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Part I Existential Theory: What Soren Said

Like most people who end up famous for something, Soren Kierkegaard began life as just some guy. Unlike most people who end up famous for something, Soren ended his life in much the same way – not really famous for anything. That Soren should eventually end up famous for something would probably have been as much of a surprise to him as to the few people who knew him.

Now, pointing out that Soren didn’t start out famous isn’t to say that he was entirely ordinary. In fact, Soren was more than a little peculiar. For example, he revered his religious father and defied him constantly. He was a serious student who submitted a doctoral dissertation that was so cheeky it was nearly rejected. He was engaged to a great girl that he was crazy about and dumped her just before the wedding (Kirmmse 1990).

And then he started writing.

Mostly they were essays that hardly anyone read. The running theme was fairly consistent – things really aren’t making any sense. And not just a few little things. Big things. The biggest possible things. Our legal systems. Our social conventions. Our religious beliefs. Our sciences and philosophies and arts. And he could prove it. He could line them up with each other and with reality and show that they were riddled with holes and inconsistencies. And perhaps the greatest inconsistency could be found in how people seem to respond to all of these inconsistencies: they behave as though everything is just fine.

So Soren wrote more and more essays about how things weren’t making any sense. To further this point, he submitted his essays under different, ridiculous pen names that had the different “authors” arguing against each other. And to take his point even further, he would submit angry letters attacking the “authors” by pointing out that their arguments didn’t make any sense.

(I told you he was a little peculiar.)

Now, if all of this were a movie about some typical famous person, we all know what would happen next: people would read Soren’s essays and think he was a genius. Publishers would beg him to write a book about his observations. It would sell thousands of copies and make him rich. The professors who misunderstood him would come to their senses and brand him a genius. Soren would come to his senses and marry the woman he loved. Then he’d lead a long and happy life, surrounded by loved ones, content with his acknowledged contribution to human thought.

As it turned out, Soren collapsed in the street and died alone at the age of 47. His possessions were given to the woman he should have married – and who had long since married someone else. Years earlier, it was revealed that he had written all of the contradictory essays, as well as the angry letters that pointed out their contradictions. Soren became a laughingstock, and the few people who took him seriously felt they had been played for fools.

At this point, you’re no doubt asking yourself: why should I care about this guy? If I remind you that he’s a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher [you start walking away] WAIT! Come back and let me explain.

The reason that you may be interested in Soren Kierkegaard is the same reason he ended up (posthumously) famous: he had some very interesting ideas. These ideas are so interesting, in fact, that they eventually caught people’s attention, in spite of his personal failures, contrarian nature, and extremely limited readership. These are ideas that were reiterated and developed by subsequent thinkers, and which eventually came to be known as existentialism. They’re the same ideas that inspired resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France and Bruce Springsteen to write Darkness of the Edge of Town. They’re ideas you’ve likely encountered many times over the course of your life, in music and movies, and books. If you’re familiar with Philip Marlowe or Holden Caulfield or Taylor Durden, you’ve definitely run into these ideas. Or if you’ve enjoyed Radiohead or Miles Davis. Or watched Blue Velvet or Blade Runner or Being John Malkovich. Or Toy Story 3.

These ideas spread for the same reason that many good ideas take hold: they’ve sort of occurred to most of us already. Maybe not as clearly expressed or thoroughly thought through, but if you’re reading this chapter, it’s likely you’ve had these thoughts yourself at one time or other – the suspicion that the sense we impose on our reality is overlaid on a lot of nonsense. Maybe you’ve known kind people who’ve experienced unimaginable tragedy or known awful people who die rich and contented. Maybe you’ve been lied to by someone you love – or you’ve been the liar. Maybe the world around you is changing in ways that make your old plans obsolete, with little recourse to a new path. Maybe you’ve succeeded though blind luck after your best efforts have gone unrewarded. Maybe you’ve learned that a respected friend holds beliefs you think are awful or reflected on your own beliefs and found that they don’t add up. Maybe you’ve read history books that describe people making the same mistakes – again and again and again. And maybe all of this has unnerved you, but at the same time, made you affirm what you believe even more strongly.

And maybe you’ve wondered why all of this should be so.

