ArticlePDF AvailableLiterature Review

The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations

February 2006
Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(2):88-110

February 2006
10(2):88-110

DOI:10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_1

Source
PubMed

Authors:

Travis Proulx

Cardiff University

Kathleen Vohs

University of Minnesota Twin Cities

The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a need for meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termed fluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are different from the domain in which the threat occurred. Evidence for fluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psychological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. People respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate and maintain a sense of meaning.

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The Meaning Maintenance Model:

On the Coherence of Social Motivations

Steven J. Heine

Travis Proulx

Department of Psychology

University of British Columbia

Kathleen D. Vohs

Department of Marketing and Logistics Management

University of Minnesota

The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a need for mean

ing; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of ex

pected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people’s sense of

meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain

meaning—a process termed fluid compensation. According to the model, people can

reaffirm meaning in domains that are different from the domain in which the threat oc

curred. Evidence for fluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psy

chological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem

threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. Peo-

ple respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a

range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate

and maintain a sense of meaning.

Nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute

illustrates the essential impulse of the human

drama.

Albert Camus, An Absurd Reasoning

In 1949, Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman published

a study in the Journal of Personality entitled, “On the

perception of incongruity: A paradigm.” According to

Bruner and Postman, people maintain mental represen

tations of expected relations, paradigms, that in turn

regulate their perceptions of the world. Consider the

paradigm for playing cards: 52 cards, 4 suits, 2 colors,

and a wide array of associated features that are demar

cated into distinct categories. What would happen to

this paradigm if people encountered a card that did not

fit into any of their recognized categories? For exam

ple, what would happen if they were confronted with a

black queen of hearts? How would they perceive this

card, and how would this card affect their existing

playing card paradigm?

Bruner and Postman (1949) designed an experiment

to test this very question. In their experiment, most par

ticipants began by ignoring the novel relationships

among features, or more precisely, they failed to see

them. Instead, they automatically revised their percep

tions of the anomalous cards such that the suits and col

ors matched their mental representations of expected

relations (black hearts were seen as red). After re

peated presentations, however, most participants grad

ually became aware of the anomalous features, and un

prompted, began to revise their playing card paradigms

to account for these newly related features. Curiously,

about 10% of participants found themselves trapped in

a kind of paradigm purgatory, whereby they recog

nized that the cards with which they were presented

had unexpected features, but they could not articulate

the odd relationships. Consequently, they could not re

vise their existing paradigm to accommodate the

changes. Even more curious, these same participants

often experienced acute personal distress, with one

participant exclaiming “I can’t make the suit out what

ever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I

don’t know what color it is now or whether it’s a spade

Personality and Social Psychology Review

2006, Vol. 10, No. 2, 88–110

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

This research was funded by grants from NIMH (R01

MH060155–01A2) and SSHRC (410–2001–0097, 410–2004–0795)

to Steven J. Heine and by support from SSHRC and the Canada Re

search Chair Council to Kathleen D. Vohs.

We are especially grateful to Edith Chen, Ian Hansen, Ara

Norenzayan, Mark Schaller, Brandon Schmeichel, Azim Shariff, and

members of the Culture and Self Lab for comments on an earlier

draft.

Correspondence should be sent to Steven J. Heine, Department

of Psychology, 2136 West Mall, University of British Columbia,

Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z4 Canada. E-mail: heine@psych.ubc.ca.

or a heart. I’m not even sure what a spade looks like.

My God!” (p. 213).

If we were to grant that some of Bruner and Post

man’s (1949) study participants experienced actual

distress in this situation, one wonders why anyone

should be troubled when presented with a black queen

of hearts. Why care about playing cards? We propose

that the unease experienced by participants in Bruner

and Postman’s study reveals a much broader concern

that underlies a diverse array of human motivations.

This unease reflects a need for meaning.

Western Existentialism

We begin our investigation of a need for meaning by

considering the literature that has most directly ex

plored this concept. A number of philosophers, whom

we term the Western existentialists, have argued that a

key element of the human condition is a never-ending

pursuit of meaning. The meaning that is the goal of this

search is a fundamentally relational mode of being.

Kierkegaard (1843/1997, 1848/1997), for example,

wrote extensively on the manner in which the self is ex-

perienced in relation to that which lies outside the self.

He suggested that the self is experienced as “a relation

that relates itself to itself, and in relating itself to itself,

relates itself to another” (p. 351). Heidegger (1953/

1996) expanded on these notions to such an extent that

he would no longer use the word self in any manner,

preferring the expression Da-sein (being there) to ex-

press a being so connected to its environment that any

perceived discrimination was mere illusion. Camus

(1955) would later survey the relational themes of the

existential literature and extract as its central obsession

a universal inclination toward what he termed “the nos

talgia for unity:” a belief that all reality comprises a

single, interconnected whole.

Regardless of whether the world is a relational

whole, Camus (1955) suggested that the desire to per

ceive reality in such a manner, to both discover and

construct relations represented “the essential impulse

of the human drama” (p. 13). Camus reiterated a line of

existential thought by claiming that all cultural endeav

ors—philosophy, science, art, and religion—are mani

festations of the universal human need to relate all ele

ments of perceived reality into a single, unified,

cohesive framework of expected relationships.

It was Camus’ (1955) contention that, for the West

ern existentialists

, meaning is relation. Human beings

are meaning-makers, driven to make connections, find

signals in noise, identify patterns, and establish associ

ations in places where they may not inherently exist.

People are meaning-makers insofar as they seem com

pelled to establish mental representations of expected

relations that tie together elements of their external

world, elements of the self, and most importantly, bind

the self to the external world. When elements of per

ceived reality are encountered that do not seem to be

part of people’s existing relational structures, or that

resist relational integration, these inconsistent ele

ments provoke a “feeling of the absurd,” a disconcert

ing sense of fundamental incongruity that motivates

people to re-establish a sense of normalcy and coher

ence in their lives.

The Meaning Maintenance Model

At first glance, matters of meaning may seem suffi

ciently esoteric and tenuous as to lie outside the pur

view of experimental psychology. However, such con

cerns are being put to rest by the chorus of voices

across multiple subdisciplines who have taken to

studying meaning-related phenomena. Echoes of

Camus’s nostalgia can be heard in research on sche-

mata (e.g., Markus, 1977), worldviews (Thompson &

Janigan, 1988), assumptive worlds (Janoff-Bulman,

1992), domains of the known (Peterson, 1999), a sense

of coherence (Antonovsky, 1979), unity principles

(Epstein, 1981), and above all, terror management the-

ory (e.g., Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2004;

Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991) and the

new science of experimental existential psychology

(e.g., Greenberg, Koole, & Pyszczynski, 2004). The

commonality among these diverse lines of research is

an attempt to articulate how humans strive to create

and maintain order, certainty, and value in light of chal

lenges and abruptions in their endeavours to do so.

We propose an overarching model that parsimoni

ously integrates the diverse literatures on mean

ing-making, as well as the literatures on self-esteem

maintenance, uncertainty reduction, affiliative mo

tives, and terror management theory. We term this

model the meaning maintenance model (MMM), and

use it to make three central claims that are addressed

and developed over the course of this article.

The first of these claims is an expansion of a claim

that has been made by psychologists for decades and

philosophers for centuries (Aristotle, 1987;

Baumeister, 1991; Freud, 1930/1991; Heidegger,

1953/1996; James, 1911/1997; Kierkegaard 1848/

1997): meaning is relation. This is to say, meaning is

what links people, places, objects, and ideas to one an

other in expected and predictable ways. Because we

take meaning, relation, and association to be synony

mous in this context, we will use these words inter

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

Although we have highlighted here the arguments of the West

ern existentialists, we are not proposing that a desire to perceive real

ity as a relational whole is peculiar to Western thought. Rather, simi

lar arguments are evident in the literatures on Buddhism, Taoism,

and Hinduism, and we submit that a nostalgia for unity is character

istic of religious sentiments more generally.

changeably, such that meaning is the expected relation

ships or associations that human beings construct and

impose on their worlds. We further propose that there

exists a series of basic realms in which people seek to

discover or apply meaning. People seek coherent rela

tions within the external world, within themselves, and

between themselves and the external world. Generally

speaking, the most important relations people seek are

those between the self and the external world, and per

ceived breakdowns in their mental representations of

those relationships provoke the strongest efforts to re

construct meaningful associations.

The second claim involves humans as meaning

makers. We propose that humans possess an innate ca

pacity to identify and construct mental representations

of expected relationships between people, places, ob

jects, and ideas. As self-conscious entities, humans

also possess a unique capacity to reflect on these repre

sentations and can consequently detect structural

breakdowns and inconsistencies. Humans find it prob

lematic to be correspondingly robbed of meaning, or

otherwise confronted with meaninglessness, and there

fore seek to reconstruct a sense of meaning whenever

their meaning frameworks are disrupted. The greater

the disruption in their mental representations of ex-

pected relations, the more urgent is the need to regain

meaning.

The third and final claim is the most central to the

MMM, and it is the one on which we focus our review

of the empirical literature: Disruptions to meaning

frameworks lead people to reaffirm alternative frame-

works. Notably, these efforts need not be directed at the

specific domain of meaning that has been jeopardized.

The MMM thus proposes a fluid compensation model

(cf., McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001;

Steele, 1988) whereby people whose meaning frame

works have been disrupted react by bolstering or reaf

firming other meaning frameworks that remain intact.

Meaning is sought in domains that are most easily re

cruited, rather than solely in the domain under threat.

We submit that the foundation of many motivational

phenomena investigated by psychologists is the ability

to construct and assert alternate relational matrices in

the presence of threats to another source of meaning.

Meaning is Relation

More than any other branch of human understand

ing, the Western existentialist philosophers of the 19th

and 20th centuries attempted to grasp the structure, ori

gin, and importance of people’s relational structures,

focusing on how these structures govern expectations

and shape perceptions of the world, the self, and peo

ple’s place within the world. Although these theorists

often used terms like relation or association, the term

most often used was meaning.

In simple terms, meaning is what connects things to

other things in expected ways—anything and any way

that things can be connected. Meaning is what connects

the people, places, and things around oneself: hammers

to nails, cold to snow, mothers to daughters, or dawn to

the rising sun. Meaning connects elements of the self:

thoughts, behaviours, desires, attributes, abilities, roles,

and autobiographical memories. Meaning is what con

nects people to that which lies beyond the self: the peo

ple, places, and things that surround them. Meaning can

come in as many forms as there are ways to relate these

elements of perception and understanding.

The MMM highlights the considerable array of do

mains in which people create meaning frameworks and

engage in fluid compensation in response to threats to

those frameworks. Building on ideas by prominent ex

istential theorists (Heidegger, 1953/1996; Kierke

gaard, 1843/1997; and Camus, 1955, in particular), as

well as existing models in the psychological literature,

(Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Park & Folkman, 1997;

Thompson-Janigan, 1988) the MMM proposes three

general domains wherein humans seek to achieve sta

ble, unified relations. These realms are broadly con-

strued of as the external world, the self, and the self in

relation to the external world. We next explore these

domains in turn.

Elements in the external world consist of the ex-

pected relationships between the people, places, ob-

jects, and events that constitute one’s external environ-

ment, where “expected” is meant to signal an imagined

or assumed reality, as opposed to how the world exists

in actuality. This realm consists of the sum total of be-

liefs about the world. For example, people expect

clocks to go forward, dogs to not speak, snow to be

cold, and the queen of hearts to be red. People strive to

make these propositional frameworks unified and in

ternally consistent, which results in efforts to avoid and

reduce contradictions (Heidegger, 1953/1996; Heider,

1958).

