The Personal Need for Structure and Personal Fear of Invalidity Measures: Historical Perspectives, Current Applications, and Future Directions

Abstract

Attaining meaning has been characterized as a primary human goal. Each person, each stimulus that meets our senses changes our environment, at times challenging our sense of knowing what to expect from the environment. Without structuring this array into coherent units that provide meaning, the world would be experienced as chaos. This is a disturbing and unsettling state that people are driven to avoid/reduce (Peirce, 1877/1957; Dewey, 1929). Why? First, for survival, an organism needs to know both whether immediate danger exists and whether stimuli that satisfy need states are present. Second, aside from promoting survival, the experience of knowing serves the drive to approach pleasant/beneficial and avoid unpleasant/harmful experiences. Without meaning being attached to the stimuli around us we would have no way to determine what stimuli in our environment are pleasurable (and perhaps species-promoting) versus painful (and perhaps species-hindering). Perception, categorization, inference, and memory are the cognitive tools humans are equipped with to provide the meaning that will shape subsequent action toward stimuli. Bruner (1957a) referred to this as categories serving a predictive function (noting that the predictions that are derived from one’s inferences are of vary- ing degrees of veridicality). James (1907/1992) stated these cognitive processes produce the meaning that allows us to anticipate, expect, act, and react, thus linking cognition with pragmatism. Third, attaining meaning is also a desired end state in and of itself. Doubt is experienced as unpleasant, and attaining meaning (knowing) allows that unpleasant state to be removed. This fact led Heider (1944) to conclude that humans possess a causal drive-a drive to establish a set of causal explanations that account for the stimuli in the environment. Heider assumed this was “a third basic drive beside the drives for self conservation and for the conservation of the species” (p. 359). Finally, Heider (1958) described this causal drive as not only reducing the unpleasantness of doubt, but also providing a sense of mastery or control over the environment. This sense of determinism allows one to feel as if the universe is not random, which is essential for both avoiding feelings of helplessness and initiating appropriate action.

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