ERNEST BECKER AND THE SCIENCE OF EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Dr. Kenneth Vail is a professor at Cleveland State University, and director of the Social Psychology & Existential Attitudes Research (SPEAR) Laboratory. He completed his BA in psychology at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and his MA and PhD at the University of Missouri. Dr. Vail’s research is focused on existential psychology, including the consequences of humans’ awareness of their own mortality, autonomy, and choice freedom, and the influence of these concerns on cultural activity (e.g., politics, religion), personal growth, and both physical health (e.g., nutrition, carcinogenic behavior) and mental health (e.g., PTSD). Dr. Vail won the APS Rising Star Award (Association for Psychological Science), and various other awards (e.g., Outstanding Research; Golden Apple Award; Outstanding Teaching; Merit Awards) for his research, teaching, mentoring, and service across a variety of domains. Dr. Vail is also a founder and President of the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology.

How did Becker’s work lay the foundation for the field of Terror Management Theory? 

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Ernest Becker brought together ideas from anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines, trying to get a better understanding of why we humans do the things we do. Throughout his works – e.g., The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), The Denial of Death (1973), and Escape from Evil (1974) – he argued that the concept of mortality constitutes a core existential threat which fundamentally animates all sorts of cultural efforts to achieve the psychological goal of restoring a death-denying sense of literal and/or symbolic permanence.

A few years later, in the late 1970s, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon met in the experimental social psychology doctoral program at the University of Kansas. They each shared an interest in better understanding the fundamental motivations of human behavior – from the motivation to protect and enhance one’s self-esteem to the motivation to engage in inter-group/inter-cultural conflict. But although they could document and observe these motivated behaviors in their lab studies, they didn’t yet have a compelling idea about where these motivations were coming from. Then, in the early 1980s, they stumbled upon Becker’s books, and suddenly they had a set of ideas that could explain why people strive for self-esteem and why they sometimes have such a difficult time getting along with other cultures.

Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon began to distill Becker’s claims into terms that would be familiar to fellow social psychologists, derived a variety of testable hypotheses from Becker’s central thesis, and at the 1984 meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) they began introducing these testable formulations of Becker’s ideas as terror management theory (TMT). Initially, TMT was greeted with some rather skeptical responses. But the trio began conducting rigorous experiments on the ideas and before long had amassed a growing body of evidence. Flash forward nearly 40 years, and today evidence for the validity of Becker’s ideas – as they appear in TMT – has been observed in over 1,500 studies conducted in dozens of countries and on every continent, making it one of the most well-validated theoretical perspectives in social psychology.

What is the “science of existential psychology,” and how does it apply to everyday life?

Existentialists such as Becker – as well as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others – argued that the human phenomenological experience is profoundly shaped by the challenge of authentic living in a world where we know that we die and where meaning and purpose are often little more than arbitrary human constructions. The science of existential psychology applies the latest methods of psychological science to systematically study whether and how such core issues of “being” and “becoming” impact social and mental functioning, including: Concerns about life and death, and the awareness of mortality; the challenges of authentic vs. inauthentic choices/actions; experiential isolation and a sense of shared reality; culture, self, and identity; meaning and purpose in life; religion and spirituality; and occasions for personal growth. Researchers in this field use a variety of tools, including correlational methods (is one variable systematically associated with another?), longitudinal methods (any changes across the lifespan?), or even experimental designs where researchers intentionally manipulate a variable to observe its causal impact on various psychological processes and social functioning.

A careful examination of these deeper human experiences, in these ways, has the potential to improve our understanding of how we think, feel, and behave, and can even improve our understanding of the broader sociocultural systems that set the stage for our day-to-day lives. Studies in this field can help us more completely understand why we humans oftentimes care so much about doing things like contributing to our communities, creating art, building hospitals, teaching students, starting businesses, playing sports, raising families, fighting wars, striving toward peace; or why we believe in souls, gods, and afterlives; or why we worry about whether we’re being our “true,” authentic selves.

Tell us about ISSEP – what inspired you to create it and what’s in store for the future?

The science of existential psychology began taking shape in the 1980s and grew throughout the 1990s. In 2001, researchers held an International Conference on Experimental Existential Psychology in Amsterdam, which led to a Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology (2004) and a highly visible paper describing the new field in the journal Current Directions in Psychology Science (Koole, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2006). Since then, the field has boomed – with a mountain of emerging research articles and books, formal university courses and training programs, and an ever-growing number of researchers studying existential psychological topics around the world.

So, to help organize this growing field, we founded the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology (issep.org) in 2019, with the overarching mission to encourage and support the scientific discovery, communication, and application of key research findings in existential psychology. Since then, the ISSEP has been providing a variety of supports, including: conference events for professionals in the field; pedagogical resources to advance teaching/learning; grant funding to support research studies; annual award programs to recognize notable contributions to the field; and digital publications of articles and interviews that illustrate how existential psychological theory and research can help us better understand important human experiences, events, art, and culture. In the coming years, the ISSEP will be continuing those existing programs and activities, and we hope to expand our impact by also funding additional programs to support more cross-cultural, international, and interdisciplinary work.