Meaning Maintenance Model

Definition

People expect that certain experiences will be associated with one another. For example, if a person goes out to dinner, he or she expects the waiter to bring what he or she ordered. If a person sees a crow, he or she expects it to be black. People expect that good people will be rewarded in life, bad people will be punished, and that their friends will be kind to them. Sometimes, however, these expectations are violated by unusual experiences. Sometimes the waiter brings the wrong breakfast, and sometimes friends are cruel. Sometimes tragedies befall nice people, villains prosper, or an albino crow lands on a neighbor's roof.

The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that whenever these expected associations are violated by unexpected experiences, it goes against people's shared desire to maintain meaning, or to feel that their experiences generally make sense. Often, when people's expectations are violated, they can revise them (“A white crow? Hmm… I guess that some crows can be white as well as black”), or they can reinterpret the experience so that it no longer appears to violate their expectations (“A white crow? I guess I didn't see it right. It must have been a dove”).

[Page 547]Alternatively, violated expectations can prompt people to seek out or remind themselves of other experiences that still do make sense to them (“Weird. A white crow? Hmm…maybe I'll watch that movie again… the one I've seen a dozen times before”). MMM proposes that when people's expected associations are violated, they often reaffirm other expected associations that haven't been violated, even if the expected associations being reaffirmed don't have much to do with the expected associations that were violated to begin with. MMM calls this process fluid compensation and proposes that expected associations are substitutable with one another when they attempt to restore a feeling that their experiences generally make sense.

What is Meaning?

Meaning comprises the expected associations that connect people's experiences to one another—any experience, and any way that experiences can be connected. Meaning is what connects people's experiences of the people, places, objects, and ideas all around them (e.g., hammers to nails, cold to snow, fathers to sons, or dawn to the rising sun). Meaning is what connects experiences of one's own self (e.g., one's thoughts, behaviors, desires, attributes, abilities, roles, and past incarnations), and meaning is what connects one to the outside world (e.g., purpose, value, belonging). Despite the many ways that people can connect their experiences, meaning always manifests as expected associations that allow them to feel that these experiences make sense.

Why Do People Maintain Meaning?

The idea that people have a general desire to maintain expected associations was suggested by many Western existentialists in the mid-19th and 20th centuries, including S⊘ren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus. These philosophers imagined that all humanity shared a common desire to see their experiences as connected to one another in ways that generally made sense. Science, religion, and philosophy were imagined to be different ways of connecting one's experiences of the outside world, connecting elements of one's own self, and ultimately, connecting oneself to the world around him or her. These connections were called meaning, and when people experience something, anything, that isn't connected to their existing expected associations, it was said to be meaningless; such experiences could only be considered meaningful once people have found a way of connecting them to their existing expected associations. According to the existentialists, feelings of meaninglessness could be evoked by any experience that violated one's expected associations, be it a simple error in judgment, an unexpected observation, a surreal image, feeling alienated from lifelong friends, or thoughts of one's own mortality, as death was thought to represent one's final disconnection from the world around him or her.

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