We are made,not born: Empiricism is existentially useful

The perennial “nativist-empiricist” debate in developmental science has far-reaching relevance in our existence. Two studies conducted under the terror management framework tested whether the empiricist developmental conception serves distal defensive purposes. Experiment 1 highlights the palliative existential effect of the empiricist conception since participants who read an empiricist essay exhibited less death thoughts than participants who read a nativist essay or a control essay. Experiment 2 gives support to the distal defensive function of the empiricist conception by showing that, unlike with the nativist or the control essay, people under mortality salience exhibited a higher need to rely on empiricism than participants in the control pain condition. The existential advantage of empiricism is explained by the fact that human development is shaped by a meaningful cultural blueprint. Our results are discussed in terms of the ontological and existential benefits of contemplating human intrinsic identity, ranging from its biology to its social behaviors as primarily influenced by the cultural environment.