Introducing Science to the Psychology of the Soul Experimental Existential Psychology

Humans live out their lives knowing that their own death is inevitable; that their most cherished beliefs and values, and even their own identities, are uncertain; that they face a bewildering array of choices; and that their private subjective experiences can never be shared with another human being. This knowledge creates five major existential concerns: death, isolation, identity, freedom, and meaning. The role of these concerns in human affairs has traditionally been the purview of philosophy. However, recent methodological and conceptual advances have led to the emergence of an experimental existential psychology directed toward empirically investigating the roles that these concerns play in psychological functioning. This new domain of psychological science has revealed the pervasive influence of deep existential concerns on diverse aspects of human thought and behavior. KEYWORDS—death; isolation; identity; freedom; meaning Humans possess far more sophisticated intellectual abilities than other animals do, including a greatly enhanced capacity for self-reflection. This capacity is highly adaptive because it enables people to develop complex strategies for dealing with risks and opportunities in their environment. However, self-reflection also leads people to realize that death is inevitable; that their most sacred beliefs and values, and even their own identities, are uncertain; that they face a bewildering array of choices in their lives; and that in many ways they are alone in an indifferent universe. Existential psychology seeks to understand how people somehow come to terms with these basic facts of life and how these issues affect diverse aspects of their behavior and experience (Yalom, 1980). Many of the early influential figures in psychology, such as Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, Sigmund Freud, William James, John Dewey, Otto Rank, and Gordon Allport, used an existential perspective in their work. However, with the growing emphasis on studying overt behavior over the course of the 20th century, the science of psychology shifted away from people’s existential concerns, dismissing them as too vague and subjective to be addressed by scientific methods. But no more: A new direction for psychological science has emerged, one that considers the human confrontation with deep existential issues to be an essential factor in diverse forms of human behavior and that uses rigorous experimental methods to explore these processes. This discipline has become known as experimental existential psychology (XXP; Greenberg, Koole, & Pyszczynski, 2004). THE EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE The psychological confrontation with deep existential concerns occurs most dramatically in the aftermath of extreme negative events—whether personal ones, such as a devastating accident, life-threatening illness, or untimely death of a loved one, or more globally significant ones like the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the absence of such extreme events, most people only occasionally consciously consider deep existential concerns, though some people consciously ponder these issues more than others. Yet existential philosophers have maintained that existential concerns exert a pervasive influence on human behavior regardless of whether people realize it or not. As long as existential concerns could only be observed through introspection, it was impossible to determine what impact they had on behavior. Fortunately, recent advances in experimental psychology have furnished the necessary tools to analyze unconscious sources of human behavior, and experimental existential psychologists have been applying these tools to explore how people respond to reminders of these daunting Address correspondence to Sander Koole, Department of Social Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands; e-mail: [email protected]. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 212 Volume 15—Number 5 Copyright r 2006 Association for Psychological Science facts of life. One of the most important tools has been the priming method, in which the effect of exposure to stimuli (primes) on people’s behavior is observed. Subtle priming events such as completing a word puzzle or seeing a picture can influence people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, even when they are unaware of any such influence. For instance, after completing a puzzle with achievement-related words, people display more achievement motivation and judge other people’s behavior as more achievement oriented (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001). Other useful experimental techniques include measures that can indirectly assess people’s attitudes or beliefs, for instance via response times. Because implicit measures do not rely on introspection, they can probe the unconscious processes that affect people’s judgments and behavior. The existential concerns that are activated by experimental techniques are generally of low emotional intensity. This suggests that the results of XXP may be relevant mostly for understanding people’s normal functioning and everyday struggles in the absence of an acute existential crisis—indeed, most work in this area is focused on such normal functioning. Whether the psychological processes activated by powerful existential crises are qualitatively different from those involved in people’s everyday existential struggles remains an open question. However, Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg (2003) observed that the reactions of the American public to the highly traumatic terrorist attacks of 9/11 were quite similar to the reactions to subtle experimental reminders of death found in many laboratory studies over the decade prior to the attacks. Thus, although the intensity of people’s existential concerns is likely to be lower in the laboratory than during extreme life events, the underlying psychological processes may be similar. THE BIG FIVE EXISTENTIAL CONCERNS Since the 1980s, hundreds of experiments have examined people’s psychological reactions to the confrontation with deep existential concerns. This first generation of experimental existential research has highlighted five major existential concerns, summarized in Table 1. These ‘‘big five’’ concerns represent some of the most profound and universal existential conflicts that people must face, and echo the works of diverse philosophers and artists across the ages. The problem of death has been one of the most widely studied issues in XXP. Most of this research has used the mortality salience paradigm (Pyszczynski et al., 2003), in which some participants are reminded of their own mortality. This is accomplished in a variety of ways, but the most common method is to ask participants to respond to two brief prompts about their own death (e.g., ‘‘Please describe the emotions the thought of your own death arouses in you’’). Control groups receive parallel questions about a neutral topic (e.g., watching television) or, more commonly, an aversive topic that is unrelated to death (e.g., failing an exam, experiencing pain). Over 200 experiments have shown that heightened mortality salience leads people to engage a systematic set of terror management defenses, which help them manage the potential for terror that the threat of death can arouse. People’s initial, conscious reaction to mortality salience is to deny their personal vulnerability to impending death (e.g., ‘‘I am a healthy person, death is far off’’) and to suppress further deathrelated thoughts (Pyszczynski et al., 2003). However, once death concerns are no longer in focal attention, people exhibit an increase in the accessibility of death-related thought. For example, they become quicker to recognize death-related words on a computer screen and are more likely to complete word