Mindsets are deep, enduring patterns of thinking that underlie surface attitudes and opinions — the durable assumptions and framings people draw on, often below conscious awareness, to make sense of an issue. Developed by the FrameWorks Institute as a unit for tracking cultural change, mindsets sit between individual opinion and collective worldview: shared enough to move at a population level, yet stable enough to act as a lever for change. FrameWorks Institute has tracked mindsets in the US since 2020, observing a rise in systemic thinking across issues such as racism and the economy; FrameWorks UK’s Moving Mindsets programme extends this to build a UK-specific tracking instrument.
The underlying claim is that culture change is real but hard to see and harder to measure, so organisations pursuing social change need a way to know whether it is happening. Mindsets supply that unit: “when mindsets move, they open up new possibilities for changes in behaviour, policy, and institutions.” Tracking them over time lets funders and campaigners ask concrete questions — for instance, whether a movement like Black Lives Matter is shifting deep culture rather than just headlines — and to locate where public thinking is already loosening, which is where narrative and policy interventions can gain the most traction.
Also see Deep Frames and Moving Mindsets