It’s All About Significance: A Reframing in Response to Commentaries

We appreciated our commentators ’ insights and the time they took in reflecting on our target article “ People who need people. ” Their remarks and analyses prompted us to re-think the issues at hand and re-consider the best way to understand the ample data that our model attempted to integrate. The “ heat ” of this discussion has engendered some welcome “ light, ” yielding an insight we are excited about. It produced a theoretical reframing in which our prior distinction between agency versus assistance is replaced by another central concept, the striving for personal significance (see Kruglanski et al., in press). In the present response to commentaries, we explain the rationale for this reframing and its fit to relevant empirical findings. Central to our discussion is people ’ s perception of their social worth, the conditions for its rise and fall, and its downstream consequences for people ’ s attitudes toward others.