Psychologists Dr Proulx and Professor Heine at the University of British Columbia have published a number of papers on what they call a:

“meaning maintenance model” in which people continually strive to preserve a functioning meaning framework. When people encounter a threat to their meaning, be it through a self-esteem threat, feelings of uncertainty, mortality salience, or witnessing a scene that does not make sense, they need to regain a sense of meaning. Often people will reaffirm an independent meaning framework in their efforts to regain meaning. We are conducting a number of different studies in which we explore the various ways that people respond to a diverse array of threats to meaning”. (Link)

There are two effects that creating meaninglessness can result in: 1. Reaffirming existing ‘meaning frameworks’ such as becoming more patriotic and more willing to defend the status quo. 2. (And this is the interesting one) “when people are not provided with an alternative framework to affirm they will seek out new frameworks instead, and will abstract patterns from noise”.

In their most recent paper (whole article as pdf here), the authors explore effect 2. To quote from the article:

‘‘What is absurd is the confrontation of the irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart’’ (Camus). According to Camus, this longing for clarity, for associations that are internally coherent and consistent with one’s environment, underlies the construction of all meaning frameworks, whether they organize scientific observation, religious observance, or plans for a weekend barbeque.”

Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine read half their experimental participants an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka.  The story is vivid and compelling but makes no sense— it is Kafkaesque. The other half of the participants were not confronted with ‘a threat to meaning’. They were read a story that made perfect sense.

All students then studied  strings of  letters and took a memory test, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a larger list of letter strings. In fact the letters of the study list were related in a subtle way with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a popular measure of implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea of how well they were performing or what patterns their brain was sensing.

But there was a dramatic difference between the Kafka and non-Kafka groups of participants: The Kafka readers (who had been left puzzled), chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than the other group who had read a coherent story and had no ‘threat to meaning’.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

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A burning question that I have is this: Is what is going on here something related to intelligence - to fluid and crystallized intelligence more specifically. Does a perceived lack of meaning (or a meaning threat) generate more motivation to use fluid intelligence – exactly that factor identified by Raymond Cattell, and measured by e.g. Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices (and this free version of it - Jensen’s IQ test). And in the cases of affirming existing ‘meaning structures’ are we talking about crystallized intelligence – what fluid intelligence has already invested in during education and acculturation?

Or alternatively, is this effect an implicit motivation related more to basic associative learning mechanisms?

More on this later… It’s fascinating.

Here is my  model of explicit motivation (as opposed to implicit, introspectively inaccessible motivation), executive processes and fluid and crystallized intelligence. Lots of reviewing of the literature and experiments to do now!

In the New York Times article on this paper (link), the author points out that

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”

This is one of those extraordinary ‘connection’ moments for me. This idea relates precisely to the implicit and explicit motivation dual process account I just wrote up in a book chapter. In Dr Inzlicht’s paper, the magnitude of the ‘Error Related Negativity’ ERP component (generated by the anterior cingulate cortex) following errors was significantly correlated with better academic performance as measured by official student transcripts. So here we have a  link between ‘norm violation’ detection and intelligence. Interestingly Dr. Inzlicht seems to understand the effect in terms of motivation: the motivation to correct errors. More on this later.

How might this Anterior Cingulate study relate to Proulx & Heine ’Kafka’ study?  Here is a quote from the paper on meaning compensation:

Several recent studies have suggested that people will also fluidly compensate for meaning threats by affirming unrelated meaning frameworks (e.g., Burris & Rempel, 2004; McGregor et al., 2001; Navarrete, Kurzban, Fessler, & Kirkpatrick, 2004). In response to these studies, we have directly tested and supported the hypothesis that the meaning frameworks people affirm in meaning-maintenance efforts are radically substitutable, such that one meaning framework (e.g., moral beliefs) or another meaning framework (e.g., group affiliation) may be called upon when an unrelated meaning framework (e.g., a perceptual schema) is violated (Proulx & Heine, 2008).

My proposal is that this ‘radical substitutability’ may reflect an underlying normativity learning & self regulating system, that relates to intelligence. When there are threats to meaning (i.e. normativity), this system has a widespread motivational effect on all normatively regulated cognition from perception and grammar all the way up to moral and existential value-systems.