplicity'' with

Duane Elgin Duane Elgin (born 1943) is an American author, speaker, educator, consultant, and media activist. Early life and education Duane Elgin grew up near Wilder, Idaho. He attended the Sorbonne in Paris for one semester in 1963 and earned a Bachelor o ...

that was published by SRI in June 1976. The report was expanded and republished with a survey in

CoEvolution Quarterly ''CoEvolution Quarterly'' (1974–1985) was a journal descended from Stewart Brand's ''Whole Earth Catalog''. Stewart Brand founded the ''CoEvolution Quarterly'' in 1974 using proceeds from the ''Whole Earth Catalog.'' It evolved out of the o ...

in 1977, which was used as the basis the 1981 book ''Voluntary Simplicity''.

VALS

Mitchell created the Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles (VALS)

methodology at

in the late 1970s. VALS helps companies tailor their products and services to appeal to the people most likely to purchase them, and explains changing U.S. values and lifestyles. It was formally inaugurated as an SRI product in 1978. VALS was subsequently called "one of the ten top market research breakthroughs of the 1980s" by ''

Advertising Age ''Ad Age'' (known as ''Advertising Age'' until 2017) is a global media brand that publishes news, analysis, and data on marketing and media. Its namesake magazine was started as a broadsheet newspaper in Chicago in 1930. ''Ad Age'' appears in m ...

'' magazine. In the VALS study, Mitchell identified three major values groups in society: the Traditionalists, the Modernists and the Cultural Creatives. The Traditionalists, as he saw them, were those who wanted to return to the 1950s, with mom in the kitchen and the white picket fence around the house. The Modernists were those who thought technology would solve all our problems. And the Cultural Creatives, consisting of two subgroups of "Greens" and "Spiritual Seekers," were people who were self-directed and interested both in developing themselves in fulfilling ways and in being of service to the larger community. According to Mitchell, this group comprised 24 percent of the American population by late 1980, and was the fastest growing values group in America. To the best of our knowledge, Mitchell was the first to coin the term "Cultural Creatives", a term subsequently popularized by Paul Ray and Sherrie Anderson in their book, Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing The World (published in 2000). Mitchell's earlier work identifying Cultural Creatives is not referenced in this work by Ray and Anderson.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mitchell, Arnold 1918 births 1985 deaths SRI International people