Chapter 11 May: Existential Psychology 349managing morality awareness. These researchers had home team hockey fans com-
plete an empathy scale and then the fans were reminded of death. Next they read
about a player either on the home team, or rival team, who committed aggressive
fouls during a game. Mortality salience always led to forgiveness of the home team
player, of course, but, among the more empathic fans, it also led to greater forgive-
ness of the opposing team player.
Yet further studies have shown that our most direct encounters with death are
especially prone to lead us toward pro-social and personal growth goals (recall the
discussion of research on post-traumatic growth and OVP in the Rogers chapter).
Vail and colleagues (2012) believe this is because such encounters mix both con-
scious and nonconscious terror management processes. Individuals who suffer
trauma or the death of a loved one often must reconstruct the “death denying system
of meaning” they previously held, shifting away from selfish, and toward more
growth-oriented, existential understandings of their world. In this way, existentialists
like Rollo May were surely right to emphasize the ironic truth that death can be
psychically good for life.
Critique of May
Existentialism in general and May’s psychology in particular have been criticized
as being anti-intellectual and antitheoretical. May acknowledged the claim that his
views did not conform to the traditional concept of theory, but he staunchly
defended his psychology against the charge of being anti-intellectual or antiscien-
tific. He pointed to the sterility of conventional scientific methods and their inabil-
ity to unlock the ontological character of willing, caring, and acting human beings.
May held that a new scientific psychology must recognize such human char-
acteristics as uniqueness, personal freedom, destiny, phenomenological experi-
ences, and especially our capacity to relate to ourselves as both object and subject.
A new science of humans must also include ethics. “The actions of living, self-
aware human beings are never automatic, but involve some weighing of conse-
quences, some potentiality for good or ill” (May, 1967, p. 199).
Until this new science acquires greater maturity, we must evaluate May’s
views by the same criteria used for each of the other personality theorists. First,
have May’s ideas generated scientific research? May did not formulate his views
in a theoretical structure, and a paucity of hypotheses is suggested by his writings.
Some research, such as Jeff Greenberg and associates’ investigations on terror
management, relates generally to existential psychology, but these studies do not
specifically flow from May’s theory. On this first criterion of a useful theory,
therefore, May’s existential psychology receives a very low score.
Second, can May’s ideas be verified or falsified? Again, existential psychol-
ogy in general and May’s theory in particular must be rated very low on this
criterion. The theory is too amorphous to suggest specific hypotheses that could
either confirm or disconfirm its major concepts.
Third, does May’s philosophically oriented psychology help organize what is
currently known about human nature? On this criterion, May would receive an aver-
age rating. Compared with most theorists discussed in this book, May has more closely