preview

Analysis Of Pyszczynski, Greenberg And Solomon

Decent Essays

The article written by Pyszczynski, Greenberg and Solomon(2000) raised many interesting points, though there are some misinterpretations and misunderstandings of SDT. In the article, they compared SDT with TMT and raised many questions with regard to the omission of self-awareness in SDT, possible conflict between the basic needs in SDT, under-estimation of anxiety in SDT and so on. This article specially aims to respond to how SDT explain dark sides of human nature and the comparison between SDT and TMT. Pyszczynski (2000) questioned the way SDT explained the dark side of human nature. SDT is sufficient for explaining the dark side of human nature: The optimal functioning will be achieved unless all three basic psychological needs …show more content…

It is not the case that the relatedness with intimate others will take away autonomy as suggested in the article. By contrast, in SDT, we suggest these three basic needs are complementary to each other. Then the article compared the TMT with SDT in many aspects. TMT emphasizes the reduction of anxiety with regard to the awareness of the unavoidable death. TMT stresses self awareness and also considers the self awareness as the fundamental reason for human beings to have existential terror. The fear of death prevents human beings from optimal functioning and development. TMT adopted perspectives from mechanistic meta theory and views human beings as passive creatures that strive to deal with the anxiety of the unavoidable death. In the view of TMT, self esteem, cultural worldviews and other concepts serve as methods to defense human begins from the existential terror in order to function normally. In contrast, SDT takes perspectives from mechanistic meta theory which suggests human beings are active creatures that seek experience to satisfy of three basic needs and therefore achieve overall optimal functioning.SDT put more emphasis on the optimal functioning of human beings achieved through the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs. For SDT, the natural tendency refers to the tendency for every living organism to behave or take action in order to satisfy basic psychological needs and thus achieve final

Get Access