The self comprises all beliefs related to oneself,

which is to say the expected relations that unite oneself

both across time (diachronically) and across roles and

contexts (synchronically). People seek to establish that

the person they were 10 years ago is related to the per

son they are now, that they are somehow the same per

son despite enacting different roles in life, that their at

titudes are not in conflict with their freely chosen

behaviours, and that their actions, beliefs, and percep

tions about themselves make sense (Chandler,

Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Festinger, 1957;

Goffman, 1973; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999; Ross,

1989). As with elements of the outside world, people

want their self-governing mental representations of ex

pected relations to be internally consistent, free of con

tradiction, and devoid of dissonance.

The self in relation to the outside world is the con

struct most commonly addressed in existential philoso

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

phy and literature. Put simply, this realm involves a

feeling of personal relation with the people, places, ob

jects, and events that constitute elements of the exter

nal world. Put even more simply, this construct repre

sents a desire to avoid feeling alienated from the

outside world. People seek close and lasting relations

with others, to belong to a community, for others to

view them in ways similar to how they view them

selves, and for their actions to have expected and val

ued consequences. This realm captures people’s de

sires to feel a part of a coherent cultural worldview

(Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Leary, Tambor, Terdal, &

Downs, 1995; Solomon et al., 1991; Swann,

Stein-Seroussi, & Giesler, 1992).

We do not anticipate that the urgency to repair

threats to meaning would be the same for all realms of

meaning. We propose instead that the intensity of the

motivation to compensate for a loss of meaning would

vary as a function of the realm of meaning under at

tack. Specifically, we predict that meaning mainte

nance efforts are of greater necessity for realms that are

more personally salient. For example, the nonrelation

implied by the eventual ending of one’s own existence

would provoke a more urgent meaning rebuilding re-

sponse (e.g., Pyszczynski et al., 2004) than the

nonrelation implied by the unexpected features of a

deck of altered playing cards, although the response to

the latter may not be trivial (e.g., Bruner & Postman,

1949). There are many elaborate and important rela-

tions between facets of the self, or between the self and

valued elements of the external world. When these

connections are no longer reliable, the individual is in

desperate need of asserting a viable network of ex-

pected relations.

Humans are Meaning Makers

At the core of the MMM is the proposition that hu

mans are inexhaustible meaning makers. From birth

onwards, people innately and automatically seek out,

construct, and apply mental representations of ex

pected relations to incoming information. Once these

relational structures are in place, events in the world

may be evaluated, either to see what gave rise to them,

or to identify how the events may be relevant to the self

(Asch, 1946; Cantnor & Mischel, 1979; Markus,

1977). The establishment of relational frameworks al

lows for many human desires to be met, especially the

drive to predict and control events.

Although determining relational regularities may

serve these and other functions, our innate relational

impulse cannot be reduced to any one of these func

tions, anymore than our capacity for vision can be re

duced to the need to see potential threats. As it is with

our capacity for vision, our meaning-making capacity

is always “on,” and researchers are just beginning to

discover the extent to which even the youngest infants

implicitly determine, and subsequently come to expect

relational regularities of astonishing complexity. Audi

tory (Creel, Newport, & Aslin, 2004), and visual rela

tions (Fiser & Aslin, 2001) are implicitly determined

and applied, allowing for eventual linguistic associa

tions (Saffran, 2001) and causal attributions (Nazzi &

Gopnik, 2002).

Humans are surely not unique in possessing a ca

pacity to create and apply mental representations of ex

pected relationships. Nonetheless, humans’ status as

the only truly cultural species is accompanied by a reli

ance on relational structures that vastly surpasses that

of other species (Tomasello, 1999). Being a cultural

animal means seeing the world and its people as part of

a system that extends far beyond each individual. The

potential arrays of relations that humans have are or

ders of magnitude beyond those of their closest evolu

tionary relatives (Dunbar, 1993; Tomasello, Kruger, &

Ratner, 1993). Succeeding as a cultural species re

quires that people not only attend to and internalize di

rect relations among objects in the environment and of

themselves to those objects, but also to relations

among others, relations between others and external

events, and relations between the perceptions that oth-

ers have about those relations, and so on. Humans,

thus, do not just live in physical environments; they

also live in socially constructed environments. In such

environments actions can take on significance at vary-

ing levels far beyond the immediate physical conse-

quences of the actions. For example, the decision by an

individual to attempt to hunt some large game can po-

tentially come to reflect (a) the reciprocation of an ear-

lier received favor; (b) a calculated political move in

which one attempts to show bravery and enhance one’s

relative status; (c) an opportunity to forge and deepen

alliances with one’s fellow tribe members; (d) a chance

to beat out a rival competitor and make them look weak

in the eyes of others; (e) an attempt to demonstrate

one’s prowess to impress a sought after mate; (f) a

chance to obtain a valued good that would afford the

beginning of a trading relation with members of a

nearby tribe; (g) an occasion to obtain a new fashion

accessory or winter coat; (h) an opportunity to boost

the toughness of one’s reputation, and thereby protect

one’s family from future threats; (i) an occasion to

make a gesture of one’s generosity and good will; (j) a

chance to have an exciting story to tell around the

campfire; (k) an opportunity to test whether one’s new

spear is effective; or (l) a way to get a tasty meal; or all

of these. In sum, as a member of a cultural species,

people’s actions come to be draped in many layers of

potential sources of meaning (Bruner, 1990). Actions

are understood in terms of the relational structures

within which they occur.

Fitness as a cultural species is crucially tied to the

capacity to attend to relations among individuals in

one’s groups, particularly when social interactions are

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

governed by nepotism and reciprocity, as was likely the

case throughout humans’ ancestral history (Boyd &

Richerson, 1995). The acquisition of cultural skills,

which were clearly crucial to humans’ survival, hinged

on the ability to be aware of the intentions of compatri

ots (Dunbar, 1993; Tomasello, 1999). Understanding

the increasing orders of intentionality implicated in

primate’s complex social worlds appears to have been

a strong selective mechanism for primate, and espe

cially human, intelligence (Dunbar, 1992; Humphrey,

1976). Hence, it was adaptive for humans to recognize

and comprehend complex orders of relations within

their worlds.

We propose that this associative impulse is an

evolutionarily adaptive trait that occupies a primary

position in humans’ motivational ontology. Support for

this notion has emerged from the discipline of cultural

psychology. Cultural psychology maintains that hu

mans are meaning makers whose experiences are fun

damentally grounded in, and consequently supported

by, cultural meaning frameworks (for discussions on

this matter see Bruner, 1990; Shweder, 1990). The im

pulse to seek out relations we assume to be a psycho

logical universal (an accessibility universal;

Norenzayan & Heine, 2005), however, the specific

kinds of mental representations that people will con-

struct may vary considerably across cultures.

Fluid Compensation

as Meaning Maintenance

Although people depend heavily on relational ma-

trices, reality bombards them with events, behaviours,

ideas, and experiences that cannot easily be integrated

into existing paradigms. Moreover, an awareness of

conflicting events implies that existing relational struc

tures are inaccurate, inadequate, or nonexistent (Kuhn,

1962/1996; Piaget, 1960). That people rely so heavily

on relational structures to understand events in their

lives indicates that breakdowns of these structures are

highly problematic. Humans’ needs for stable rela

tional frameworks requires that they respond to actual

or potential tears in a meaning framework with at

tempts to rebuild other frameworks or to assert new

frameworks altogether.

In his influential book, The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1962/1996) proposed two

general responses to the awareness of an anomaly, de

fined as something unrelated or unrelatable to an exist

ing paradigm. The first of these responses is to revise

one’s system of relations such that it can accommodate

the anomaly. The second, and generally assumed to be

more common response, is to reinterpret the anomaly

in such a way that it ceases to be an anomaly, and in

stead now relates to one’s existing relational structures.

Other models of meaning maintenance have described

how people respond to ruptures in their mental repre

sentations of expected relations. For the most part,

these models propose strategies that are variants of the

revise and reinterpret strategies proposed by Kuhn

(1962/1996). For example, Piaget (1960) proposed that

children learn their schemata through interactions with

the world, which requires either assimilating new in

formation into an existing schema, or accommodating

their schemata to incorporate new information.

Janoff-Bulman (1992) construed meaning as “assump

tive worlds,” which are “stable, unified conceptual sys

tem(s),” “a network of diverse theories and representa

tions,” and “strongly held set of assumptions about the

world and the self” (p. 5). When these assumptive

worlds are presented with an anomaly, the person is

forced to either revise the assumptive world or, more

commonly, reinterpret the anomalous event such that it

conforms to the existing assumptive world. In another

model, Park and Folkman (1997) describe “global

meaning” as “people’s basic and fundamental assump

tions, beliefs and expectations about the world…, be

liefs about the world, beliefs about the self, beliefs

about the self in the world” (p. 116). In addition, Park

and Folkman proposed the existence of “situational

meaning,” which is the determination of how similar

one’s existing meaning frameworks are to those rela-

tions they perceive in reality. If there is a perceived dis-

crepancy between global and situational meaning, the

person is forced to either revise global meaning to ac-

count for the situational meaning, or reinterpret situa-

tional meaning to eliminate the discrepancy. In yet an-

other model, Thompson and Janigan (1988) described

a process of assimilating anomalies whereby “found

meaning,” which represents one’s existing meaning

frameworks, can be revised to account for discrepan

cies between it and “implicit meaning,” which repre

sents one’s appraisal of the real world.

We do not question that some variant of the two

Kuhnian processes of revising or reinterpreting often

take place in reaction to challenges to people’s mean

ing frameworks. However, the foundational premise of

the MMM is that there exists a third, complementary

route by which people can restore meaning following

disruption. This has not been articulated by other theo

ries. That is, following threats to meaning people will

reaffirm an alternative network of relations. If people

perceive an element of self or of their worlds that does

not find a place in their existing frameworks, they may

react by adhering more strongly to other relational

structures, even if these structures are unrelated to the

expected relationships that are under attack. In other

words, instead of responding to a relational anomaly

by reinterpreting it or revising their existing relations,

people may respond by reaffirming other relational

structures so as to compensate for damage done to the

framework undermined by the anomaly. This reaffir

mation we term fluid compensation (cf., McGregor et

al., 2001; Steele, 1988). The process is fluid insofar as

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

it does not require that a particular relational frame

work be asserted, but rather that any alternative frame

work of associations that is intact, coherent, compel

ling, and readily available can be affirmed to

compensate for a loss of meaning.

We further hypothesize that compensatory re

sponses can occur both within and across the three

realms of meaning; if the system of expected relations

that govern perceptions of the outside world is compro

mised, one may respond by bolstering other relational

systems governing the outside world, or by bolstering

the relations that pertain to the self, or the relations of

the external world to the self. For example, encounter

ing information that signifies one’s own mortality pro

vides a threat to the relations between the self and the

external world. In response to such a threat, people

may see patterns within noise (and thereby identify

new relations among events in the external world;

Dechesne & Wigboldus, 2001), enhance the value of

their ingroup (thereby creating relations between one

self and a desirable group; Greenberg, Porteus, Simon,

Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1995), or desire high status

products (thereby creating desirable associations be

tween oneself and the external world; Mandel &

Heine, 1999). We argue that any of these responses

serve to compensate for the meaning disruptions by as-

serting an alternative meaning framework. Note, that in

reality none of these compensatory efforts actually di-

minish the threat posed by the initial disruption (in our

example, the threat of one’s own morality). Rather they

allow the individual to focus attention on another

framework that does not suffer from a perceived

anomaly.

