The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making
Abstract
Across eras and literatures, multiple theories have converged on a broad psychological phenomenon: the common compensation behaviors that follow from violations of our committed understandings. The meaning maintenance model (MMM) offers an integrated account of these behaviors, as well as the overlapping perspectives that address specific aspects of this inconsistency compensation process. According to the MMM, all meaning violations may bottleneck at neurocognitive and psychophysiological systems that detect and react to the experience of inconsistency, which in turn motivates compensatory behaviors. From this perspective, compensation behaviors are understood as palliative efforts to relieve the aversive arousal that follows from any experience that is inconsistent with expected relationships—whether the meaning violation involves a perceptual anomaly or an awareness of a finite human existence. In what follows, we summarize these efforts, the assimilation, accommodation, affirmation, abstraction and assembly behaviors that variously manifest in every corner of our discipline, and academics, more generally.
Cite this
Travis Proulx, Michael Inzlicht (2012). The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making. Psychological Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840x.2012.702372
@article{travis2012the,
title = {The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making},
author = {Proulx, Travis and Inzlicht, Michael},
year = {2012},
journal = {Psychological Inquiry},
doi = {10.1080/1047840x.2012.702372}
}Citations in this library
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