Soren Kierkegaard certainly wondered these things and even came up with a few answers that people found useful. While you may have run into these answers here and there, you may not be aware of how many of these answers – and the questions that inspired them – have been explored by experimental psychologists over the past century. And now, a new psychology of meaning is affirming and surpassing how it is that we made sense of sense-making, offering fresh support for ideas that are intuitive, intriguing, but also elusive. While the full spectrum of these ideas lie beyond the scope of this chapter – and the psychology of meaning – I’ll try to highlight three of the central ideas that existentialism introduced, along with how they’ve informed our own theoretical perspective – the meaning maintenance model (Heine et al. 2006; Proulx and Inzlicht 2012).

Existentialism’s New Idea # 1: Meaning Is Relationships

This is one of the oddest sounding things that Soren (or anyone) ever wrote:

The self is a relation that relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self, relates itself to another. (Kierkegaard 1848/1997, p. 351)

What could this possibly mean? The self is “a relation”? How can anything be “a relation”? Soren’s answer to this question: actually, everything is a relation. Every idea in our head, anyway. According to Soren, every idea we have (about our self, our world, and our relationship to the word) is actually a series of expected relationships between different ideas. And these different ideas are a series of expected relationships between other ideas. And what are those ideas made of? (You guessed it.) We expect snow to be white and cold, and we expect clocks to run clockwise. We expect friends to lend us a hand when we need it, and we have the same expectation of ourselves. We expect to like a new album by our favorite artist and likely expect our friends to like it too. Of course, a list of expected relationships is as endless as the ideas in our head, and you probably get the general idea. What Soren really wanted to highlight was the following: the content of our ideas can be very different, but the stuff that makes and sticks them together is always expected relationships. We call these expected relationships meaning.

Later on, other existentialist writers would follow up on Soren’s line of thinking. Like Soren, Albert Camus died relatively young at the age of 46. Unlike Soren, he had established himself as a world famous novelist, playwright, and resistance fighter by the time of his death (also a pretty decent football player). According to Camus (1955), people have a natural desire to relate everything to everything else, with the ultimate aim of connecting all of reality up into one, consistent, unified whole. Ever had a vague feeling that you were once connected up with everything in existence, only to be yanked out of this perfect unity? Camus certainly thought so and saw a desire to regain this sense of lost unity as the central motivation for most of the activities that people get up to – or as he put it: “the nostalgia for unity is the fundamental impulse of the human drama” (p. 13). For Camus, religion, science, and philosophy were all “systems of relations” (p. 13). Even though the content of these systems are very different (spiritual connections and empirical regularities and logical coherence), he nevertheless imagined them all as different meaning frameworks and believed that the same meaning motivation brought them into being.

Existentialism’s New Idea #2: Meaninglessness Feels Bad

People are pretty smart, and this allows us to create pretty sophisticated meaning frameworks to represent our reality. Somewhat ironically, the same smarts that allow us to assemble meaning frameworks allow us to take them apart – and to notice that (sometimes) they’re barely holding together to begin with. A lot of what Soren wrote dealt with this paradox. More than he wanted to acknowledge, the meaning frameworks he had assembled from experiences were contradicted by his experiences – he just couldn’t help but notice. In particular, he felt that much of what he’d been taught as a young man could be contradicted by reality and other meaning frameworks.

In one of his most famous essays – Fear and Trembling (1843/1997a) – Soren used the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to make his point. Do you know this one? Well, to make a long (Biblical) story short, Abraham was the leader of the ancient Israelites, and he had no heir. He was very old, and so was his wife. And yet, God granted them a son, Isaac, whom they were told was the future of the Israelites. Then God told Abraham to take Isaac to the top of a mountain and cut his throat. And without a peep of protest, Abraham tried to do it – before God stopped him at the last possible moment. Now, Soren thought that there were a couple of things that were a little odd. At the outset, what was Abraham thinking? It’s like he fully believed that God wanted him to kill his son, yet fully believed that God would stop him from doing it. How is that contradiction possible? And even stranger – how can middle-class Europeans use these stories as their guide for living? If some guy stumbled into church and admitted to killing his family – because “God told him to” – he wouldn’t be commended for his faithful obedience. He’d be thrown into a madhouse. And the Bible is full of stories that Soren thought were equally absurd (don’t even get him started on the Book of Job).

So do we actually acknowledge these contradictions, or are we just fooling ourselves and each other? And what other contradictions would those contradictions imply for how we lead our lives? By now, all of these contradictions were filling Soren with a very common emotion: anxiety. Camus wanted to get more specific. These contradictions weren’t making us feel just any kind of anxiety. They were making us feel a very special kind of anxiety, a “feeling of the absurd” (p. 5) that tells us that our experiences – any of our experiences – aren’t matching up with our meaning frameworks.

