Finding death in meaninglessness: Evidence that death‐thought accessibility increases in response to meaning threats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The meaning maintenance model proposes that violations to one's expectations will cause subsequent meaning restoration. In attempts to distinguish meaning maintenance mechanisms from mechanisms of terror management, previous research has failed to find increased death-thought accessibility (DTA) in response to various meaning threats. The present research suggests that this failure may have resulted from methodological differences in the way researchers measured DTA. Studies 1a and 1b found that by replacing this method with a standard method employed when studying worldview and self-esteem threats, DTA increased in response to two different meaning violations. Study 2 found increased DTA, but only among individuals high in personal need for structure, when using this standard DTA procedure, but not when using the procedure taken from previous meaning maintenance studies. Interestingly, these studies did not find increased meaning restoration, so an additional study (Study 3) was designed to provide a theoretically informed examination of this null effect. A meaning restoration effect was observed after removing the standard DTA assessment procedure, but only among participants high in personal need for structure. Implications for the threat-compensation literature are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".