Satiability, Substitutability and

Evidence for Similar Function

One hallmark of motivations is that they are obvi

ated or attenuated when sated (e.g., Baumeister &

Leary, 1995). For example, the need for meaning

would no longer drive behaviour when a person tempo

rarily perceives that his or her actions are supported by

an expected pattern of relations. In this way, the moti

vation is primarily evident when its goal (a viable

meaning framework, in this case) is potentially out of

reach, in the same way that people are mainly aware of

hunger motivations when their stomachs are empty.

The less reliable the present meaning framework, the

stronger and more urgent is the motivation to assert an

other more reliable matrix. In this way, people’s reli

ance on relational frameworks can be considered to be

a need.

A related proposition from the satiation feature of

motivations is substitutability (Baumeister & Leary,

1995). The same underlying drive can be satisfied by a

variety of alternatives to the extent that the alternatives

share a common function. Lewin (1935) and his stu

dent Ovsiankina (1928) proposed that if one action can

be substituted for another we can conclude that these

actions serve a common purpose, or have equifinality

(also see Shah, Kruglanski, & Friedman, 2003; Tesser,

Crepaz, Beach, Cornell, & Collins, 2000). For exam

ple, an individual’s hunger can be sated either by con

suming bread or fish. This substitutability suggests that

humans do not have specific motivations to consume

bread or fish per se; rather they have motivations to

consume food more generally. That bread can be sub

stituted for fish highlights the need to turn from a more

specific category (i.e., bread) to a more inclusive cate

gory (i.e., food) to understand the goal of hunger moti

vations. Substitutability between domains suggests a

common function. We submit that the satiability and

substitutability of various psychological motivations

indicates a common function: a need to maintain a co

herent framework of meaning.

Evidence for Fluid Compensation

of Meaning Maintenance

At the heart of the MMM is the proposition that

when people experience a disruption to meaning

frameworks they attempt to reconstruct meaning

through other relational structures that are available

and intact. Because this compensation is proposed to

be fluid, evidence for meaning construction efforts is

anticipated not only in the same domain as the original

threat, but also in domains far removed from the source

of the threat (although we submit that the first line of

defense to a meaning threat would be to try to respond

to the threat directly, and only affirm alternative mean-

ing frameworks if the present one is damaged beyond

repair; e.g., Stone, Wiegand, Cooper, & Aronson,

1997). We first discuss the evidence for fluid compen

sation within domains and then review evidence for

fluid compensation between domains.

Evidence for Fluid Compensation

Within Domains

We now consider research programs that have in

vestigated compensatory responses within domains.

We summarize evidence from four domains that are

most relevant to people’s drive to maintain meaning;

needs for self-esteem, certainty, belongingness, and

symbolic immortality. The MMM proposes new ways

of understanding the findings within these four

domains.

Self-esteem needs. Self-esteem is the construct

perhaps most closely tied to people’s perceptions of

meaning in their lives. Self-esteem has been viewed as

an indicator of people’s success at relating to their ex

ternal worlds (Crocker & Park, 2004; Leary et al.,

1995; Mischel & Morf, 2003), and, accordingly, how

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

much meaning they can derive from their lives. The

MMM proposes that people pursue self-esteem be

cause it facilitates the maintenance of a viable frame

work of meaning, particularly within individualistic

societies where the relative independence of people

renders other relational frameworks less potent (Heine,

2005; Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999).

Much empirical research in this area has investi

gated people’s responses to threats to their self-esteem

and their attendant efforts to restore it (e.g., Baumeister

& Jones, 1978; Cialdini et al., 1976; Leary et al., 1995).

Efforts to build self-esteem appear to be most evident

when an individual’s self-esteem is vulnerable or has

been threatened. At some point, however, people stop

trying to increase or restore their self-esteem, a pattern

akin to that seen for other basic motivations, and a pat

tern that suggests that a need for self-esteem can be

sated. People’s pursuits of self-esteem are largely

halted when they encounter an opportunity to reflect

on positive aspects of their lives (Cialdini et al., 1976;

Steele, Spencer, & Lynch, 1993). In contrast, the pur

suit of self-esteem is stimulated when people encoun

ter a threat to a positive view of self. In general, then,

we can conclude that people do not endeavour to maxi-

mize their self-esteem. Instead they strive to ensure

that their self-esteem reaches or exceeds some thresh-

old, and consequently self-esteem maintenance efforts

are engaged when people perceive that their personal

evaluations fall short of that threshold. The satiability

of self-esteem motivations supports the claim that they

represent a valid need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

Efforts to maintain self-esteem are not limited to a

specific process such as favorable social comparisons

or self-serving attributional biases; rather, there is

much evidence for fluid compensation to counter

self-esteem threats across multiple strategies. For ex

ample, Baumeister and Jones (1978) found that after

participants received negative feedback about certain

aspects of their personality they came to view other un

related aspects of their personality more positively rel

ative to participants who had not received negative

feedback. Cialdini and colleagues (1976) illustrated

that after college students failed a trivia test they were

more motivated to affiliate themselves with their

school’s football team after team victories but dis

tanced themselves after team losses. Hence, these lines

of research demonstrate that compensatory boosts to

self-esteem can be achieved when people take advan

tage of circumstances unrelated to the initial threat.

Thus, different self-esteem maintenance strategies ap

pear to be interchangeable.

The most explicit formulation of fluid compensa

tion in the self-esteem domain has been developed by

Tesser and colleagues in their self-evaluation mainte

nance model (Tesser, 2000, 2001; Tesser & Cornell,

1991; Tesser, Crepas, Beach, Cornell, & Collins,

2000). Building on the domain-general mechanism

identified by Steele and colleagues in their work on

self-affirmation (Steele, 1988; Steele & Liu, 1983;

Steele et al., 1993), Tesser and colleagues have pro

vided evidence for at least three substitutable processes

serving self-esteem maintenance efforts. Specifically,

Tesser and colleagues showed that a threat to the self

by way of negative social comparisons or cognitive

dissonance could be offset by self-affirmations of

one’s values, dissonance reduction, or positive social

comparisons. That is, the dissonance experienced

when one has made a “close-call” decision can be

eliminated by affirming one’s values (such as by wear

ing a coveted lab coat; Steele & Liu, 1983), receiving

favorable personality feedback (e.g., Heine & Lehman,

1997), or focusing on a positive social comparison sit

uation (Tesser & Cornell, 1991). Tesser and colleagues

also showed that social comparison processes can be

reversed when people affirm their values (Tesser &

Cornell, 1991) or are exacerbated when they write a

counter-attitudinal essay that elicits dissonance (Tesser

et al., 2000). Likewise, it has been shown that people

affirm their values more after they have been induced

to make negative social comparisons or have written a

counter-attitudinal essay (Tesser et al., 2000).

These highly divergent phenomena are substitut-

able because the engagement in one decreases the en-

gagement in the other (Tesser, 2000). The hydraulic

nature of these phenomena suggests that the different

processes are in service of the same underlying goal.

The processes previously reviewed are not enacted as

ends in themselves (i.e., the goal is not to make a down-

ward social comparison per se), but are means to a

higher end. Tesser (2000) proposed that this higher end

is the maintenance of self-esteem. The goal of main

taining high self-esteem transcends the more proximal

goals of engaging in downward social comparison or in

affirming one’s values because the myriad strategies

for maintaining self-esteem are substitutable

themselves.

Of course, describing people’s behaviors in the pre

viously discussed experiments as servicing a need for

self-esteem invites the question of why such a need ex

ists. This question has led to some rather diverse ac

counts of the functionality of the self-esteem motive.

For example, Barkow (1989) proposed that self-esteem

was selected to serve as a gauge of subtle changes of

the individual’s status within dominance hierarchies.

Leary and colleagues (Leary & Baumeister, 2000;

Leary et al., 1995) argued that self-esteem is an adapta

tion that functions as an indicator to detect when peo

ple’s social relationships and stability within valued

groups were vulnerable. Terror management theory

(e.g., Pyszczynski et al., 2004) has maintained that

self-esteem emerged as an adaptation to stave off the

debilitating existential anxieties that come from peo

ple’s fears of their own mortality. Heine and colleagues

(Heine, 2003; Heine et al., 1999) have argued that

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

self-esteem is derived from desires to actualize individ

ualistic cultural goals of being unique, self-sufficient,

in control of one’s personal fate, and distinct from oth

ers. These are diverse explanations and taking each on

its own, it is difficult to adequately account for data

collected in the competing paradigms.

The MMM provides another perspective by which

to understand the debate regarding the self-esteem mo

tive. The MMM does not dispute that people are often

motivated to secure self-esteem, but rather proposes

that self-esteem maintenance is itself in service of the

overarching goal of meaning maintenance. That is,

self-esteem is a means to the end of maintaining a via

ble relational framework, rather than being an end in it

self. Looking across the different depictions of the

function of self-esteem, it emerges that threats to

self-esteem signal that people are failing to function

ally relate to their external worlds. The MMM can also

address why the self-esteem motive appears stronger in

individualistic than in collectivistic cultures (Heine et

al., 1999). Within individualistic cultures, much mean

ing may be derived by viewing oneself as competent

and in control, given that these cultures encourage peo

ple to view themselves as the primary source of agency

(in contrast with some other cultures, in which agency

and control are often achieved more by adjusting one-

self to the desires of the collective; Markus &

Kitayama, 1991; Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto,

2002; Triandis, 1989). In sum, at least within individu-

alistic cultures, high self-esteem is an important means

to maintain a coherent relational structure.

Certainty needs. Many research paradigms in

social psychology have explored people’s motivations

to feel certain about their understanding of the world.

That is, it has been proposed that people have a funda

mental motivation to believe that their perceptions, at

titudes, and behaviors are correct (e.g., Festinger,

1957; Fromm, 1947). Related motivations have been

described as a need to know (Rokeach, 1960), a need

for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982), a need for

structure (Neuberg & Newsom, 1993), and a need for

cognitive closure (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). The

commonality among these programs is the proposition

that people have a fundamental need to feel accurate in

their understanding of how the world operates.

Similar to other human needs, the desire for cer

tainty can be sated. People are most likely to pursue

certainty when they are made to feel uncertain

(Festinger, 1957). In contrast, when people are led to

feel reasonably certain, they are less likely to engage in

efforts to increase cognitive certainty (e.g., I.

McGregor et al., 2001). In this way, people do not usu

ally aspire to maximize certainty, except in specific sit

uations with highly important outcomes (Petty,

Cacioppo, & Goldman, 1981).

Moreover, research indicates that people’s needs for

certainty are substitutable. That is, a lack of certainty in

one domain can be compensated by increased certainty

in another. Research by I. McGregor and colleagues on

compensatory conviction underscores the hydraulic na

ture of certainty motivations. I. McGregor and col

leagues (2001) found that when participants were made

aware of an inconsistency in their lives they responded

by becoming more rigid in their beliefs about unrelated

topics. Thus, people compensated for a lack of certainty

in one domain by creating a sense of certainty in another

(also see I. McGregor & Marigold, 2003).

Empirical evidence surrounding a cognitive need

for closure also underscores the domain-general nature

of a motivation for certainty. People who are chroni

cally high in the need for nonspecific closure, or people

for whom a high need for closure has been induced, en

gage in a variety of tactics to re-establish a sense of cer

tainty (for reviews see Kruglanski & Webster, 1996;

Webster & Kruglanski, 1998). For example,

Kruglanski and Webster (1991) found that experimen

tally elevating a need for nonspecific closure (by creat

ing a sense of time-pressure and introducing ambient

noise) resulted in participants rejecting someone who

possessed an opinion different from the participants’

group (also see Kruglanski & Freund, 1983). Likewise,

research by Doherty (1998) found that people reacted

to a woman who deviated from cultural norms more

negatively if they had been encouraged to reach cogni-

tive closure.

