COMMENTARY ON “THE MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL: ON THE COHERENCE OF SOCIAL MOTIVATIONS”

Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) was proposed by Heine, Proulx, and Vohs (2006) in the article named “The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations”. Additionally, writers were interested in four different motivations and suggested MMM as the underlying motivation among them. However, there is a questionable point in the article. The authors actually selected meaning maintenance motivation as the primary motivation, while it is still possible to select another one as the primary. Thus, questions related with the primary motivation claim are needed to be examined. Is meaning maintenance a primary motive? Is there any other triggering mechanism for meaning maintenance? Or is it possible to track the supports for meaning maintenance as demonstrating another mechanism? In this paper, specifically, the aim is to analyze the claim of ‘basic motivation’ made by Heine, Proulx, and Vohs (2006) from a different perspective within literature about uncertainty reduction.