From Biological Needs to Existential Motives: Meaning, People, & Esteem
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. May 3, 2021
Human beings are animals. For many people that’s a disturbing thought – we’ll talk about why this idea is troubling later. The biological and psychological systems that keep us alive are remarkably similar to those found in other species. This is because human beings evolved through a long process of natural selection that resulted in adaptations that initially emerged in other species long before our kind existed. Natural selection provided our species and all other animals a set of biological needs that motivate behavior aimed at staying alive, which of course is necessary for having sex and producing offspring that carry on one’s genes. All animals are motivated to procure the basic necessities of life (food, water, warmth, safety) that enable them to stay alive long enough to mate with other members of its species, because, in the distant past, these tendencies increased the likelihood that its ancestors passed on the genes responsible for these motives.
In this essay, we will consider how natural selection led to some uniquely human ways of meeting those biological needs—adaptations that set off a cascade of developments that led to a new and different type of animal. In particular, we’ll focus on the transition from biological needs to existential motives—needs that result from the uniquely human awareness of the facts of life, or the “givens” of existence. This awareness gives rise to an entirely new set of needs and desires that go far beyond the simple necessities of life.
Three uniquely human adaptations
The opening segment of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” is titled “The dawn of man,” and symbolizes early hominids making the evolutionary leap in cognitive abilities that sparked their incredible technological and cultural advances.
Though we humans are similar to other animals in many ways, natural selection endowed us with a set of sophisticated cognitive abilities that sets us apart from all other living things. In particular, we have the capacity for symbolic thought — to make one arbitrary thing stand for another — which is the essential building block for language. This opens the door to meanings, communication, and possibilities far beyond that of any other species.
We also have the capacity for mental time travel. We can think back to what happened a short time ago and use that to predict what is likely to happen in the near future; we use this capacity for future-oriented thought to guide our behavior toward making good things more likely and bad things less likely. We can also project ourselves into the more distant future and imagine things that have never existed. We can then use our sophisticated intellect to concoct actions to turn these figments of our imagination into reality, changing the world in ways that shape the lives of both ourselves and others.
Perhaps most importantly, we have the capacity for self-awareness, or self-reflective thought. We are aware of our own existence as unique beings, distinct from other people and anything else in the universe. We not only experience things that happen to us, but we reflect on our experiences, evaluate them, and attach meanings to them. When we reflect on ourselves, we compare our current state with what we desire or aspire to, which sets in motion a suite of processes oriented toward getting us where we want to go.
These uniquely human intellectual capacities — for symbolic thought, mental time travel, and self-awareness — each played important roles in the system through which we regulate our behavior and gave rise to a new kind of animal: homo sapiens sapiens; literally, the wise ones. Although, just like other animals, we need and actively pursue that which biologically sustains our lives, our cognitive sophistication gives us much more flexibility in how we pursue these things. These abilities enable us to adapt to a much broader range of ecological niches and all the variation in them that occur over time. Indeed, Ernest Becker (1971), a cultural anthropologist who had a profound impact on modern existential psychology, argued that the cognitive sophistication which facilitated this adaptive ecological flexibility may have been the most important evolutionary development in the emergence of the human as an animal unmistakably distinct from all other living things.
Meaning: From biological needs to cultural abstractions
Armed with these cognitive abilities, this new breed of animal set out to understand the workings of the world in which it lived. It sought explanations for how and why things happen, so it could use these explanations to guide and direct its behavior to meet its needs. It developed “theories of reality” that explained how to find food, stay warm, avoid predators, and live peacefully and productively with other humans. The capacity for language made it possible to codify these understandings and communicate them with other humans, ultimately leading to shared understandings that were passed down across generations, as cultural patterns that made it easier to meet their biological and psychological needs.
These cultural worldviews are repositories of knowledge that people draw on to navigate the challenges and opportunities of life. Of course, the knowledge contained in cultural worldviews changes over time, and most (but not all) of the ways today’s humans understand the world are dramatically different from the ways early humans did. But, like our ancestors, we all filter our own experiences through our cultural worldviews to understand the workings of the world, which then guides our behavior toward things that meet our needs and away from things that thwart them.
