Notes on Autobiographical Personality Analysis

I've considered doing a PhD. They take years and are expensive. I have an interesting project idea though. Here I'll include what the proposal could look like, an email I wrote to a businessman about it, and an email I wrote to a professor about it.

PhD Research Proposal

Title:

A Value-Based Framework for Analyzing Autobiographies: Mapping Meaning and Motivation in the Lives of Influential Individuals

or

Autobiographical Personality Analysis: An Axiological Framework for Analyzing Writing About the Self

Abstract

This research proposes a novel framework for the systematic analysis of autobiographies and memoirs through the lens of value theory, social psychology, and computational linguistics. Drawing on Viktor Frankl’s fourfold structure of creative, experiential, encounteral, and attitudinal values, this project aims to develop a scalable methodology for mapping the motivational structures of historical and contemporary figures. The study will integrate theories of meaning-making, social reference group psychology, and positive psychology (notably the work of Martin Seligman) with textual analysis of life narratives. The project offers academic contributions to the fields of motivational psychology, biographical history, and philosophy of the self while producing practical tools for personality assessment and historical insight, particularly relevant for business and education.

Research Aims and Questions

Aims:

To build a value-based analytic framework for interpreting autobiographies and memoirs.

To identify and compare motivational and meaning-making structures across a wide range of historical individuals.

To explore how patterns of value fulfillment influence life outcomes.

Key Research Questions:

How can Viktor Frankl’s categories of value be reliably identified and coded in autobiographical texts?

What patterns of social reference groups (e.g., mentors, heroes, audiences, rivals) emerge in the lives of high-performing individuals?

How do attitudes toward adversity, derived from linguistic indicators of optimism, time orientation, and character strength, correlate with life trajectories and decision-making?

Can this framework be applied predictively or diagnostically in contemporary contexts, such as entrepreneurial success or leadership development?

Methodology

This is an interdisciplinary project combining qualitative and computational methods:

Textual Corpus Construction

Autobiographies and memoirs of notable figures in business, politics, and the arts (e.g., Andrew Carnegie, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ford, Phil Knight) will be selected as the core dataset. Selection criteria will include cultural impact, detail of life reflection, and availability of text.

Qualitative Coding

Manual and software-assisted content analysis will identify expressions of:

Creative values (e.g., inventions, companies founded, works produced)

Experiential values (e.g., vivid sensory/life experiences)

Encounteral values (e.g., descriptions of mentors, rivals, audiences)

Attitudinal values (e.g., reactions to setbacks, linguistic optimism/pessimism)

Social Reference Group Typology

Borrowing from reference group theory, interactions will be coded as:

Normative (moral influence),

Comparative (competitive influence),

Model (aspirational figures),

Audience (perceived observers).

Computational Linguistics

Tools such as LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) will be used to assess tone, time orientation, and strength-focused vs. weakness-focused language.

Cross-case Comparative Analysis

The data will be synthesized to identify patterns across individuals and domains, with attention to cultural, temporal, and occupational differences.

Significance and Contribution

This study offers several unique contributions:

Academic Value:

It extends Frankl’s existential theory into empirical analysis, providing a new framework for studying life meaning and personal development within psychological and literary contexts.

Methodological Innovation:

By combining narrative psychology, social theory, and computational text analysis, the study proposes a replicable method for large-scale value analysis of autobiographical texts.

Applied Impact:

The framework has potential utility in domains like investor evaluation of startup founders, leadership training, educational curriculum design, and content production (e.g., podcasting, biography writing).

Researcher Profile

I hold a BA in Philosophy from Birkbeck, University of London, and an MSc in Public Policy and Management from SOAS, University of London. I pursued higher education in my 30s after gaining significant professional experience, including serving as the elected head of a local municipal government in Michigan. My BA dissertation examined the structure and purpose of dialogue, while my MSc dissertation focused on employee turnover within local government administration. My academic and professional journey reflects my interest in how people make meaning through action, language, and leadership.

Conclusion

This project seeks to develop a foundational model for understanding how individuals construct meaningful lives through their value structures, as revealed in their autobiographical narratives. It offers rigorous, multidimensional insights into motivation, identity, and decision-making that are valuable both within academia and across applied sectors.

Here is part of the email to the business person:

I have a PhD research project idea that can help you in your investing and on your podcast.

Here's the idea, and then I'll explain how it can help you.

There are many great memoirs and autobiographies. In business good examples are Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Phil Knight, Bob Parsons, and many others. What sets these people apart? Many things of course, but the key thing is the way they see and take action on what they value in the world. This value structure can be evaluated in their autobiographies and memoirs. Here's how that could look.

Viktor Frankl divided values up into four useful categories: creative, experiential, encounteral, and attitudinal. He posited that it's the achieving of these values that give meaning to life. For the creative and experiential categories our analysis can be literal. For instance, Andrew Carnegie created Carnegie Steel. He had many experiences, for instance, when he was an executive assistant at a railroad company he dropped the pay envelope, convinced the train conductor to stop and back the train up, and found the envelope along the side of a river bank. These types of things are often pretty clear in autobiographies and memoirs.

The next two categories get even more interesting. For encounteral values we can use social reference groups. Who we orient ourselves with is a major influence on our perspective and behaviors. Major social reference groups that we have include normative people that we take advice from on what is good and bad such as parents and mentors, models are people that we try to emulate and become as examples of our heroes, and our audience is who we want to impress such as friends, a spouse, children, fans, or posterity, and there are comparative reference groups that we compete with such as rivals. These key social events are often pivotal in autobiographies and memoirs, as in life.

Next are our attitudinal values. Seligman's research has shown significant differences in how people react to setbacks based on whether or not they have an optimistic or pessimistic frame of mind, people's awareness and focus on their strengths versus their weaknesses, and their temporal orientation toward the past, present, and future. These can be evaluated over large amounts of material through computational linguistics.

