Research links open-minded core beliefs to higher death anxiety
Hope College psychologist Daryl Van Tongeren says openness to revising core beliefs can aid tolerance but may carry psychological costs.
By Sofia Marchetti · World Affairs Correspondent
3 min read
Being willing to rethink life’s biggest questions may make people more tolerant, but research cited by Hope College psychologist Daryl Van Tongeren links that openness to higher anxiety about death and a weaker sense of meaning. Van Tongeren, writing for The Conversation, calls the trait “existential humility”: readiness to revise core convictions when new evidence warrants it.
Van Tongeren said many people see themselves as open-minded, yet resist questioning beliefs tied to religion, morality, identity and life’s purpose. He argued that such resistance is not only stubbornness; decades of psychology research, he wrote, suggest that deeply held beliefs help people feel secure in a confusing world.
Worldviews and certainty
Psychologists describe broad systems of belief as worldviews, according to Van Tongeren. He said those systems connect everyday opinions with larger convictions about who people are, what gives life meaning and what counts as right or wrong.
Van Tongeren wrote that people often assume others who are thoughtful will see the world as they do. That assumption can make challenges to core beliefs feel destabilizing, especially when a small doubt seems to threaten a larger structure of meaning.
In his account, certainty has a psychological use. Belief in an afterlife, for example, can reduce fear of death because it rejects the idea that death ends existence, Van Tongeren wrote, citing research on religion and mortality anxiety.
What the studies found
In 2022, Van Tongeren and colleagues asked research participants to consider existential topics and describe what they believed. The participants also rated how committed they were to those beliefs and how open they were to changing them.
The researchers then measured anxiety and well-being, including participants’ reported sense of meaning and purpose, and the extent to which they drew peace from religion, according to Van Tongeren. He said the work covered several groups, including college students, adults and people making significant changes to their religious beliefs.
Across those studies, Van Tongeren reported, greater existential humility was associated with higher anxiety about death and a lower sense of meaning in life. He said the findings point to a trade-off between the comfort of conviction and the social value of openness.
The trade-off
Van Tongeren framed the issue as a tension between two motivations: certainty and curiosity. Certainty can provide safety and purpose, he wrote, but it can also foster intolerance when people treat disagreement as a threat.
Curiosity, by contrast, can keep people open to new evidence and other viewpoints, according to Van Tongeren. He said that openness can support tolerance and generosity, while also making uncertainty harder to bear.
Van Tongeren argued that existential humility can benefit relationships and communities, even when it carries personal discomfort. He said practicing it requires learning to tolerate unease while holding beliefs with awareness that they could be mistaken.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.