Clockwise from top left: During Ramadan, Muslims break their fast at a nightly meal called Iftar; a modern couple is out on a date; Christians symbolize communion with the “body of Christ” by eating sacramental bread and wine; a couple celebrating their marriage in a traditional Indian wedding.
Unlike any other animal (at least any that we know of), the things we want and need in life are imbued with meanings provided by our cultural worldviews. Like other animals, we need food, water, warmth, and connections with other members of our species in order to survive and reproduce. But our worldviews assign abstract meanings to these necessities that go far beyond what is relevant to meeting our basic needs. For example, food becomes more than just a source of nutrition and is imbued with values and taboos that have nothing to do with its inherent function of sustaining life. Specific edible commodities take on value because they signify social status (or the lack thereof), as well as ethnic, religious, and national identities. Foods considered taboo or disgusting in some cultures (beef in India, pork in much of the Middle East, insects in the United States) are considered delicacies in others. Cultures also imbue sex with meaning, transforming an act that is pursued by all but the very simplest of animals into a sign of transcendent love, a symbol of power, an experience of degradation, or a pathway to spiritual enlightenment. Cultures provide rules regarding how and when particular foods are to be prepared and with whom and under what circumstances sex is appropriate or immoral. The point here is that everything that people do, even things that meet the most basic biological needs they share with other animals, involves the pursuit of meaning and value that transcends the basic biological functions of these behaviors. We live our lives in a world of ideas, concepts, and values, that are ultimately products of human intelligence, imagination, and creativity.
People: Cultural appraisals of others and the social validation of reality
This tendency to assign abstract meaning and value also extends to the people who inhabit our world, including ourselves. Like our primate ancestors and many other species, we are social animals, who depend heavily on other humans for most of what we need and want in life. But we are also cultural animals, who imbue other people and ourselves with meaning and value. At the most basic level, these meanings provide information useful in meeting our biological needs — who is most likely to be a good person to cooperate with or avoid in our quest for nutrition, safety, sex, and the other necessities of life.
We often congratulate other people on a job well done when they meet or exceed relevant cultural standards of value.
But our cultures assign shades of meaning and value to everyone in our lives. We evaluate people relative to the standards of value provided by our cultural worldviews. We admire those who meet or exceed those values and denigrate those who fall short. Our cultures provide a vast array of these standards for attributes such as physical attractiveness, strength, power, intelligence, and morality, as well as more specific aspects of each of these valued features. Cultures also differentiate people in terms of the specific roles they play in life and attach value and status to those roles.
Beyond helping us meet our basic needs, other people fulfill another extremely important uniquely human function. They help us construct and validate the meanings that are so central to our existence. Most of what we know about life we learn from other people, sometimes through direct communication via our linguistic abilities, sometimes by simply observing what they do and say. The beliefs and values of our cultural worldviews are learned through interaction with other people: parents, peers, teachers, leaders, and even fictional characters invented to convey important cultural meanings.
We also rely on other people to validate our private perceptions, beliefs, values, and experiences. When other people share our experiences or ideas, they consensually validate our experience of reality which increases our confidence that we’re correctly and objectively apprehending the world as it is. When other people view things differently, it undermines our certainty. In these ways, our understanding of the world in which we live is filtered through the culture in which we live, which is communicated to us and either validated or called into question by other people. Other people are essential sources of the meanings and values that are central to all aspects of our lives.
Self-esteem: Cultural evaluations of ourselves
Just as we develop fine-grained concepts of other people and evaluate them relative to cultural standards, we do the same for ourselves. The resulting self-knowledge is used to direct us toward some goals and activities, and away from others. Indeed, our self-concept is the cornerstone of the system that we use to regulate our behavior. Whenever we turn attention inward and become self-aware, we compare ourselves with these standards. Our emotional reactions to these evaluations motivate us to do whatever we can to meet or exceed these standards (Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklund, 1972).
