The Frog in Kierkegaard’s Beer: Finding Meaning in the Threat-Compensation Literature

Much existential philosophical theorizing and experimental psychological research is consistent with the notion that people experience arousal when committed beliefs are violated, and this prompts them to affirm other committed beliefs. People depend on meaning frameworks to make sense of their experiences, and when these expected associations are violated, the offending anomaly is often either assimilated into the existing meaning framework, or their meaning framework is altered to accommodate the violation. The meaning maintenance model proposes that because assimilation is often incomplete and accommodation demands cognitive resources, people may instead respond to anomalies by affirming alternative meaning frameworks or by abstracting novel meaning frameworks. Empirical evidence and theoretical implications are discussed. The basic thesis of this manuscript is that a good deal of what we call the ‘threat-compensation’ literature in social psychology can be summarized in one sentence: when committed beliefs are violated, people experience an arousal state that prompts them to affirm other beliefs to which they are committed. This sentence also happens to summarize the meaning maintenance model (MMM; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006; Proulx & Heine, 2006), which attempts to integrate a variety of social psychological perspectives in providing support for this claim. This is not to suggest that the MMM is the first psychological perspective to make this broad claim. In fact, the above sentence could just as easily summarize the bulk of existentialist theorizing over the past century and a half. Looking all the way back to Kierkegaard, a similar claim was fully discussed and developed by the mid 19th century, though the full theoretical implications of this claim have yet to be imported and developed by the current social psychological literature. Over the course of the next few pages, we’ll attempt to do just that – summarize this existential perspective, point to findings that support this perspective in the social psychological literature and argue that the implications of this perspective will move the social cognition literature in directions yet to be explored. An Acknowledgment of the Absurd In 19th century Copenhagen, a failed academic named Soren Kierkegaard broke off with his fiancée so he could focus on his writing. Over the next 7 years, an increasingly isolated Kierkegaard expressed his growing misery to a rapidly diminishing audience. Then he collapsed in the street and died. A few decades later, the writings of this melancholy dane ended up initiating a dominant philosophical guide for living of the 20th century: Existentialism. It’s not clear – and not likely – that Kierkegaard actually surmounted what Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/10 (2010): 889–905, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00304.x a 2010 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass a 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd he identified as the central barrier to human happiness, either in his life or in his writings. Rather, his contribution lies in his clear-eyed identification of this barrier: our experience of reality does not make sense, we all realize this, and it’s making us miserable. According to Kierkegaard, the great philosophical systems of Hegel and Kant were riddled with contradictions. The emerging fields of scientific inquiry were uncovering contradictory phenomena faster than they could be explained. Turning to the Good Book was no help either; God’s demand that Abraham murder Isaac, the last hope of the Israelites, made about as much sense as God singling out Job, the world’s most godfearing man, for the most degradation heaped upon any man. Of course, if our own lives made sense in any satisfying way, we would never have invented these systems to begin with. All too often, the plans we make to attain our goals fail to account for reality, where these goals continually contradict one another and are ultimately rendered irrelevant by our unavoidable demise. Absurdity, it appears, is everywhere. For Kierkegaard, and the existential theorists that followed, the ‘feeling of the absurd’ (Camus, 1955) could be evoked by any perceived inconsistency, though the feeling itself was remarkably consistent in how it was experienced, whether it followed from finishing a beer and finding a live frog at the bottom of the mug (Kierkegaard, 1846 ⁄1997) or contemplating one’s own death (Heidegger, 1996 ⁄1956). Existential anxiety, writ large, was understood as the common psychological response to the breakdown of expected relations – meaning – that constitute our understanding of our selves, the world around us, and our relation to this world. Even as these expectations are violated by contradictory experiences, our unique capacity for reflection allows us to compare expectations and note their frequently contradictory nature. Existential anxiety, it appears, can be experienced in any given situation – and often is. If this was the extent of Existentialist psychological insight, it’s unlikely their ideas would have proliferated – not because they were wrong, but because they were too depressing. Existentialists were not nihilists, however, as the central aim of most existentialist theorists was to find a solution to the crisis they had highlighted. Even if things don’t make sense, we can and do compensate for the awareness of ‘nonrelations’ (Heidegger, 1953 ⁄1996, p. 232) in a variety of ways. The most common of these compensatory responses to nonrelation is to simply ‘return to the chain’ (Camus, 1955, p. 10) and affirm existing relations elsewhere in our environment. We re-integrate with ‘the they’ (Heidegger, 1953 ⁄1996, p. 235), which means throwing ourselves into our work, our relationships, our general interests – anything else that we find meaningful. Importantly, the meaning frameworks