Motivations for certainty also underlie a tendency to

rely on stereotypes. Because stereotypes allow people

to perceive the world in a more orderly manner, it fol-

lows that they should be relied upon more heavily by

those who feel a more urgent need to achieve closure.

In support of this notion, Dijksterhuis, van

Knippenberg, Kruglanski, and Schaper (1996) found

that people who were chronically high in need for clo

sure as well as people for whom a need for closure was

induced exhibited more stereotypically-biased memo

ries of social events.

Similar to the substitutability that has been identi

fied among the self-esteem maintenance strategies,

people are able to bolster a sense of certainty through a

broad array of tactics, some of which are far removed

from the initial source of uncertainty. It is thus inaccu

rate to claim that people only have needs to feel certain

about particular beliefs, such as a belief that one’s solu

tion to Task A is correct; rather, they appear to have

more general needs to feel certain about something. In

parallel to the fluidity of self-esteem maintenance

strategies, we can also conclude that feelings of cer

tainty in one domain can diminish efforts to achieve

certainty in another domain. Thus, certainty strategies

are interchangeable.

Certainty is one’s sense that the mental representa

tions of expected relationships that one has generated

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

are internally consistent, fit with their perceptions, and

meet many of the other needs that allow one to satisfy,

most notably, the desire for predictability and control

in their lives. The social world can be enormously

complex, and people wish to impose a sense of order to

this world: They seek to predict and control their envi

ronments based on mental representations of expected

associations that account for cause and effect relations,

as well as teleological relations that are formed when

they perceive their actions as directed towards a

higher-level purpose (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987).

Feelings of subjective certainty with regards to these

meaning frameworks provides people with confidence

regarding how they should behave, and an understand

ing of what they should expect from their environments

when they do (or do not) behave accordingly. In accor

dance with the MMM, certainty is the sense that one

has generated a reliable framework of relations be

tween themselves and their worlds (Bartlett, 1932;

Hogg, 2001). Through meaning, people believe that

they understand the operations of their world and their

place with in it, and are subsequently able to derive a

sense of certainty from these relations.

Affiliative needs. Humans are fundamentally a

social species, and our sociality has surely played a

role in the kinds of traits and attributes that were se-

lected for in the ancestral environment (Dunbar, 1992;

Tomasello et al., 1993). As a social species, human fit-

ness is enhanced with the maintenance of successful

relationships with others. When deprived of smoothly

functioning relationships, people suffer from a variety

of negative consequences, including an increased risk

for mental illness (e.g., Bloom, White, & Asher, 1979),

more deleterious responses to stressful life events (e.g.,

Delongis, Folkman, & Lazarus, 1988), and, overall, an

abbreviated lifespan (e.g., Goodwin, Hunt, Key, &

Sarnet, 1987; House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988).

Maintaining successful relations with others is a core

human need (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

The need to belong is evident not only in people’s

desires to form relationships with others. This need

also manifests itself in people’s desires to belong to a

cohesive social unit that can be contrasted against

groups to which they do not belong. In a series of ele

gant studies Tajfel (Tajfel, 1970; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy,

& Flament, 1971) discovered a remarkable finding.

People appeared motivated to carve up an array of

strangers into “us” and “them,” even when the basis of

this categorization was unapparent, or when the indi

viduals stood to gain nothing personally. Tajfel’s in

triguing studies suggest that people possess a tribal im

pulse, which drives them into imagined enclaves of

similar others. People are not content to think about

themselves and others merely as individuals; in con

trast, people actively wish to assign themselves and

others to social clusters.

Similar to needs for self-esteem and certainty, there

appears to be both a satiability and a substitutability in

herent in our need for belongingness (Baumeister &

Leary, 1995). People do not strive to maximize their

sense of belongingness with others. Rather, people’s

motivation to pursue new relationships drops when

they have a number of close relationships relative to

times in which they are less connected (e.g., Reis,

1990). The drive for affiliation is spurred by depriva

tion and is weakened by achieving connection with

others. Moreover, there appears to be a limit regarding

the number of social relationships that an individual

can maintain, and once the limit is reached, the need to

develop further relationships is rendered weaker

(Audy, 1980; Dunbar, 1997). In general, people are

more motivated to establish and deepen their relation

ships when their affiliative needs are not sated.

Although each relationship is in some ways unique,

relationships also appear to serve a shared function.

People can achieve some of their belongingness needs

by replacing one relationship with another. For exam

ple, Milardo, Johnson, and Huston (1983) demon

strated that as people develop new intimate relation

ships they concomitantly spend less time with existing

relationships. Apparently, the needs that are satisfied

from the new intimate relationships reduces the utility

derived from interacting with pre-established relation-

ships. Similarly, Vaughan (1986) noted that as bad

marriages begin to dissolve, people preemptively seek

out new relationship partners. Furthermore, this same

research found that people who are unhappy in their

marriages often choose to have children, presumably

in an attempt to compensate for their weakened feel-

ings of belongingness. When one’s belongingness

needs are no longer adequately satisfied in one rela

tionship, the urgency to find new relationships in

creases. Likewise, Bowlby (1969) observed that chil

dren’s distress about being separated from their

mothers was reduced significantly if a familiar person

was nearby. Stated otherwise, children do not have a

need only to stay close to their mother, they also have a

need to stay close to someone whom they already

know. In sum, human needs to affiliate with others and

to achieve belongingness are not directed solely at spe

cific relationships. To a certain extent, belongingness

needs to belong are substitutable, such that people can

satisfy their broader belongingness needs by maintain

ing successful relationships with someone.

The MMM agrees that people have pronounced

belongingness needs that serve a variety of important

functions. The current model goes beyond existing ex

planations of belongingness functions by proposing

that one crucial purpose of having interpersonal rela

tionships is that they provide people with a general

sense of interrelation—a sense of meaning. Meaning

frameworks derived through close relationships pro

vide people with the sense that their opinions are

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

shared and are thus more likely to be correct (Hogg,

2003), suggest that people’s experiences are normal

(Pinel, Long, Landau, & Pyszczynski, 2004), provide

people with feelings of self-worth (e.g., Cialdini et al.,

1976), help to make sense of and cope with traumatic

experiences (Lehman, Ellard, & Wortman, 1986), and

provide relevant standards by which people can assess

their performance (Festinger, 1954). Meaning as inter

personal relationships allow people to gauge how well

they are functioning and provide them with a sense that

they can predict and control their worlds. Disruption of

interpersonal relationships and social categories is dis

ruption of human’s sense of meaning. We propose that

such disruptions motivate people to reaffirm alterna

tive relational structures.

Symbolic immortality needs. Borrowing from

a number of existential theorists including Becker

(1973), Freud (1930/1991), Lifton (1976), and Rank

(1941), terror management theory (TMT; Pyszczynski,

Greenberg, & Solomon, 1997; Pyszczynski et al.,

2004; Solomon et al., 1991) proposes that many human

motivations hinge on the existential anxiety associated

with people’s thoughts about their inevitable demise.

The theory stems from the observation that a primary

goal for all species is self-preservation, yet humans,

having the cognitive capabilities to comprehend that

their death is imminent, are inescapably aware that

they will fail at this central goal. A consideration of the

ultimate futility of one’s efforts to preserve his or her

existence is proposed to engender a great sense of exis-

tential anxiety or “terror.” TMT proposes that people

aspire for symbolic immortality to protect them from

this anxiety that arises from the awareness that they do

not have literal immortality. Symbolic immortality is

posited to be achieved via a dual anxiety buffer, which

consists of a structure (i.e., the individual’s cultural

worldview), and the individual’s association with that

structure (i.e., his or her ability to live up to the stan

dards determined by his or her cultural worldview;

Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999). The cul

tural worldview is a constructed conception of reality

that provides the individual with a sense of order, sta

bility, and predictability. Within this worldview is a

consensually shared set of standards that mandate what

kinds of actions or thoughts are of value. By living up

to the standards that are inherent in the cultural

worldview, people are able to derive a sense of value

from their cultures.

TMT maintains that when people are confronted

with thoughts of their mortality, they combat the anxi

ety by bolstering either of the dual components of the

cultural anxiety buffer. One strategy is to reaffirm the

connections of one’s cultural worldview, thereby in

creasing faith in its validity and potential endurance.

For example, one can become critical towards people

who act in ways that are inconsistent with their cultural

worldview (e.g., Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon,

Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). Following from this

strategy, another strategy is to reaffirm one’s connec

tion to their cultural worldview by reflecting or em

bodying cultural values. In so doing, people may

achieve symbolic immortality insofar as they are con

nected to that which will endure after they are dead.

For example, one can desire possessions that convey

that one has the trappings of success in their culture

(e.g., Mandel & Heine, 1999).

Although TMT has its detractors (e.g., Leary, 2004;

Muraven & Baumeister, 1997; Paulhus & Trapnell,

1997), over the past decade and a half a number of re

searchers have conducted at least 175 experiments that

have provided striking support for a number of diverse

predictions from the model (for a review see

Pyszczynski et al., 2004). Studies that have been con

ducted to test TMT typically share the same straight

forward methodology: Participants in a control condi

tion are contrasted with those who have been reminded

of their mortality, which is operationalised through a

variety of different mortality salience primes. Subse

quently, various measures of worldview defense or

self-enhancement are contrasted across conditions fol-

lowing a brief delay. For example, threats to one’s

meaning frameworks via mortality salience have been

shown to lead to such compensatory responses as prej-

udice against outgroups (e.g., I. McGregor et al.,

2001), maintenance of cultural norms (Rosenblatt et

al., 1989), protection of cultural icons (Greenberg et

al., 1995), supernatural beliefs (Norenzayan &

Hansen, 2005), and a preference for George W. Bush

over John Kerry (Landau, Miller, et al., 2004), to name

a few. TMT currently stands as one of the most fecund

theories in psychology, and there are few motivational

phenomena that have not yet been linked with it in

some way. Furthermore, at least some of the findings

have been found to generalize well across divergent

cultural groups (e.g., Halloran & Kashima, 2004;

Heine, Harihara, & Niiya, 2002). Importantly for this

article, TMT findings lucidly demonstrate how broadly

fluid compensation processes can operate. Threats to

one’s meaning framework via mortality salience can be

compensated by aspiring for symbolic immortality via

a highly diverse array of responses, all of which in

volve reaffirming the connections within our cultural

worldviews, and reaffirming our connection to these

worldviews.

The desire for symbolic immortality also displays

the hallmarks of a satiable and substitutable motiva

tion. People do not strive to maximize their feelings of

immortality, that is, they do not continually reinforce

their dual anxiety buffer once their thoughts of their

mortality are no longer available (Pyszczynski et al.,

1999). Likewise, concerns with literal mortality can be

compensated by beliefs in symbolic immortality, via

the activation of either component of the dual anxiety

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

buffer, a finding that underscores the substitutability of

these motivations.

The MMM predicts similar findings that TMT stud

ies have reported but for different reasons. Rather than

viewing these effects as being reducible to the desire to

avoid the terror associated with the awareness of our

own mortality, the MMM proposes that humans seek to

preserve a viable framework of expected relations,

which may in turn be applied to the task of providing

symbolic immortality. Any disruption to one’s frame

work, particularly with respect to one’s relations with

the external world, creates a sense of urgency to repair

that fissure ortoconstruct another relational framework.

The MMM views an awareness of one’s imminent death

as one of many such disruptions of people’s associative

webs. The MMM hypothesizes that this attempt to af

firm an alternative meaning framework follows the

same course (including the same critical temporal de

lays; Pyszczynski et al., 1999) as that identified in ma

nipulations of mortality salience in TMT studies.