Martin Heidegger, a German existentialist theorist (who bucked the “early death” trend by dying at age 86), had another term for this special feeling. It’s a word often used by other existentialists and always used by people making fun of existentialism: angst. According to Heidegger (1956/1996), this is a very subtle feeling – more of a mood than an emotion – and we experience the same angst following any experience than threatens meaning. He called these experiences non-relations and argued that angst would follow from any non-relational experience, whether it was a trivial, unexpected mistake, or what he called “your own most non-relational potentiality of being, not to be bypassed” (p. 251) (It’s what you and I call death).

Existentialism’s New Idea #3: Meaninglessness Makes You Affirm Meaning

So how do we deal with the funny feeling that things aren’t making sense? Mostly by focusing on other things that do make sense. Whenever Soren got this feeling (after a typical day of contemplating the gaps and fissures of existence), he would repeat familiar behaviors (Kierkegaard1843/1997b). This might involve making a favorite trip to his favorite theater to see his favorite play. He would stop at the same restaurant along the way, stay at the same hotel, and sit in the same seat in the theater, mouthing along with the same dialogue and laughing at the same jokes. When Camus got this feeling, he threw himself into his work – he wrote novels and plays and resisted the Nazis in occupied France. When Heidegger got this feeling, he joined the Nazi party.

For better or worse, it’s often easier to affirm another meaning framework than it is to completely revise a threatened meaning framework. Sure, you can sit around contemplating the potential absurdity of ascribing value to a finite human existence – or you can affirm something else, anything else more strongly. Often, this instinctive response is a great strategy, especially if what you’re affirming enriches your life or the lives of those around you. (Heidegger dismissed these affirmation responses as inauthentic because they didn’t directly address the source of the meaning crisis – though this criticism may be most applicable to his own affirmation efforts.)

Part II Meaning Maintenance Model: Stealing What Soren Said

So let’s recap what Soren (and the existentialists, more generally) had to say: (1) meaning is what connects all of the ideas in our head. (2) When experiences violate meaning frameworks, this makes us feel a special kind of bad. (3) When we feel this way, we often respond by affirming other meaning frameworks.

A recap of the meaning maintenance model would go something like this: (1) meaning is what connects all of the ideas in our head. (2) When experiences violate meaning frameworks, this makes us feel a special kind of bad. (3) When we feel this way, we often respond by affirming other meaning frameworks.

OK, in terms of existentialist theory, the meaning maintenance model isn’t exactly novel. But in terms of existential social psychology, this perspective is oddly underrepresented in the current cannon (Greenberg et al. 2004). If it’s going to have any appeal, it will be because these ideas have sort of occurred to most of us already, and indeed, the pieces of this perspective have long been in place, with overlapping and complementary findings in different literatures and fields in psychology, more generally. What we’ve tried to do with the meaning maintenance model, more than anything else, is simply acknowledge that these findings are overlapping and complementary. Like any theoretical framework, the meaning maintenance model begins as a description of a general phenomenon – in this case, the very reliable ways that people respond to experiences that violate mental representations of expected associations, whatever these associations happen to represent. Following from this description is a proposed mechanism – in this case, a belief that violations of expected associations, whatever they happen to represent, will lead to a common syndrome of physiological arousal and neurocognitive activation. In turn, some component of this syndrome provokes a common array of cognitive compensation efforts. These efforts often involve the affirmation of alternative expected associations – even if these meaning frameworks share no content whatsoever with the associations that were initially violated. Finally, this assumed mechanism allows us to make predictions that would not follow from (or be allowed by) other theoretical frameworks – namely, that the violation of any deeply held expectation will evoke a common, measurable syndrome of arousal and activation, which in turn will provoke the affirmation of any proposition we happen to be committed to.

Empirical support for this prediction, I believe, would be the ultimate verification of existentialist theory (and the meaning maintenance model). To date, evidence for the totality of this proposition does not exist (which is why it’s still just a prediction). However, there’s an awful lot of evidence that this prediction will eventually be born out. This evidence can be found in many different fields in psychology, where there is significant evidence for each element of the mechanism hypothesized to underlie the meaning maintenance model (and existentialist theory). Let’s take a look at each of these elements, in turn.