we affirm following the ‘feeling of the absurd’ can be entirely unrelated to the absurdity that provoked it. In fact, this is commonly the case, particularly when the absurdity in question is difficult (impossible?) to render sensible. Psychology and the Absurd Although the existentialist theorists may have proposed their ideas without much thought to experimental psychology, there are central psychological assumptions made by the existentialists that psychologists can address: (a) people are motivated to construct expected relations that cohere with one another and their experiences; (b) a distinct mode of arousal is associated with an awareness that this is not always the case; (c) motivated by this arousal, we often engage in efforts to affirm other meaning frameworks; (d) doing so makes us feel better, at least in the short term. In fact, psychologists have spent the better part of the last century telling this very story, albeit from the perspective of many different authors offering disjointed and some890 Meaning and Threat-Compensation a 2010 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/10 (2010): 889–905, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00304.x Social and Personality Psychology Compass a 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd times overlapping accounts. According to Bartlett (1932), all propositions are organized as psychological schemata. According to Bruner and Postman (1949), the violation of a schema (now called a ‘paradigm’) initiates cognitive processes that preserve the schema, as well as some kind of ‘emotional distress.’ According to Piaget (1937 ⁄1954), the emotional distress (now called ‘disequilibrium’) that follows the violation of a schema motivates the construction of new schemata through assimilation and accommodation. According to Festinger (1957), arousal following from a schema violation (now called ‘dissonance’) also prompts efforts to repair the damaged schema. According to numerous social psychological researchers over the past 20 years, violations of beliefs about literal immortality lead people to affirm worldviews in an effort to attain symbolic immortality (Greenberg et al., 1992), violations of social affiliations provoke efforts to affirm social affiliations (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), violations in the perceived integrity of a social system lead people to make efforts to justify that same system (e.g., Jost & Banaji, 1994; Lerner, 1980), violations of subjective certainty lead people to affirm other sources of subjective certainty (Hogg & Mullin, 1999; McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001; Van den Bos, 2001), violations of security lead people to strive to regain a sense of security through other avenues (Hart, Shaver, & Goldenberg, 2005), violations of beliefs about control provoke efforts to affirm other beliefs about control (Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), violations of the self-schema are ameliorated by unrelated affirmations of the self (Fein & Spencer, 1997; Sherman & Cohen, 2006; Steele, 1988) and violations of beliefs about value and purpose provoke efforts to affirm beliefs about value and purpose (Park & Folkman, 1997). Underlying all of these ‘threatcompensation’ processes may be a need for coherence (Antonovsky, 1979), a unity principle (Epstein, 1981), a need for cognitive closure (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996) or a need for structure (Neuberg & Newsom, 1993). Meaning Maintenance Model – Gathering Up the Threads There are two general perspectives one could take when surveying the vast and multiplying literatures in social psychology presenting threat-compensation processes. The first would be to imagine that each of these literatures exemplifies an entirely distinct psychological process. As noted, people may affirm committed beliefs following death reminders for reasons that are uniquely related to mortality (Greenberg et al., 1992), while others affirm committed beliefs following self-related threats for reasons that are unique to the self (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Entirely separate, analogous processes could underlie compensatory affirmation following control threats (Kay et al., 2008) or self-certainty threats (Hogg & Mullin, 1999; McGregor et al., 2001; Van den Bos, 2001). The second perspective would suggest that the various threat-compensation effects that follow from these literatures are not entirely distinct, but rather represent partial manifestations of the same psychological motivation. We strongly advocate for this second perspective and submit that this underlying motivation is a desire to maintain mental representations of expected associations, that is, meaning. The MMM is an integrative framework that argues that the analogous threat-compensation processes catalogued in the social psychological literature are, at least partially, manifestations of an underlying effort to affirm committed beliefs following the violations of other – often unrelated – committed beliefs. While specific elements of this process may vary depending on the content of the threatened beliefs and the content of the beliefs that one subsequently affirms, we argue that the cognitive and motivational machinery that underlies this process is largely invariant across domains. Approaching the Meaning and Threat-Compensation 891 a 2010 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/10 (2010): 889–905, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00304.x Social and Personality Psychology Compass a 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd threat-compensation phenomena from this perspective, we argue, allows for unique theoretical hypotheses that are not currently explored by other perspectives. In what follows, we will elaborate on this framework, present evidence that supports this generally integrative perspective and suggest directions for social psychologists to take when subsequently exploring this phenomenon.