How might death be disruptive to one’s sense of

meaning? In his book entitled Meanings of Life (1991),

Baumeister devotes one chapter to the integral role of

meaning loss in death. In it, he maintains that death

threatens meaning (which he also defines as relation)

in four particular ways: (a) death undermines the pre-

dictability and controllability of one’s existence, (b)

death eliminates all potential that one has for earning

meaning in the future, (c) death reminds people that

their existence and the meaning framework that they

have constructed will likely be forgotten, and (d) death

nullifies the value of one’s life’s achievements. The

Western existentialists, Kierkegaard (1848/1997),

Camus (1955), Heidegger (1953/1996), and Sartre

(1957), stressed the relative psychological primacy of

humans’ fear of death. Yet, similar to the MMM, these

theorists were also careful to point out that the desire to

avoid an awareness of one’s own mortality partially, if

not completely, reduces to the desire to avoid mortal

ity’s assault on meaning frameworks. Following from

this line of thought, the MMM asserts that people do

not construct meaning frameworks mainly to assuage

their anxieties about death. Rather, people primarily

have anxieties about death because death renders life

meaningless by severing individuals from their exter

nal environment, and in a sense, from themselves. In

sofar as people are impelled to construct meaning in

the face of death, it is only to cover up the “gaps and

fissures” (Heidegger, 1953/1996) that the awareness of

death tears into the connective fabric of their meaning,

where death is not the only event that can produce such

tears. Nonetheless, in the current model, we submit

that death and meaning loss are inextricably interwo

ven (also see Dechesne & Kruglanski, 2004; Lifton,

1976).

In sum, according to the MMM, death is but one of

many events that stands to threaten people’s meaning

frameworks. It is perhaps the strongest or most potent

of the meaning threats that humans encounter, but re

sponses to it can be predicted using the same MMM

framework as can be used to predict fluid compensa

tion efforts following self-esteem threats, feelings of

uncertainty, and interpersonal rejection. We will return

to explore how the MMM and TMT can be contrasted

in a later section.

Evidence for Fluid Compensation

Across Domains

The research reviewed underscores the

substitutability of some motivations. Threats to

self-esteem in one self-domain can be compensated by

boosts in another; feelings of uncertainty in one area

can lead to attempts to feel certain in another; a dis

rupted relationship with one individual can lead people

to strive to deepen their relations with a different

group; and reminders of one’s mortality can be com

pensated by various attempts to achieve symbolic im

mortality. The MMM proposes that all of these in

stances represent special cases of responses to threats

to meaning. Notably, however, most of this research

has investigated the substitutability of these motiva-

tions within these specific domains. Although such

findings are completely consistent with the MMM,

there exists theories within each of these domains to

predict each of the respective domain-specific findings

(but not the findings within the other domains). In con-

trast, what is not consistent with existing theories (with

the exception of TMT regarding studies of symbolic

immortality) is the MMM’s prediction that evidence of

substitutability should be observed across the four do

mains. Such evidence would suggest that these sepa

rate domains serve a common function, which we sub

mit is the impulse to maintain a coherent relational

framework.

Fluid compensation among self-esteem, cer

tainty, and affiliative needs. One line of research

that cuts across the different research domains dis

cussed previously has been conducted under the con

ceptual aegis of social identity theory. Originally de

veloped by Tajfel and Turner (e.g., Tajfel, 1972; Tajfel

& Turner, 1979; Turner, 1975), and further elaborated

by Hogg and others (Abrams & Hogg, 1988; Ellemers,

Spears, & Doosje, 1999; Hogg, 2003; Hogg &

Sunderland, 1991), social identity theory has focused

on how people are motivated to have a sense of

belongingness with others and how they derive a sense

of identity from the various groups to which they be

long. One foundational premise of social identity the

ory is that the mere act of being categorized as a group

member, regardless of the basis of that categorization,

increases ingroup favoritism and intergroup discrimi

nation (e.g., Tajfel, 1970; Tajfel et al., 1971). The ques

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

tion of interest in social identity theory is why people

will demonstrate intergroup discrimination in a mini

mal groups design when they stand to gain nothing for

themselves, either from belonging to these groups or

by acting in ways that favor their minimally assigned

group.

Intergroup discrimination has been said to stem

largely from two underlying motivations. The first,

sometimes referred to as the self-esteem hypothesis

(e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1988), maintains that people

are motivated to discriminate among groups as a means

to secure a positive self-view. Building upon

Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory, Tajfel

(1972) proposed that people are not only motivated to

secure favorable contrasts between themselves and

others, but also between their group and other groups.

Discriminating between groups, then, is a way for peo

ple to feel good about themselves by casting their

group in a more favorable light (also see Turner, 1978,

1982). Over the past few decades a great deal of re

search has explored the relation between self-esteem

and intergroup discrimination. Two corollaries of the

self-esteem hypothesis have been derived and tested

from this model. The first is that people should feel

better about themselves following an intergroup dis-

crimination task. A number of studies report evidence

consistent with this proposition (Hogg, Turner,

Nascimento-Schulze, & Spriggs, 1986, Exp. 1;

Lemyre & Smith, 1985; Oakes & Turner, 1980), al-

though some others have not (e.g., Hogg &

Sunderland, 1991; Hogg & Turner, 1987). The second

corollary of the self-esteem hypothesis is that people

should demonstrate stronger intergroup discrimination

following a threat to their self-esteem. In support of

this proposition, Hogg and Sunderland (1991) found

that participants who received failure feedback on a

word association task demonstrated greater intergroup

discrimination than those who had received success

feedback (also see Brown, Collins, & Schmidt, 1988).

In general, then, there is considerable evidence that

self-esteem and social categorization are substitutable,

although the relation between self-esteem and inter

group discrimination appears to be moderated by addi

tional variables, such as the extremity of self-esteem,

the degree to which people identify with the group, and

the extent to which groups and their members may feel

under threat (Abrams & Hogg, 1988; Hogg, 2003;

Long & Spears, 1997; Rubin & Hewstone, 1998).

The second motivation that has been proposed to

underlie social identity theory is uncertainty reduction

(Hogg, 2001). As described earlier, uncertainty is a

problem when people are motivated to achieve control

over their lives. However, the quest for certainty is dif

ficult because there is scant evidence that objectively

confirms that people are indeed correct in their knowl

edge or opinions. In the absence of objective informa

tion, people must resort to seeking out cues that sug

gest that their beliefs are correct. For example, one

such cue relevant to social identity theory is perceived

agreement with others. To the extent that people feel

that there is a widely-shared consensus about a belief,

their confidence in that belief should increase. Hogg

and colleagues (e.g., Hogg & Abrams, 1993; Hogg &

Mullin, 1999) proposed that people can reduce their

sense of uncertainty on a particular topic if they feel

that they belong to a relatively homogeneous group. To

the extent that people are surrounded by those who ap

pear to be similar to themselves, they may infer that

their own beliefs on certain domains are also shared by

those similar others, and hence suggest that their per

sonal opinion is correct. Hogg and colleagues pro

posed that this relative homogeneity can be achieved

by intergroup discrimination. In addition to highlight

ing the distinction between groups, intergroup discrim

ination calls attention to the homogeneity within

groups, and “imposes order and ascribes meaning to a

potentially bewilderingly complex social field” (Hogg,

2003, p. 473).

In one test of the uncertainty hypothesis, Grieve and

Hogg (1999) demonstrated that participants showed a

more pronounced intergroup bias in a minimal groups

paradigm when they had earlier engaged in a task that

had no obvious solution and thus left them feeling un-

certain, relative to when they had not experienced in-

duced uncertainty (see Hogg & Mullin, 1999, for a re-

view of other relevant studies). Similarly, Shah,

Kruglanski, and Thompson (1998) found that a height-

ened need for closure leads to more pronounced

ingroup biases. Moreover, in their classic study,

Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (1956) found that

when cult members’ doomsday beliefs were proved

wrong they started to proselytize, apparently in an at

tempt to get consensual validation for their beliefs that

no longer appeared to be correct. Relatedly,

McKimmie, Terry, and Hogg (2003) found that percep

tions of group support reduced participants’ feelings of

dissonance. Pinel and colleagues (2004) found that the

negative experience of existential isolation can be

mended by connecting with others who share the same

subjective experiences, thereby contributing to feel

ings of certainty. A desire for certainty can be relieved

through compensation in another domain such as

belongingness. Thus, motives for uncertainty reduc

tion and belongingness are capable of being substi

tuted for each other.

There are a number of other instances in which we

see interdependence among the domains of

self-esteem, certainty, and belongingness. For exam

ple, Navarette, Kurzban, Fessler, and Kirkpatrick

(2004) found that a manipulation of social isolation led

people to be more critical of someone who wrote an

anti-U.S. essay. That is, when individual’s feelings of

belongingness were threatened they came to desire the

certainty that their country’s ways of operating were

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

above the criticisms that the essay writer had proposed.

Zadro, Williams, and Richardson (2004) found that

even rejection by a computer program was sufficiently

threatening as to lower people’s feeling of

belongingness, control, self-esteem, and perceptions

of a meaningful existence. The blurring of the bound

aries between motivations for certainty and

self-esteem can be seen in the debate regarding

whether the unease experienced in cognitive disso

nance is fundamentally about inconsistency or about

self-esteem threat (Aronson, 1968; Festinger, 1957;

Steele, 1988). Furthermore, sociometer theory pro

poses that self-esteem and affiliative needs are deeply

intertwined (Leary & Baumeister, 2000; Leary et al.,

1995). Specifically, the model maintains that

self-esteem serves to indicate when individual’s rela

tionships are at risk for disruption. The sensitivity of

the sociometer is such that whenever relationships ap

pear vulnerable, self-esteem is likely to suffer. This is

proposed to be true even when the relationships at risk

are of little importance to the individual, or if the rela

tionships are only indirectly vulnerable due to an inad

equacy of an individual’s performance in other do

mains (Baumeister, Wotman, & Stillwell, 1993; Leary

et al., 1995). The interdependence between motiva-

tions for belongingness and self-esteem suggests that

these two motivations may serve a common function.

In sum, there is considerable evidence for instances

of interdependence among the three domains re-

viewed. In some circumstances, threats to self-esteem,

certainty, and belongingness can be compensated by

boosts in the other domains. We suggest that all of

these threats amount to assaults on the relational

frameworks that account for one’s selves, one’s outside

world, and one’s relation to the outside world. As such,

it follows that to a certain extent these domains should

appear to be largely substitutable with each other, inso

far as one may draw on one domain to reaffirm mean

ing when relations in another domain have been

compromised.

Fluid compensation of symbolic immortality

needs. Substitutability across domains is particu

larly evident in research on TMT. Mortality salience

has been linked to a variety of motivational tendencies,

including the three domains reviewed earlier. First,

mortality salience has been shown to lead people to

pursue various strategies to enhance or maintain

self-esteem (Greenberg et al., 1992; Harmon-Jones et

al., 1997; Mandel & Heine, 1999). For example,

Mikulincer and Florian (2002) found that the

self-serving attributional bias becomes more pro

nounced after mortality salience. The logic of TMT is

that people can experience symbolic immortality by

perceiving themselves as living up to the standards of a

culture, and consequently becoming associated with

enduring features of the culture (e.g., Solomon et al.,

1991). A desire for symbolic immortality leads to simi

lar consequences as threats to self-esteem and thus can

also be viewed as substitutable with self-esteem

threats.