How we fare in comparisons with these internalized cultural standards determines our self-esteem, the feeling that we are valuable contributors to a meaningful universe. High self-esteem is associated with happiness, health, and well-being. Low self-esteem is associated with virtually every form of psychological dysfunction, including anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and posttraumatic stress disorder (Pyszczynski et al., 2004). Though people in different cultures pursue self-esteem in different ways, because attaining it depends on living up to the standards of one’s own cultural worldview, the need for self-esteem is universal.
Indeed, the pursuit of self-esteem can be thought of as a master motive that plays a role in virtually everything we do. Because of the meanings and values that cultures place on all aspects of life, virtually everything people do has the potential to impact their self-esteem. And research shows that the pursuit of self-esteem plays a role in an incredibly wide range of behaviors (Pyszczynski et al., 2004). The self-esteem motive fuels the pursuit of things obviously related to one’s sense of personal value, such as success in academics, athletics, financial dealings, and most other aspects of life. It is also a driving force in our relationships with others: we like those who help us feel good about ourselves and dislike those who make us feel inferior. Even subtle slights that imply a lack of respect can set us spinning and ruin interactions or relationships with others. The pursuit of self-esteem also drives behavior in less obvious ways. People help others because it makes them feel good about their generosity; they favor politicians who make them feel good about their nationality; they buy products that make them feel proud of their good taste; they affiliate with causes that make them proud of their virtue. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of anything people do that isn’t affected by the need for self-esteem.
The worm at the core: Existential concerns about death
Clockwise from top left: Ernest Becker; The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971); The Denial of Death (1973); and Escape from Evil (1974).
But why do people need self-esteem? And why are abstract meanings, that go beyond the functional utility of the things that meet our needs, so important? These are the questions that led Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and I to develop terror management theory (TMT) in the mid-1980s (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986). We were inspired by a series of books written by a cultural anthropologist, called Ernest Becker, including The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), The Denial of Death (1973), and Escape from Evil (1974). In these landmark volumes, he sought to bring together ideas from a diverse array of disciplines to explain what sets humankind apart from other animals, what drives their relentless pursuit of meaning and self-esteem, and how these needs influenced our species over the course of history—and how they continue to influence our lives today. Becker’s ideas provided answers to questions we didn’t even know we had and filled in the blanks regarding many things we felt were missing from empirically oriented psychology when we were embarking on our academic careers. TMT was our attempt to distill Becker’s ideas into a simpler set of propositions that would be amenable to rigorous empirical testing and integrate his thinking with ideas central to social, cognitive, developmental, and personality psychology.
Becker argued that although the human intellectual abilities that we’ve been discussing in this article are extremely adaptive because they provide immense flexibility to human behavior, thereby making it possible for our species to do things far beyond the capacities of even our closest primate relatives, they also lead to some uniquely human problems. The most basic problematic consequence of human intelligence is that it leads to an awareness that death is inevitable and can come at any time in a multitude of disturbing ways. This awareness of our mortality is an immense problem for a species that, like all others, evolved a diverse array of biological and psychological systems that function to keep it alive long enough to reproduce and propagate its genes on to future generation. This juxtaposition of awareness of the inevitability of death with powerful motives oriented toward staying alive create the potential for existential terror, an overwhelming fear that is both extremely aversive and capable of disrupting the goal-directed behavior necessary to sustain life.
Of course, there is ultimately nothing that can be done to solve the problem of death. It is an unalterable fact of life that everything that lives must someday die. But our ancestors used the same sophisticated intellectual abilities that made them aware of the problem of death to invent ways of managing the terror to which this awareness gave rise. The potential for terror profoundly influenced the ideas that early humans were developing to understand their world. Ideas that detoxified death were especially appealing, likely to be shared with others, spread within communities, and eventually institutionalized as central aspects of cultural worldviews. But how can mere ideas make knowledge of the inevitability of death more tolerable?
