ABSURD REALITY: A BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECT OF MEANING THREAT ON THE INTERPRETATION OF UNRELATED WORD PAIRS

Abstract

When situations or objects violate our expectations of the way reality is supposed to operate, certain mental processes step in to alleviate the distress, including a pattern seeking behavior. Would the propensity for pattern seeking in meaning threat translate into behavioral differences in semantic evaluation? Thirty-one participants from an undergraduate population were recruited and completed personality questionnaires. Participants then evaluated 64 sets of related or unrelated word pairs before and after reading either an absurd story by Franz Kafka or a control story. Reaction time and accuracy were recorded for all participants. Results of two 2x2x2 factorial ANOVAs indicated that there were no significant differences between the control and meaning threat groups on reaction time or accuracy. This suggests that even though people were given a story known to cause meaning threat, there seemed to be no effect on behavioral responses.