Second, encounters with uncertainty also appear to

be substitutable with desires for symbolic immortality.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that mortality sa

lience leads to a heightened desire for certainty

(Deschene, 2002; Landau, Johns, et al., 2004; Van den

Bos, 2001; Van den Bos & Miedema, 2000). For exam

ple, Dechesne and Wigboldus (2001) found that partic

ipants who were reminded of their own mortality were

quicker to discern a pattern amongst a set of letters rel

ative to those who were not so reminded. According to

TMT, the heightened desire for certainty that follows

mortality salience is an attempt to reinforce one’s cul

tural worldview.

Third, belongingness needs are also affected by

mortality salience manipulations. A number of studies

have found that mortality salience prompts affiliative

tendencies (e.g., Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger,

2004; Pyszczynski et al., 1996). One such response to

mortality salience is a heightened desire to discrimi

nate one’s group from others. For example,

Harmon-Jones, Greenberg, and Solomon (1996) found

that people who had been assigned to groups based on

their preference for one of two paintings showed more

of an intergroup bias if they were previously primed

with mortality salience than if they had not been

primed with death, thereby paralleling other work that

has employed uncertainty and self-esteem manipula-

tions (e.g., Grieve & Hogg, 1999; Hogg & Sunderland,

1991). A second way that people strive to fulfill

belongingness needs in the face of mortality salience is

that they strive to form more social relations. For ex

ample, Taubman Ben-Ari, Findler, and Mikulincer

(2002) found that mortality salience manipulations led

to a greater willingness to initiate social interactions,

particularly among those who were securely attached.

Wisman and Koole (2003) found that mortality sa

lience manipulations led people to prefer to sit in a

group than to sit alone, even when members of the

group endorsed beliefs that were antithetical to partici

pants’ own beliefs. Threats to one’s sense of

belongingness and desires for symbolic immortality

can be said to be, at least in some circumstances,

interchangeable.

TMT is by all accounts a hydraulic model. Not only

do threats to one’s meaning framework via mortality

salience lead to the compensatory responses identified

previously, but boosts to an individual’s sense of mean

ing reduce the impact of mortality salience. For exam

ple, boosts to self-esteem have been shown to eliminate

the effects of mortality salience on both worldview de

fense and death thought accessibility (Harmon-Jones

et al., 1997; Mikulincer & Florian, 2002). Likewise,

engaging in self-affirmation mollifies the impact of

100

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

mortality salience on worldview defense (Schmeichel

& Martens, 2005). Manipulations of variables related

to perceived certainty (or examinations of people who

vary in dispositional levels of these variables) find a re

duced impact of mortality salience manipulations (e.g.,

Dechesne, 2002; Dechesne, Janssen, & van

Knippenberg, 2000; cf., Jost, Fitzsimons, & Kay, 2004;

Van den Bos & Miedema, 2000). Furthermore, people

whose belongingness needs are sated insofar as they

report having secure attachments (Mikulincer &

Florian, 2000) or are seated with others (Wisman &

Koole, 2003) do not show worldview buffering re

sponses to mortality salience, although those whose

belongingness needs are deprived do. In sum, the

threats to one’s relational framework elicited by mor

tality salience can be compensated by boosts to one’s

relations in the domains of self-esteem, certainty, and

belongingness.

Divergent threats lead to convergent responses.

Further evidence for the substitutability across do

mains can be seen by examining the diverse array of

psychological threats that lead to the same kinds of

specific responses. For example, hostile reactions to

someone who criticizes one’s country has been ob-

served following manipulations such as mortality sa-

lience (H. A. McGregor et al., 1998), inducing a feel-

ing that one’s life is meaningless (Heine, MacKay,

Proulx, & Charles, 2005), temporal discontinuity (I.

McGregor et al., 2001), or by imagining that one has

been burglarized or socially isolated (Navarette et al.,

2004). Intergroup biases have been identified follow-

ing mortality salience manipulations (Greenberg et al.,

1990), a heightened need for closure (Shah et al.,

1998), feelings of uncertainty (Grieve & Hogg, 1999),

threats to self-esteem (Hogg & Sunderland, 1991), and

when people are unable to affirm their values (Fein &

Spencer, 1997). Affiliative motives have been fostered

by encounters with uncertainty (e.g., Festinger,

Riecken, & Schachter, 1956), mortality salience ma

nipulations (Mikulincer et al., 2004), worldview

threats (e.g., Hart, Shaver, & Goldenberg, 2004), and

self-esteem threats (Cialdini et al., 1976). A tendency

to rely on stereotypes has been identified by people

who have been reminded of their own mortality

(Schimel, Simon, & Greenberg, 1999), those whose

spatial-symbolic self was threatened (Burris &

Rempel, 2004), and by those high in need for closure

(Dijksterhuis et al., 1996). A tendency to punish people

who break cultural norms is evident among people who

are high in need for closure (Doherty, 1998), people

who were led to feel meaningless (Heine et al., 2005),

or people who were reminded of their mortality

(Rosenblatt et al., 1989). Observing that such diverse

phenomena lead to the same kinds of responses sug

gests the extent to which they substitutable for each

other. In each case mental representations of expected

relationships have been shattered, and in each case ex

pected relations have been reaffirmed elsewhere.

In sum, there is much evidence that self-esteem mo

tivations, preferences for certainty, affiliative needs,

and motivations for symbolic immortality are

substitutable drives. Divergent threats across these do

mains lead to convergent responses. Moreover, boosts

in one domain (e.g., self-esteem) diminish the effects

of threats in others (e.g., desire for symbolic immortal

ity; e.g., Harmon-Jones et al., 1997). The

substitutability, or equifinality, of different phenomena

suggests that they are in service of the same underlying

goal (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Lewin, 1935;

Ovsiankina, 1928; Shah et al., 2003; Tesser, 2000). The

fluid compensation processes that have observed be

tween these different domains suggests that motiva

tions to maintain self-esteem, achieve certainty, estab

lish and maintain interpersonal relationships, and

avoid thoughts of one’s mortality are not ends in and of

themselves, but are means to a higher end. This end, we

propose, is a motivation to maintain meaning. It is far

more parsimonious to view these various motivations

as stemming from a single overarching concern (viz., a

desire for meaning) than to view these as separate, in-

dependent, processes.

One alternative account to our claim that the moti-

vations in the domains are substitutable is that a trans-

fer of affect or arousal could perhaps explain the find-

ings that an experience (e.g., an uncertainty or

mortality salience manipulation) can affect the engage-

ment in another behavior (e.g., increased intergroup

discrimination or dislike of an anti-U.S. essay writer).

For example, Zillman, Katcher, and Milavsky (1972)

found that after people exercised they would engage in

more aggressive activity. It does not seem reasonable

to propose that this is because exercise and aggression

are expressions of a similar underlying need; rather, it

appears that the arousal experienced from the exercise

carried over to affect people’s aggressive behaviors in

another context (also see Berkowitz, 1990; Schacter &

Singer, 1962). However, this transfer of arousal

account would seem to be hard-pressed to explain

many of the findings that we reviewed previously.

First, many of the reviewed studies included additional

dependent measures to serve as controls (e.g., evaluat

ing essay writers on nonmeaning-threatening topics;

Harmon-Jones et al., 1997; Heine et al., 2005) and

these did not reveal any effects of the meaning threat.

Rather, the meaning threat only led to specific mean

ing-boosting responses, rather than more critical re

sponses in general. Second, many of these studies

(again, particularly the TMT studies) included condi

tions that were designed to instill negative affect but

not meaning threats (e.g., by asking people to imagine

taking an exam or imagining worrisome thoughts;

Greenberg et al., 1995; H. McGregor et al., 1998), and

none of these revealed any evidence for worldview de

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MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

fense. Hence, differences between the studies reviewed

in support of the MMM and previous studies support

ing transfer of arousal or affect effects ameliorate con

cerns that the latter could account for the patterns ob

served and predicted by the MMM.

Is meaning the primary motive? One potential

challenge to our model is that because we are propos

ing that there is such similarity among needs for cer

tainty, self-esteem, belongingness, symbolic immor

tality, and meaning, it is possible that we have

identified the wrong motivation that unites them all.

For example, if these motivations are all so similar

could it instead be that a need for certainty, rather than

a need for meaning, underlies them? Or, perhaps the

fundamental human motivation guiding all of these dif

ferent responses is the need to belong. Given the sub

stantial degree of overlap that we are proposing, how

can we identify which motivation lies at the origin of

our motivational ontology?

This is a difficult question to answer empirically be

cause the overlap between these different motivations

requires that they are all closely connected and are thus

likely activated simultaneously. However, it is impor-

tant to make a distinction between saying that a moti-

vation for meaning underlies motivations for

self-esteem, certainty, belongingness, and symbolic

immortality and saying that these four motivations are

nothing but expressions of the desire for meaning.

There would certainly seem to be facets of these four

psychological processes that are distinct from each

other. That is, although a desire to maintain meaning

cuts across all of these psychological processes there is

more to each of these processes than just a motivation

for meaning. The imperfect overlap of these four pro

cesses is evident when considering some of the specific

experimental findings. For example, studies that found

that a heightened need for closure led to more pro

nounced ingroup biases (e.g., Shah et al., 1998) would

be difficult to explain by arguing that the process origi

nated with a threat to self-esteem. We do agree that

there is room to debate which motivation is more pri

mary in each of the individual experiments that have

been reviewed, however, we think that the one account

that is parsimonious across each and every instance is

that people are striving to affirm coherent structures of

expected relationships.

More important to this point is that people need

mental representations of expected relationships to

have these other things. If one wants to predict events

in the outside world, or the thoughts, feelings and be

haviors associated with themselves and others, one

needs stable mental representations that bear some re

lation to these phenomena. If one wants to intention

ally intervene in their environment and control events

to bring about desired outcomes, such intervention is

n’t possible unless these same relational structures are

in place. If one wants to feel connected to something

outside themselves—places, belongings, family,

friends, lovers, a society, a culture—the impulse and

ability to form such complex relationships both fuels

this desire and makes it possible. This is true regardless

of the other needs met by such relationships, be it the

need for self-esteem, the need for certainty, the need to

belong, or the need to symbolically endure.

Testable Predictions for the MMM

A model as broad and encompassing as the MMM

should afford many testable and falsifiable predictions.

Specifically, the model predicts that threats to an indi

vidual’s meaning will lead to efforts to affirm an alter

native viable relational framework when given the op

portunity. Although a great deal of research has been

conducted that is consistent with the MMM, there are

many directions that future research could be pursued

to directly test the model. First, as we have argued, the

four domains of empirical findings that we have re

viewed (viz., motivations for self-esteem, certainty, af

filiation, and symbolic immortality) are hypothesized

to be substitutable. That is, threats in any of these do-

mains should be compensated for by a boost in any of

the others. Although there is much research that we re-

viewed that is in support of our thesis, there are a num-

ber of combinations of these four domains that have yet

to be investigated. The MMM would predict, for exam-

ple, that people should be more motivated to discern a

pattern in some noise following a significant

self-esteem threat delivered via negative personality

feedback. Alternatively, one would expect that people

should strive to affiliate with others following a manip

ulation that heightens their need for cognitive closure.

The MMM predicts that these compensatory responses

should be evident provided that the meaning threats are

significant and effectively delivered, and that there are

sound measures of attempts to redirect attention to al

ternative meaning systems. In sum, these four domains

of meaning threats and four domains of mean

ing-boosting responses provide at least 16 cells within

which predictions from the MMM can be tested and

potentially falsified.