Meaning Maintenance Model (Old) New Idea #1: Meaning Is Relationships

At the outset, I’ll point out that most of us are sober scientists who don’t have time for “existential this” or “non-relation that.” Rather, we prefer unambiguous terminology that can be precisely operationalized. Take the word “meaning,” for example. You’ll seldom hear an experimental psychologist use the word “meaning” to describe a bunch a related ideas filling up people’s heads.

When psychologists describe a bunch of related ideas filling up people’s heads, we use a different word: schema.Footnote 1

In fact, we’ve been using the word schema for nearly a century now, to describe all of the expected relationships that fill up our heads. We talk about the social schema that we have for our personal relationships and the self schema we have for ourselves (obviously). We talk about the event schema we have for the things that go on around us every day and the perceptual schema we have for the things we hear and see. We also talk about all of the functions that a schema might serve. A given schema might help to organize our experiences and help us to predict and control future events. It can also help memorize experiences and call them back into our thoughts when they seem relevant. In fact, a good deal of what psychologists have been up to for the past 100 or so years has been about understanding one kind of schema or another. And when developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists all use the word schema, it’s always to describe the same thing: mental representations of expected relationships. Relationships between anything that our minds can comprehend.

Of course, none of this is to say that the content of various schemas aren’t importantly different or that that the functions they serve don’t differ in general importance. We all realize that there are important differences between a schema that organizes our understanding of what is (epistemic meaning) and what should be (teleological meaning). None of us will confuse a schema that organizes our perception of playing card features (Bruner and Postman 1949) with a schema that assigns a purpose to our life (McAdams and Olson 2010). None of us will imagine that failures of either schema will produce equivalent practical consequences – be it an inability to play Bridge or a sense that life isn’t worth living. And none of us will confuse the kinds of experiences that violate either of these schemas – be it a reverse-colored playing card or a reminder of our unavoidable mortality (Pyszczynski et al. 1999). Yet while we all have a clear conception of how these schemas differ in terms of content and function, it may very well be the case that our brains do not – at least in terms of how our brains respond to experiences that violate these schemas. That’s because our brains likely respond to the violation of any schema in pretty much the same way – a syndrome of activation and arousal and a limited palette of cognitive compensation efforts.

Meaning Maintenance Model (Old) New Idea #2: Meaninglessness Feels Bad

Once again, it may be worth pointing out that no self-respecting psychologist would use an expression like “feeling of the absurd” or “angst.” Instead, we tend to use “anxiety” – a lot. If we look to the clinical literature, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1992) describes our affective response to tragic events – a “double dose of anxiety” (p. 64). The first of these doses stems from the fear and loss that follows from a tragedy. The second dose follows from having a fundamental meaning framework violated – namely, our expectation that bad things don’t happen to good people or at least people who don’t deserve them. If we travel backwards in time, and across psychological domains, Jerome Bruner (1949) describes a common response to reverse-colored playing cards – “acute personal distress” (Kuhn 1962/1996, p. 63). At points in between, Jean Piaget (1985) describes our response to experience-schema mismatches as disequilibrium, and Leon Festinger (1957) coins dissonance as the feeling we get when our behaviors don’t match our beliefs. More recently, uncertainty (e.g., Van den Bos 2001) has become a catch-all term for the feeling that follows experiences that violate our understandings – an expression that comes full circle as anxious uncertainty (McGregor et al. 2010).

Given how ubiquitous this notion is across so many disciplines in psychology, you would think we’d have a pretty clear idea of what dissanxiousuncertlibrium actually is – we don’t. Part of the problem is that lab participants seldom report feeling much of anything following the kinds of experiences that we think should evoke this particular feeling (Baumeister et al. 2007) – and yet we all know what this feeling feels like in everyday life. And we can infer the presence of some kind of arousal following these sort of experiences, insofar as misattribution of arousal manipulations will extinguish the compensation efforts that we imagine are motivated by this feeling (e.g., Kay et al. 2010; Proulx and Heine 2008; Zanna and Cooper 1974). Apparently, having people attribute the feeling that follows from these experiences – a feeling that they don’t report feeling – to another likely culprit extinguishes the motivation to engage in other behaviors to make this feeling go away. But what is this feeling?

