Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/10 (2010): 889–905, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00304.x
The Frog in Kierkegaard’s Beer: Finding Meaning in the Threat-Compensation Literature Travis Proulx1* and Steven J. Heine2 1 2
University of California, Santa Barbara University of British Columbia
Abstract
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 ª 2010 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd