Reactive Approach Motivation RAM a psychological science concept

Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM ; McGregor, 2006) refers to the way people deal with anxiety producing threats by becoming extremely zealous, which reduces the anxiety caused by the threat.

The zealous pursuit focuses on an ideal that offers hope and strength, bolsters values and convictions. People are motivated to become closed minded. They may increase religious fervor or political extremism depending on their value system.

RAM is based on the neuropsychology of anxiety. Anxiety rises in situations of uncertainty. RAM proposes that people deal with anxious uncertainty by ardently pursuing meaningful goals. When anxious, people become more vigilant and prepare for fight or flight responses.

Example

People with travel plans during the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic anxiously searched online for information about the virus, government announcements, and travel news. Many zealously warned of the growing extent of the flu. Others tried to encourage people with religious messages. Some sought financial safety by selling their shares in businesses. Others focused on repeating messages about washing hands and avoiding social contact. Even the hand washing was couched in religious language as "Holy Hygiene."

Related concepts /  posts

Terror Management Theory

Meaning Maintenance Model



Reference

McGregor, I. (2006). Offensive defensiveness: Toward an integrative neuroscience of compensatory zeal after mortality salience, personal uncertainty, and other poignant self-threats. Psychological Inquiry, 17(4), 299–308. https://doi.org/10.1080/10478400701366977

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Meaning Maintenance Model MMM Psychological Science

The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) hypothesizes that people are motivated to respond to experiences that violate their expectations by restoring meaning. MMM is associated with Heine, Proulx, and Vohs (2006).

Meaning occurs when people connect their experiences in memory. We understand the concept of a healthy meal when we mentally connect the various foods that our culture teaches us belong together to form a healthy meal. We may laugh when a cartoonist violates the concept of a healthy meal by picturing different kinds of chocolates. The concept, healthy meal, is a unit of meaning. Psychologists have referred to these mental concepts as schema.

The concept of meaning may be traced to existential philosophers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Albert Camus. Psychological scientists examine meaning by looking at the way people link experiences.  Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969) was an English psychologist at Cambridge University who developed schema theory. Schema are mental organizations of knowledge gained from experience within one's culture. 

Larger organizational sets are called worldviews. Worldviews organize many schema into an orientation to life. Some writers refer to worldviews as meaning frameworks. Outside of psychology, some disciplines write about seeing the world through different lenses.

Meaning can be violated when a new experience cannot be explained or understood as a part of a person's existing schema. On a larger scale, the experience does not make sense in terms of a person's worldview. When faced with experiences that do not "make sense," people work to restore meaning. Sometimes this work can impact other aspects of thinking, which seem unrelated to the experience.

Examples

For years, Europeans only saw white swans, but black swans exist. An easy modification of a schema for "swan" adds the knowledge that swans can be either black or white. 

Some cultures have schema for the way women and men ought to dress and behave. When people violate the expectations, those with traditional schema work to make sense of the new experience. 

A common example of a worldview is a person's religion, which includes a large set of schema about God or supernatural beings and how the supernatural and natural worlds interact. When significant experiences violate one's understanding of the way the world works, people seek answers from their religious leaders, modify their beliefs, change their religion, or give up on religion altogether.

Following is a quote from the abstract by Heine and his colleagues (2006). See their article for details on the model.

"The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a need for meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termed fluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are different from the domain in which the threat occurred. Evidence for fluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psychological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. People respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate and maintain a sense of meaning."

The Meaning Maintenance Model has been proposed as an alternative to Terror Management Theory.

Heine, S., Proulx, T., & Vohs, K. (2006). The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the coherence of social motivation. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 10, 88-111.

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Anxiety Buffer

An anxiety buffer is a concept in Terror Management Theory. When faced with reminders of death (mortality salience), people develop ways to manage the resulting anxiety. People buffer themselves in different ways according to those values that are highly meaningful to them and those available when under threat. 

Religion is one of the most common and nearly universal ways people buffer themselves against this type of anxiety.

See also

Terror Management Theory (TMT)

Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM)

Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM)

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Terror Management Theory

Terror Management Theory (TMT) was proposed by psychological scientists Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski. 

The theory posits that people manage the terror inherent in their awareness of their own death by investing in that which is more durable. They experience conflict between the instinctual urge to live and the reality of death.

Research findings indicate that when people are reminded of their mortality (Mortality Salience, MS), they create or use an anxiety buffer. Becoming a part of a meaningful group helps cope with death awareness.

Many religious teachings guide people to "life after life," which in itself is a phrase that omits the more common, "life after death." Others find meaning in their children and grandchildren, the possessions they leave behind, and contributions to their nations.

Terror Management Theory is related to self-esteem. Many people assess their self-esteem or self-worth by a comparison to their culture's way of defining worth.

Here is a quote from the theorists' 2015 summary of research.


Terror management theory posits that human awareness of the inevitability of death exerts a profound influence on diverse aspects of human thought, emotion, motivation, and behavior. People manage the potential for anxiety that results from this awareness by maintaining: (1) faith in the absolute validity of their cultural worldviews and (2) self-esteem by living up to the standards of value that are part of their worldviews. In this chapter, we take stock of the past 30 years of research and conceptual development inspired by this theory. After a brief review of evidence supporting the theory's fundamental propositions, we discuss extensions of the theory to shed light on: (1) the psychological mechanisms through which thoughts of death affect subsequent thought and behavior; (2) how the anxiety-buffering systems develop over childhood and beyond; (3) how awareness of death influenced the evolution of mind, culture, morality, and religion; (4) how death concerns lead people to distance from their physical bodies and seek solace in concepts of mind and spirit; and (5) the role of death concerns in maladaptive and pathological behavior. (Abstract)


One recent root of TMT can be found in the book, The Denial of Death by cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker. Becker draws on earlier work about death anxiety. See my review (Sutton, 2015) for quotes from Becker's book and applications to religion.

Related posts

Worldview

References

Pyszczynski, T., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., & Schimel, J. (2004). Why Do People Need Self-Esteem? A Theoretical and Empirical Review. Psychological Bulletin, 130(3), 435–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.3.435

Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S. & Greenberg, J. (2015). Thirty Years of Terror

Management Theory: From Genesis to Revelation. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zarna (Eds). Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 1-70. 

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