In recent years, we’ve gotten much better at measuring arousal – both conscious and unconscious – following a wide array of experiences that violate expected associations. For example, if you violate people’s self-conception, their heart rate will increase and their blood vessels will dilate – a physiological threat response (Blascovich et al. 2002). This shouldn’t be very surprising, given how important people’s self-conceptions are to their everyday lives. What may be surprising, however, is that people will demonstrate an identical threat response if the person they’re talking to is Chinese, but they have an Alabama accent (Weird!) (Mendes et al. 2007). Conversely, providing people with information that violates their expectations in a positive way will also evoke this response. For example, minorities who believe that social discrimination is rampant will demonstrate a threat response if they are not discriminated against (Major et al. 2007). These recent findings join examples of consciously reported anxiety following other positive experiences that violate people’s expectations. For example, people feel anxious after learning that their test scores have improved, if this knowledge violates their understanding of how people learn (Plaks and Stecher 2007).

We’re also learning a lot more about the cognitive neuroscience that likely underlies our common responses to meaning violations – whatever they happen to be about and whether they represent good news or bad. As it turns out, there are areas of our brain that do nothing but detect mismatches between what we expect and what we experience (Montague et al. 1996). According to the reward prediction error hypothesis, areas of the anterior cingulated cortex, in particular, are associated with the detection of a wide variety of discrepancies and inconsistencies, from simple mistakes on an attention task to violations of linguistic syntax and conflicting motivations (Holroyd and Coles 2002; Ridderinkhof et al. 2004). It doesn’t matter whether the experience is unexpectedly good or bad – the ACC responds by firing dopaminergic neurons. And remarkably, the ACC response to this kind of simple task-relevant error is diminished when people are reminded of their religious worldview (Inzlicht et al. 2009). Of course, you and I know there is a difference between regularities in an attention task and systems of religious conviction – our brains, however, do not. And this may go a long way in explaining why the same physiological arousal seems to follow from any violation of expected associations, whether it’s mundane or profound. And why we’ll affirm our moral worldview following reminders of our mortality (Rosenblatt et al. 1989) – or reverse-colored playing cards (Proulx and Major in press).

Meaning Maintenance Model (Old) New Idea #3: Meaninglessness Makes You Affirm Meaning

Speaking of reverse-colored playing cards – do you know what happens if you show someone a black four of hearts? Typically, people will reinterpret their perception of the card so that it agrees with their paradigm for playing cards – they’ll see the four of hearts as a spade. Alternatively, of course, they can recognize that the card is anomalous and revise their playing card paradigm to account for it – they’ll come to expect some anomalous cards from the deck the experimenter draws from (Bruner and Postman 1949). And how about an unexpected tragedy – like a fatal car accident? Well, people will typically reinterpret their perception of the event so that it agrees with their belief in a just world – they’ll imagine that the deceased was speeding, or possibly drunk. Alternatively, they can acknowledge that tragedy often strikes those who don’t deserve it and revise their belief in a just world accordingly – shit happens (Janoff-Bulman 1992). And I could just as easily describe these responses using the Piagetian (1985) terms, assimilation or accommodation. Or terms from the many different theoretical perspectives that describe these same compensation behaviors (e.g., Park and Folkman 1997; Thompson and Janigan 1988). From the outset, I think it’s important to acknowledge that what’s being described here, across these different fields and literatures and theories, is the same general psychological phenomenon – two common responses to any meaning violation, regardless of the content or practical importance.

More recently, a third response has taken over a significant portion of the social psychological literature – the compensatory (re)affirmation of alternative meaning frameworks. If you violate someone’s sense of self-worth, they’ll affirm their self-worth in other ways (Tesser 2000). Violate their sense of belongingness (Baumeister and Leary 1995), and they’ll affirm belongingness in other ways. Violate their sense of control (Kay et al. 2008) or their ideological worldview (Jost et al. 2004), and they’ll affirm what’s been violated in other ways. Or you can just violate everything at once by reminding people of their own mortality and watch them affirm whatever you put under their nose (Pyszczynski et al. 1999). This process is variously termed compensatory conviction (McGregor 2007), compensatory control (Kay et al. 2008), worldview verification (Major et al. 2007), system justification (Jost et al. 2004), self-affirmation (Steele and Liu 1983), and cultural worldview defense (Pyszczynski et al. 1999), although I think that giving this process a variety of names obscures what might be obvious to the outside observer – fundamentally, this is the same psychological process, manifesting regardless – and in spite of – the specific content of what is violated and what is affirmed. You could call this process compensatory worldview system verification defense. Or just meaning maintenance.