Why cultural meaning systems and self-esteem are so important
The human “solution” to the problem of death is to imbue life with cosmic significance and our own lives with enduring value that transcends this most disturbing fact of life. This type of meaning goes beyond simply understanding how and why things happen in the world – what is sometime referred to as epistemic meaning -- that functions to guide the concrete aspects of goal-oriented behavior. Existential meaning makes awareness of the inevitability of death tolerable by assuring us that human life matters because it is part of an eternal grand cosmic scheme of things and that we matter because we are important contributors to this enduring reality. Viewing ourselves as valuable contributors to a meaningful and eternal cosmic reality detoxifies the impermanence of death by giving us hope for two distinct but related types of permanence.
Clockwise from top right: Self-portrait with Death playing the fiddle (1872), by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin; a Bible study group holding hands in prayer; The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015); and Lebron James with his NBA championship trophies, MVP trophies, and Olympic medals.
Literal immortality is the belief that our conscious existence will continue after we die, in an afterlife of some sort. Literal immortality is central to religious aspects of cultural worldviews and takes different forms in different cultures. Concepts of heaven, paradise, reincarnation, nirvana, spirits, and souls all function to assure us that our lives do not end when we physically die. This usually entails viewing oneself as having an underlying ethereal essence – a soul, spirit, or mind – that transcends one’s body and continues to exist after one dies. Variations on these concepts are found in all cultures and the vast majority of human beings, past and present, use beliefs such as these as part of their shield against existential terror. These attempts to construe ourselves as beings who continue to exist after we die lead us to make a sharp differentiation between our ethereal essence and our bodies, and distance ourselves from our animal nature and even be repulsed and disgusted when we perceive similarities between ourselves and other animals (Goldenberg et al., 2000).
From the perspective of TMT, these beliefs are the products of human creativity, put to work to solve an otherwise intractable problem of life. Importantly, most religions that have stood the test of time teach that only those who have absolute faith in their beliefs and live up to the values of that faith qualify for a blissful afterlife; those who lose faith or whose behavior violates these teachings either cease to exist after death or are consigned to a horrific afterlife consisting of the worst things our minds can imagine. Components of our cultural worldviews focused on literal immortality encourage beliefs that conform to cultural teachings and behavior that conforms to cultural values by making one’s fate after death contingent on such fealty.
Symbolic immortality is the sense that one is a valuable contributor to something greater than oneself that will continue on after one has died. By being part of a family, ethnic group, nation, or congregation of believers, people feel that some part of them will continue to exist after they have died. They can live on in the memories of the members of their groups, or even better, leave tangible contributions to the group behind after they have passed. It might be a great novel, work of art, scientific theory, or something more mundane like a trophy, picture, or other memento. As social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) maintains, the groups to which we belong are important parts of our identity and self-esteem. The concept of symbolic immortality helps explain why group identities are so important: by merging with groups that exist beyond our own lifespan, we can continue to exist through our contributions to these entities that transcend the limits of our individual existence.
The existential reality transcends the biological one
TMT has implications for understanding many aspects of life and this essay only scratchs the surface of the many ideas that follow from this way of thinking. For an accessible overview of the diverse implications of these ideas, I suggest The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015). My focus here has been on how the evolution of uniquely human sophisticated intellectual abilities changed the very nature of our species, creating an animal that lives its life in a world of ideas that transcends physical reality and the biological needs that we share with other animals. This abstract world of ideas helps us meet our biological needs and keeps us alive. But these products of human imagination and creativity also help us cope with the disturbing knowledge of death that is an inevitable consequence of our cognitive sophistication.
Tom Pyszczynski is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Dr. Pyszczynski's research is focused primarily on terror management theory, which he developed with his colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon. Terror management theory is concerned with the role of self-esteem and cultural belief systems in providing protection against core human fears, especially the fear of death. Over the years Professor Pyszczynski and colleagues have explored the role of terror management processes in a wide range of topics, including self-esteem, self-deception, prejudice, interpersonal relations, altruism, aggression, sexual ambivalence, disgust, depression, anxiety disorders, trauma, unconscious processes, aging, human development, and terrorism. He has also conducted research on how people fool themselves into believing that their biased views follow logically from the available facts and on the role of self-regulatory processes in depression and other psychological disorders.