This analysis taken together will be a unique contribution to the field of psychology and would represent the most thorough analysis of autobiographies and memoirs that has ever been done. Most useful to you would be for business. After it is created and can be successfully done on a larger scale it doesn't have to be limited to a certain subject area, the same analysis structure and framework can then be applied to the autobiographies of everyone from chefs and artists to politicians and escaped slaves.

Here's how this would be of immense benefit to you. From an investment standpoint you will have a unique advantage in that you can analyze the value systems of the founders and executives you're looking at investing in. Here's how that could look. You have a variety of investments that you could make. You've done your normal analysis of the product, brand, business model, and market. Now it comes down to the character and ability of the people involved. Will they make the right decisions and take the right actions to succeed? That hinges on their values. You can have them write a few pages about their lives. We can then evaluate those writings using this same framework. We can compare their results with others that you know have succeeded, ranging across history, cultures, and industries. This can help you to make superior selections. With that comparative advantage to other funds you will push further ahead.

This will also benefit you immensely in your podcast, writing, and other work centered around stories of life. It will give you the ability to have detailed analysis of historical figures. Not just other's opinions about them, but unique insights into what they valued and how they thought, what made them who they were. This gives you a massive amount of material with a superior quality than other podcasts. You'll be aware of the patterns that we discover through this analysis and that will give you the ability to be more insightful in both your questions and judgments. Not only will you be able to talk about the values and thoughts of historical figures, you'll also be able to talk about what people in the present need to be valuing in order to continue to create a great future.

Peter Thiel makes the case with his Founders Fund that the people with the original idea are usually the best to take it forward to all that it can be. As I've originated this concept I would like your assistance in pursuing it. I'm the right person for this role because I have the vision of what it can be. You also have a vision that you are achieving and this project can help you take that to the next stage.

Here are parts of two emails to a professor:

I am definitely interested in pursuing the idea. I don't think coming up with material should be an issue. Just the subgenre categories within autobiography and memoir give a glimpse of the range: business memoirs, war stories, slave narratives, political autobiographies, etc. I'll expand a little on the potentialities of the idea without going too long. From the Frankl axiological perspective there are creative, experiential, and attitudinal values. Encounteral values are a subcategory of experiential values, and an important one as humans are highly social. These encounteral values can be seen through the lens of reference group theories as being associative or disassociation, and categorized as normative, model, or audience influences.

Let's say I take Conrad Hilton's autobiography "Be My Guest" about his journey in founding and growing Hilton Hotels to the first international hotel chain in the world and break it down piece by piece within this axiological theoretical framework. I'm not sure exactly what I would get, but I think it would be interesting. I believe there will be patterns and interesting observations to be made from this alone. This may in itself be worthy of a study to reveal the prime value motivations and how they change over the lifetime of a given individual.

Then I do the same thing with Tom Monaghan's autobiography "Pizza Tiger" about his founding and growing of Domino's Pizza. I've read both of these autobiographies, and the value and social aspects of them are very interesting. Both Hilton and Monaghan are American founders of large and successful companies. They are both believing and practicing Catholics. They both have military experience. They come from different times, and they had significantly different family life growing up. Do patterns emerge between the two?

This can be immensely expanded. Add in Clay Mathile of Iams pet food as another American Catholic businessman and compare. Take Jay Van Andel and Rich Devos, the two founders of Amway. Phil Knight, Steve Madden, Brian Smith, and Paul Van Doren all founded shoe companies. Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy were both in advertising. David Rockefeller and Henry Adams were both descendants of famous Americans. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft together, and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were both tycoons. Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone still have thriving brands with their last names and were close personal friends. Marc Randolph and Mitch Lowe were both instrumental in founding and growing Netflix. Jim Koch started what we think of as the modern microbrewing industry today. I just finished Sarah Frey's memoir about growing a farming business from a young age and after a rough upbringing.

I don't want you to think I would be limited to just business. Frederick Douglass, Josiah Henson, Elizabeth Keckley, Booker T. Washington, and Olaudah Equiano are all slaves that ended up free with immensely interesting stories. Rod Henderson and J. D. Vance are both recent rough coming of age memoirs. The chef Anthony Bourdain and the writer Steven Pressfield both tell grueling tales of being unsuccessful until later in life. The economists Glenn Loury, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Ludwig von Mises all have autobiographies. Max Planck the physicist who discovered quanta, Charles Darwin of evolution fame, and James Watson as co-discoverer of the structure of DNA all have written their stories. Cal Turner Jr., Leonard Lauder, and Thomas Watson Jr. all inherited successful businesses from their parents and then grew them further still. Some people are just fascinating historical characters like Benjamin Franklin or Giacomo Casanova. Frankl, Freud, and Jung all have memoirs, I've only read one so far, but I'm sure they're interesting. C. S. Lewis, St. Augustine, Leo Tolstoy, G. K. Chesterton, and Roger Scruton have all written memoirs about their conversions or reconversions to Christianity.

The most important piece of these narratives is the phenomenological axiological perspective of the acting individual within that specific lived context, which we cannot access in any better way than through autobiography and memoir. Can there be bias and distortion in retroactively applying self-positive sensemaking and meaning-making to the personal historical references that cannot be verified or refuted? Yes. Even that, to the extent that we can discern such things, is revealing.

I'm thinking I use a foundation of George Herbert Mead's social self and Daniel Dennett's self as the center of narrative gravity, then layer on this axiological structure of Viktor Frankl's value framework (and dimensional ontology that meshes nicely with Mead and Dennett), and then focus in on social reference groups as presented in memoir and autobiography. I think it's a beautiful idea. What do you think about the practical possibility of a plan like that?

Find more at JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com