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Meaning Maintenance Model: Introducing Soren to Existential Social Psychology

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Book cover The Experience of Meaning in Life

Abstract

Existentialist theorists – most notably, Kierkegaard – laid out the blueprint for our current understanding of meaning. These theorists shared a common understanding of how meaning frameworks are acquired, along with the ways that people commonly respond to violations of these meaning frameworks. Our own perspective, the meaning maintenance model, draws from existentialist theory and current theoretical perspectives in experimental psychology. In this chapter, I will summarize this meaning maintenance perspective, along with the data that supports our central theoretical conceit: a general meaning maintenance motivation underlies much of the “violation-compensation” literature in social psychology.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Also see script (Nelson 1981), narrative (McAdams and Olson 2010), paradigm (Bruner and Postman 1949), internal working model (Bowlby 1980), implicit theory (Murphy and Medin 1985), assumptive world (Janoff-Bulman 1992), and even (from time to time) meaning (Baumeister 1991; Peterson 1999).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tilburg School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Travis Proulx

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  1. Travis Proulx
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Correspondence to Travis Proulx .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Dept. of Psychology, Texas A&M University, TAMU 4235, College Station, 77843, Texas, USA

    Joshua A. Hicks

  2. , Dept of Psychology, North Dakota State University, Minard Hall, Fargo, 58105, North Dakota, USA

    Clay Routledge

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Proulx, T. (2013). Meaning Maintenance Model: Introducing Soren to Existential Social Psychology. In: Hicks, J., Routledge, C. (eds) The Experience of Meaning in Life. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6527-6_4

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