The MMM does not only propose mean

ing-affirming responses to meaning threats. The

MMM is a hydraulic model and, as such, predicts that

people should experience less of a meaning threat

when they have experienced a boost to an alternative

relational framework. For example, people who have

affirmed their values or have received a self-esteem

boost have been found to experience less cognitive dis

sonance upon making a difficult choice (e.g., Heine &

Lehman, 1997; Steele & Liu, 1983). Thus far, the ma

jority of research on hydraulic relations between

meaning boosts and threats has been conducted within

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HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

a TMT framework, which has identified a variety of

meaning boosts that diminish the impact of mortality

salience (e.g., Dechesne, Janssen, & van Knippenberg,

2000; Harmon-Jones et al., 1997; Mikulincer &

Florian, 2002; Schmeichel & Martens, in press; Van

den Bos & Miedema, 2000; Wisman & Koole, 2003).

We propose that further evidence of the hydraulic na

ture of meaning maintenance could be obtained by

findings that boosts to people’s self-esteem, perceived

certainty, and belongingness would lessen the impact

of various threats, including mortality salience, but

also self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, or in

terpersonal rejection. In sum, meaning boosts in any of

the four domains are predicted to reduce the impact of

threat in any of the other four domains.

Please note that we are not proposing that the four

domains of self-esteem, certainty, belongingness, and

symbolic immortality are an exhaustive list of the ways

that people can gain meaning in their lives. In addition

to these 4 domains, there are likely other sources of

threats to meaning and successful meaning boosting

strategies. For example, some manipulations that have

led to compensatory meaning-gaining responses in

clude thinking of the presence of dust mites (Burris &

Rempel, 2004), a temporal discontinuity task (I.

McGregor et al., 2001), imagining that one has been

burglarized (Navarette et al., 2004), or questioning

how meaningful one’s life is (Heine et al., 2005). It is

not clear that these manipulations fit into motivations

for self-esteem, certainty, affiliation, or symbolic im-

mortality. We suspect that there are likely many other

threats to meaning that could be experimentally manip-

ulated and that would show comparable mean-

ing-boosting responses. For example, we anticipate

that if participants could be led to believe that their per

ceptions of the world were out of touch with reality,

such as when people participate in an Asch-like line

judgment task in which they discover that they failed to

accurately perform a simple visual task, they would

consequently seek to assert alternative frameworks.

Likewise, meaning-seeking responses would be pre

dicted to occur if participants were led to encounter

large anomalies in time perception by having them at

tend to a malfunctioning clock; if they were led to be

lieve that their self-concept was inconsistent and con

tradictory; if they encountered Bruner-Postman kinds

of irregular stimuli (i.e., playing cards of a certain suit

being the wrong color); or even if they watched a sur

real mind-blowing movie such as Mulholland Drive.

Moreover, we propose that these events would be less

threatening to people’s relational frameworks if they

were preceded by a boost to the person’s meaning, such

as through a value affirmation task or a manipulation to

make the person feel more certain. We hypothesize fur

ther that perceived anomalous relations in the realm of

the self or the realm of the relations between the self

and external world will lead to more significant efforts

to regain meaning compared with experiencing anom

alous relations in the realm of the external world. Put

another way, the more central the perceived relations to

one’s life, the more connections that will be open and

thus vulnerable to an anomalous experience. Hence, a

disruption to a framework such as this would bring

about an urgent need to assert a coherent relational

framework.

Last, because people’s meaning-making exercises

will be greatly influenced by what relations are

consensually constructed within their culture, we ex

pect there to be significant cultural differences in the

kinds of events that serve to threaten or boost meaning.

For example, self-esteem does not appear to be a pri

mary source of meaning in hierarchical collectivistic

societies such as in East Asia, and thus we predict that

there should be little evidence of compensatory re

sponses to self-esteem threat there (e.g., Heine et al.,

1999). Conversely, we reason that “face” is a more fo

cal source of meaning in East Asia, and that threats to

face should lead to pronounced meaning-boosting ef

forts in that culture (Heine, 2005). We anticipate that

measuring the extent to which people engage in com

pensatory responses after different kinds of threats

may serve as a methodology to help identify the core

sources of meaning within a culture. In sum, there are

many testable and falsifiable predictions that can be

uniquely derived from the MMM.

Contrasting TMT and the MMM

Our initial reasoning for the MMM was an exten

sion of our reading of the compelling TMT literature,

and, indeed, there are many parallels between these

two theories. Both theories are existential in nature,

both predict the same kinds of worldview bolstering re

sponses to mortality salience, and both emphasize the

fluid domain-general nature of our attempts to restore

meaning. Given this similarity we feel it is crucial to

underscore the important ways in which these two the

ories diverge.

TMT and MMM differ in terms of the foundation of

the respective theories. TMT proposes that people are

motivated to achieve symbolic immortality, which is

attained by activation of the dual component anxiety

buffer. In TMT, thoughts of death provoke anxiety by

reminding people of their own mortality. In an effort to

avoid this anxiety, people strive for a sense of symbolic

immortality, which they achieve by bolstering the

structure within which they exist, or their associations

to that structure. Symbolic immortality is said to be de

rived from the activation of the dual component anxi

ety buffer because the structure is perceived to have a

sense of permanence, and one can become symboli

cally associated with this permanence by perceiving

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MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

oneself as a valued part of this structure (e.g.,

Pyszczynski et al., 2004; Solomon et al., 1991).

In contrast, the MMM proposes that people have a

fundamental need to maintain viable mental represen

tations of expected relationships. Anything that chal

lenges these relational structures will lead to efforts to

construct or affirm alternative structures. Mortality sa

lience is one experience that disrupts an individual’s

meaning framework; however, the proposed model

predicts that other threats to meaning would yield com

parable efforts to regain meaning.

Given the substantial conceptual overlap between

TMT and MMM, we consider the kind of evidence that

would disentangle the two theories. Because both theo

ries view mortality salience as a threat which leads to

compensatory responses, the findings of TMT studies

are also consistent with the predictions of the MMM,

albeit for a different theoretical rationale. In contrast,

however, threats to meaning that do not invoke

thoughts of death would only be predicted to lead to at

tempts to construct or reassert meaning frameworks by

the MMM. Hence, the two theories can be distin

guished by contrasting their predictions for the re

sponses in which people engage when they encounter a

nondeath related meaning threat.

Recently, a number of research programs have con-

trasted how people respond when they encounter

meaning threats that do not involve reference to death

with a mortality salience condition. In one direct series

of tests of the MMM, Heine and colleagues (2005) pro-

vided participants with feedback, via a rigged ques-

tionnaire, that their life was low in meaning or with a

mortality salience manipulation. Participants in both

conditions responded in the same way across a number

of studies. Specifically, participants were more nega

tive towards someone who criticized their country

(thereby preserving a desirable set of relations between

oneself and one’s country), more punitive towards a

prostitute (maintaining an orderly set of relations

within the external world), and more desirous of

high-status products compared with those in a control

condition (which allow for positive associations be

tween oneself and the world). It is not clear what model

other than the MMM could account for these findings.

Other research programs have yielded findings eas

ily integrated into the MMM but counter to the predic

tions of TMT. For example, I. McGregor and col

leagues (2001) found that having people experience a

temporal discontinuity manipulation led people to

have the same response as a mortality salience manipu

lation. Specifically, they showed a heightened inter

group bias (which provides people with an orderly and

desirable set of associations between themselves and

their group). There was no difference in participants’

responses between this condition and another condi

tion in which mortality salience was manipulated.

Navarette and colleagues (2004) provided people with

a manipulation of “theft salience” (they were to imag

ine their homes had been burglarized), or a

manipulation of “social isolation” (they were to imag

ine themselves isolated from family and friends), or a

mortality salience manipulation. Subsequently, partici

pants evaluated an anti-U.S. essay. Participants in all

three conditions responded with more hostility towards

the anti-U.S. essay writer compared to those in a con

trol group. Van den Bos and colleagues (Van den Bos

& Miedema, 2000; Van den Bos, Poortvliet, Maas,

Miedema, & Van den Ham, 2005) asked people to con

sider how they feel when they are uncertain or when

their mortality is made salient. People in both condi

tions responded with increased anger towards unfair

treatment compared with those in a control condition

(perceived unfairness violates one’s expected relation

ships with the world). Miedema, Van den Bos, and

Vermunt (2004) found that participants reacted more

strongly towards variations in fairness when their

self-image had been threatened (by having them recall

situations in which central aspects of their selves were

questioned by people who were very important for

them) relative to a control condition, in ways identical

to those previously identified by mortality salience ma-

nipulations (e.g., Van den Bos & Miedema, 2000).

Burris and Rempel (2006) found that reminding people

of the existence of dust mites led to a preference for

stereotypical targets over counter-stereotypical targets

compared with those in a control condition. They also

found this identical pattern of results when contrasting

mortality salience and control conditions (cf., Schimel

et al., 1999). Although thoughts of dust mites are not

associated with thoughts of mortality, they do chal-

lenge one’s spatial-symbolic self in that they represent

an invasion of one’s space. We propose that they also

threaten one’s meaning frameworks in that they pro

duce an invasive, unexpected, and undesired associa

tion with the self.

In sum, research has shown that a diverse array of

threats to established relations (i.e., temporal disconti

nuity, reminders of the relative meaninglessness of

one’s life, thoughts of burglary or social isolation, feel

ings of uncertainty, self-image threats, and thoughts of

dust mites) lead to the same responses as manipula

tions of mortality salience to a diverse array of depend

ent measures (i.e., intergroup biases, preferences for

high-status products, punitive responses towards a

prostitute, dislike of someone who criticizes one’s

country, anger towards unfair treatment, and prefer

ence for stereotypical targets). In all of these studies

the effects from the nondeath meaning threats were as

strong as the effects of mortality salience manipula

tions, although we note that some efforts to manipulate

meaning have not replicated TMT findings (e.g.,

Baldwin & Wesley, 1996; Landau, Johns, et al., 2004).

Taken together, the diversity of operationalizations and

predicted responses in the studies reviewed previously

104

HEINE, PROULX, VOHS

lends support to the robustness of the meaning-making

compensatory process while weakening alternative ac

counts of any individual study. Apparently, meaning

threats elicited through numerous means influence

people in the same ways as does mortality salience.

These findings would seem to be a challenge to the

logic of TMT. One possibility consistent with TMT is

that the threats to meaning described previously lead to

TMT-like responses because meaning threats weaken

the anxiety buffer and allow death thoughts to reach

consciousness, thereby leading to efforts to regain

symbolic immortality. However, we would challenge

this alternative account in two respects. First, there is

little evidence that death thoughts are activated by

these other meaning threats. Word completion tasks re

veal that none of these manipulations led to increased

death thought accessibility (Burris & Rempel, 2004; I.

McGregor, Zanna, & Holmes, 1998; Navarette et al.,

2004; Van den Bos et al., 2005), however, we note

some other manipulations, such as relationship prob

lems (Florian, Mikulincer, & Hirschberger, 2002), and

thoughts of physical sex among neurotics

(Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, McCoy, & Greenberg,

1999), have been shown to heighten death thought ac-

cessibility, findings that are not easily explained by the

MMM. It is difficult to maintain that the meaning re-

construction efforts are due to the activation of death

thoughts when these studies have failed to find it. Sec-

ond, the MMM is a far more parsimonious account of

findings from studies in which mortality salience is not

manipulated. The MMM explains nondeath related

studies as well as TMT findings by maintaining any

number of significant threats to one’s meaning frame-

work will lead to a response to affirm an alternative

framework.

We do suggest, however, that not all meaning

threats are created equal. We submit that the most sig

nificant threat to one’s relational frameworks is

thoughts of one’s pending death. Heidegger (1953/

1996) regarded humans’ desire to avoid death as a

placeholder for the more fundamental desire to estab

lish stable webs that tie together elements of external

reality, and that finally entangle our human selves

within them. Death rips apart these connections, and in

so doing, renders humans’ existence ultimately and un

avoidably fragmentary, and therefore meaningless.