Most recently, we’ve directly demonstrated the fundamental nature of compensatory worldview system verification defense, er, meaning maintenance. Sure, you can reliably get people to affirm their moral worldview by reminding them of their own mortality (Pyszczynski et al. 1999) or violating their sense of self (Steele and Liu 1983). And you might be motivated to come up with reasons why only mortality reminders (Schimel et al. 2007) or self-threats more generally (Van den Bos 2009) should evoke this response. But if you do, you’re going to have difficulty explaining why people will engage in moral affirmations after they’ve played blackjack with reverse-colored playing cards (Proulx and Major in press). Or after the person they’re talking to secretly switched with a different person who’s wearing the same clothes (Proulx and Heine 2008). Or after they’ve read an absurd joke (Proulx et al. 2010). Or after they’ve been flashed nonsensical word pairings at 32 ms (Randles et al. 2011).

Now, you could argue that subliminal presentations of “quickly blueberry” are wreaking havoc on people’s self-concept, provoking efforts to restore the self by affirming values closely integrated with one’s identity. Or you could suggest that a red ace of spades floods people’s minds with death-related thoughts, threatening people with potential terror and initiating anxiety buffers which evoke distal efforts to affirm a cultural worldview that provides a sense of symbolic immortality. But I think Occam’s Razor will dice these arguments pretty quickly. What’s likely happening is simply this: meaning frameworks are being violated, which makes people feel funny and want to affirm meaning elsewhere.

Part III Existential Social Psychology: Finally, What Soren Said?

With all the talk of “inconsistency” this and “discrepancy” that, it may have occurred to you that Soren’s ideas – and existentialism more generally – represent a kind of radical consistency theory. Radical in the sense that all of human experience is represented as meaning, and the violation of any meaning framework is understood to arouse the same feeling and lead to the same general array of compensation responses. This is because – unlike prior schools of Western thought – the existentialists were unconcerned with the objective reality of what exists. Beginning with Soren, the focus shifted to our subjective experience of existence. Theorists became interested in how we mentally represent reality, how these structures can be created or altered, and the emotions associated with their dissolution and growth. Into the early twentieth century, psychology and philosophy were saturated with this perspective. Quine (1953/1980) understood knowledge as a web of beliefs, undergoing continual realignment and revision. Kuhn (1962/1996) described the history of science as the gradual coalescing of individual theories around common phenomena, until they integrate into a singular paradigm. He took the word “paradigm” from Bruner (Bruner and Postman 1949) and used anomalous playing cards as an example of how scientists respond to unexpected observations – they feel anxious and either reinterpret their observation or revise their understanding. Heider (1958), Piaget (1985), and Festinger (1957) described these same efforts as they were thought to follow from imbalance, disequilibrium, and dissonance. More recently, efforts to reaffirm a variety of violated understandings appear in an expanding “threat-compensation” literature in social psychology (Proulx 2012).

Following from Kuhn, one might have expected these different perspectives to themselves coalesce into a common paradigm in experimental psychology. Instead, something else has occurred. Rather than integrating our perspectives, we’ve been generating “new” theories for every manifestation of this process that we bring to light. Particularly in social psychology, we’ve come to understand progress as the continual introduction of more and more theories – different brands in an increasingly saturated marketplace. Can we show that violating beliefs about climate change will initiate efforts to affirm these beliefs in other ways? I bet we could – and we’d be launching climate conviction theory in the process. Have strong feelings about American jazz trumpeters? You’d likely reaffirm them if they were violated – and Satchmo justification theory could be a road to academic riches. Though in all seriousness, I think a consequence of our metastasizing micro-theories has been that the core mechanism underlying this general phenomenon has yet to be specified. And frankly, I don’t think it matters whether this work is framed as meaning maintenance (Proulx and Inzlicht 2012), meaning making (Park 2010), neo-dissonance (Harmon-Jones et al. 2009), or compensatory worldview system verification defense (YOUR NAME HERE?). Finally, specifying this mechanism will significantly expand the field of existential social psychology and generally enhance our understanding of a fundamental process that spans numerous fields in psychology. Most importantly, it will finally validate what Soren said, so long ago. And given all of the inconsistencies he brought to our attention, don’t we owe him some closure?