Disruption of meaning frameworks that are less central

to the self would be expected to cause a less urgent re

sponse to assert an alternative framework.

In addition to the conceptual reasons for why re

minders of death provide such strong threats to mean

ing, we submit that there might be a methodological

reason as well. Mortality salience has the unique virtue

of being a manipulation that is extremely difficult to ra

tionalize away. Threats to self-esteem, manipulations

of uncertainty, or staged interpersonal rejections can be

effectively disarmed by reinterpreting the threat such

that one’s self-esteem really hasn’t been threatened,

that one really doesn’t feel uncertain, or that the

rejectors are not seen as competent or valued relation

ship partners. As anyone who has tried to deliver fail

ure feedback to research participants can testify, quite

often the manipulated threat is not received with the in

tent that it was delivered. In an attempt to reinterpret

the threat, participants can conjure up external attribu

tions (e.g., “I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”), dis

count the importance of the task (e.g., “Who really

cares about anagram-solving skills anyways?”), or be

come suspicious about the whole experiment (e.g.,

“There is no way that I could have done that poorly!”).

In sharp contrast, there is no reinterpreting away the

fact that some day one will die. Hence, we imagine that

mortality salience may indeed prove to be the most

powerful and reliable manipulation to threaten peo

ple’s meaning frameworks in the laboratory.

The Problem of Suicide

The differences in the theoretical foundations of

TMT and MMM are perhaps most evident when we

consider the problem of suicide. Camus (1955)

claimed “There is but one truly serious philosophical

problem, and that is suicide” (p. 3). Why might it be

that someone would wish to take their own life? Camus

suggested that

Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized,

even instinctively, the ridiculous character of habit,

the absence for any profound reason for living, the in-

sane character of daily agitation, and the uselessness

of suffering…there is a direct connection between this

feeling and the longing for death. (Camus, 1955,

p. 10)

If it is, as TMT suggests, that the need for meaning

reduces to the need to avoid the latent anxiety that re

sults from an awareness of one’s own mortality, how

then could it be that in the absence of meaning, people

long for death? If people sometimes choose death over

meaninglessness, it scarcely seems possible that death

can be considered their greatest fear, or that the need

for meaning can reduce to the desire to be buffered

from an awareness of one’s own imminent death. The

MMM presents an alternative motivational ontology,

wherein the need for meaning exists independently of

the will to exist, and is sufficiently powerful that, if un

met, the resulting distress may goad one into ending

one’s own life. We agree with Heidegger (1953/1996,

p. 245) that “angst about death must not be confused

with fear of one’s demise.” We suggest that if there is

any reductive relationship between death and meaning

lessness, it is the fear of death that primarily reduces to

the need for meaning, insofar as humans fear death be

cause death may render life meaningless. When indi

105

MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL

viduals are unable to construct the coherent mental

representations of expected relationships that allow

them to maintain a perception of control over their

existences, or derive a sense of purposeful connection

in their daily activities, they occasionally, and tragi

cally, choose death.

Conclusions

The MMM proposes that a diverse array of human

motivations, including motivations for self-esteem,

certainty, affiliation, and symbolic immortality, can be

understood as stemming from a common underlying

drive: People possess an associative impulse by which

they seek to relate objects and events to each other and

to the self. This desire to perceive relations results in

people viewing their worlds and the events within them

through the prism of their mental representations.

These representations are constructions, and often do

not accurately reflect objective relations within the

world. When people become aware of events that can

not be accommodated in their relational structures,

they experience a threat to their sense of meaning.

These threats to meaning are dealt with in a few ways:

people may reinterpret the events so that they are no

longer inconsistent with their mental representations

or they may revise their representations so that they are

capable of incorporating the new troublesome event

(Kuhn, 1962/1996). In addition to these more re-

searched strategies, the MMM offers the novel propo-

sition that people might respond to meaning threats by

reaffirming an alternative framework. The goal is to be

attending to a viable and coherent framework of rela

tions, and people will be motivated to assert one even if

it does not appear related to the source of threat that

motivated their search in the first place.

There are various sources of threat to people’s

meaning frameworks. People might encounter a threat

to their self-esteem that reduces their sense that they

are relating to their worlds in a functional way. People

encounter occasions in which they feel uncertain about

relations between elements of the world around them,

making them feel unable to predict future events. Peo

ple may be rejected by others, thereby ostracizing them

from any consensual indicators that they are function

ing well. Or there are times when people consider their

future mortality and this realization shatters all rela

tions between the self and its external world. These

threats, we submit, lead people to respond by asserting

alternative frameworks that do not appear to contain

any anomalous relations. Affirmations of a coherent

relational structure will serve to nullify the threat

caused by the hitherto identified irregularities. Because

the proposed goal of our meaning maintenance efforts

is to be attending to a viable meaning framework, it is

not necessary to deal directly with the threatening

anomaly. Any compelling and available network of re

lations can suffice, thereby underscoring the fluid com

pensatory nature of the MMM. For example, threats to

uncertainty can be compensated by feelings of

belongingness (Hogg, 2003), or threats to mortality sa

lience can be compensated by boosts in self-esteem

(Harmon-Jones et al., 1997). Indeed, threats within the

domains of self-esteem, certainty, belongingness, or

symbolic immortality should all be ameliorated by as

serting meaning frameworks within any of the other

domains. Because each of these four psychological

processes can be substituted by the others suggests that

they are serving a common purpose. That purpose is to

maintain meaning.

The MMM integrates a number of diverse litera

tures on human motivation. Although the MMM is

surely not all that is behind the specific motivations for

self-esteem, certainty, belongingness, and symbolic

immortality, we propose that elucidating a common

motivation that cuts across these human drives will fa

cilitate future conceptual and empirical inquiries into

identifying why people behave in the ways they do.

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Study 1 participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele, 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced uncertainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about social issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, eliminated uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat caused clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other uncertainty-related threats, mortality salience and temporal discontinuity, caused similar responses: more extreme intergroup bias in Study 3, and more self-consistent personal goals and identifications in Study 4. Going to extremes and being oneself are seen as 2 modes of compensatory conviction used to defend against personal uncertainty. Relevance to cognitive dissonance and authoritarianism theories is discussed, and a new perspective on terror management theory (J. Greenberg, S. Solomom, & T. Pyszczynski, 1997) is proposed.

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Sep 2000

This article focuses on the question of why fairness matters to people. On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, the authors argue that people especially need fairness when they are uncertain about things that are important to them. Following terror management theory, the authors focus on a basic kind of human uncertainty: fear of death. Integrating these two theoretical frameworks, it is proposed that thinking about their mortality should make fairness a more important issue to people. The findings of three experiments support the authors’ line of reasoning: Asking participants to think about their mortality led to stronger fair process effects (positive effects of perceived procedural fairness on subsequent reactions) than not asking them to think about mortality. It is argued that these findings suggest that fairness especially matters to people when they are uncertain about fundamental aspects of human life such as human mortality.

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Oct 1999

It is assumed that people seek positive self-regard; that is, they are motivated to possess, enhance, and maintain positive self-views. The cross-cultural generalizability of such motivations was addressed by examining Japanese culture. Anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses revealed that many elements of Japanese culture are incongruent with such motivations. Moreover, the empirical literature provides scant evidence for a need for positive self-regard among Japanese and indicates that a self-critical focus is more characteristic of Japanese. It is argued that the need for self-regard must be culturally variant because the constructions of self and regard themselves differ across cultures. The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture. Conventional interpretations of positive self-regard are too narrow to encompass the Japanese experience.

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Article

Full-text available

Oct 1999

Distinct defensive processes are activated by conscious and nonconscious but accessible thoughts of death. Proximal defenses, which entail suppressing death-related thoughts or pushing the problem of death into the distant future by denying one's vulnerability, are rational, threat-focused, and activated when thoughts of death are in current focal attention. Distal terror management defenses, which entail maintaining self-esteem and faith in one's cultural worldview, function to control the potential for anxiety that results from knowing that death is inevitable. These defenses are experiential, are not related to the problem of death in any semantic or logical way, and are increasingly activated as the accessibility of death-related thoughts increases, up to the point at which such thoughts enter consciousness and proximal threat-focused defenses are initiated. Experimental evidence for this analysis is presented.

When Exemplification Fails: Hypocrisy and the Motive for Self-Integrity

Article

Full-text available

Jan 1997

Two experiments investigated how the dissonance that follows a hypocritical behavior is reduced when 2 alternatives are available: a direct strategy (changing behavior to make it less hypocritical) or an indirect strategy (the affirmation of an unrelated positive aspect of the self). In Experiment 1, after dissonance was aroused by hypocrisy, significantly more participants chose to reduce dissonance directly, despite the clear availability of a self-affirmation strategy. In Experiment 2, participants again chose direct resolution of their hypocritical discrepancy, even when the opportunity to affirm the self held more importance for their global self-worth. The discussion focuses on the mechanisms that influence how people select among readily available strategies for dissonance reduction.

Self-Image Resilience and Dissonance: The Role of Affirmational Resources

Article

Full-text available

Jun 1993

It was predicted that high self-esteem Ss (HSEs) would rationalize an esteem-threatening decision less than low self-esteem Ss (LSEs), because HSEs presumably had more favorable self-concepts with which to affirm, and thus repair, their overall sense of self-integrity. This prediction was supported in 2 experiments within the “free-choice” dissonance paradigm—one that manipulated self-esteem through personality feedback and the other that varied it through selection of HSEs and LSEs, but only when Ss were made to focus on their self-concepts. A 3rd experiment countered an alternative explanation of the results in terms of mood effects that may have accompanied the experimental manipulations. The results were discussed in terms of the following: (a) their support for a resources theory of individual differences in resilience to self-image threats—an extension of self-affirmation theory, (b) their implications for self-esteem functioning, and (c) their implications for the continuing debate over self-enhancement versus self-consistency motivation.

Group Members' Reactions to Opinion Deviates and Conformists at Varying Degrees of Proximity to Decision Deadline and of Environmental Noise

Article

Full-text available

Aug 1991

Four experiments examined freely interacting groups to investigate the determinants of group members' reactions to opinion deviates and conformists. In the 1st experiment, the deviate was rejected more when he or she articulated the dissenting opinion in close proximity to the group-decision deadline versus at an earlier point in the group discussion. In the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th experiment, the deviate was rejected more when the group discussion was carried out in a noisy versus a quiet environment. Furthermore, when the conformist's contributions to the group's attempts to reach consensus were made salient (in Experiment 4), he or she was evaluated more positively in a noisy versus a quiet environment. The results were discussed in terms of the notion that group members' tendency to denigrate a deviate or extol a conformist may be stronger when their need for collective cognitive closure is heightened.

The Impact of Daily Stress on Health and Mood: Psychological and Social Resources as Mediators

Article

Full-text available

Mar 1988

This study examined daily stress processes among 75 married couples across 20 assessments during a 6-month period. The somatic and psychological effects of common everyday hassles were investigated. Overall, there was a significant relationship between daily stress and the occurrence of both concurrent and subsequent health problems such as flu, sore throat, headaches, and backaches. The relationship of daily stress to mood disturbance was more complex. The negative effects of stress on mood were limited to a single day, with the following day characterized by mood scores that were better than usual. Furthermore, striking individual differences were found in the extent to which daily stress was associated with health and mood across time. Participants with unsupportive social relationships and low self-esteem were more likely to experience an increase in psychological and somatic problems both on and following stressful days than were participants high in self-esteem and social support. These data suggest that persons with low psychosocial resources are vulnerable to illness and mood disturbance when their stress levels increase, even if they generally have little stress in their lives.

A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

Book

Jun 1957

Leon Festinger

The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations

Abstract

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