During my years as a Ph.D. student, I found myself for the first time in a familiar routine. For four years, my life settled into a predictable rhythm—weekly meetings with my supervisor, seminars to attend, research projects to juggle, students to teach. Even my personal life found its groove: Sunday apartment cleaning, Tuesday meal prep, Thursday laundry cycles.
It was steady, purposeful work—not exciting, not stressful, just the consistent effort required to maintain my standing. I wasn’t racing to the end or anxiously avoiding failure. I was simply focused on keeping pace.
Yet my studies on human motivation at the time showed that this fundamental daily experience had no place in psychological theory. The field recognized two types of goals: approach goals that drive us toward positive outcomes, and avoidance goals that push us away from negative ones. You either wanted to achieve something or prevent something. There was no category for what I was actually doing—working steadily to maintain what I already had.
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This omission puzzled me. How could psychology overlook something so basic about human behavior? We constantly work to maintain our health, preserve our relationships, keep our jobs stable, sustain our communities. Yet our theories of motivation had no language for this essential human drive.
This gap in psychological theory turns out to have profound implications for understanding political behavior. My research initially confirmed what political theorists had long observed: Conservatives showed significantly stronger support for maintenance-oriented messages across three countries.
But then contemporary American politics turned this theory upside down. The very people who should be most motivated to preserve existing systems became the most eager to tear them down. This reversal has ignited a new investigation: testing whether the same institutional threats drive conservatives toward protection and liberals toward progress.
The invisible third motivation
Approach motivation drives us toward rewards—we work to gain something positive. Avoidance motivation pushes us away from threats—we act to prevent something negative. But what about the equally powerful drive to preserve what we already have?
This missing piece led me to develop what I call the ternary goal model, which recognizes maintenance goals as a distinct third category. Maintenance motivation isn’t about gaining or losing—it’s about actively preserving existing states. When we work to maintain our health through regular exercise, sustain a relationship through consistent attention, or keep a job through reliable performance, we’re pursuing maintenance goals.
As I started to become interested in political psychology, I found that maintenance as a basic motivation was missing there, too. For decades, researchers observed that conservative individuals appeared more motivated by avoidance than approach. They seemed more inclined to experience threat than the lure of possible reward. But this characterization—as either motivated to avoid or to approach—neglects an important aspect of how political theorists understand conservatism.
Political theory recognizes that conservative ideology centers on preservation—maintaining traditional institutions, sustaining cultural values, preserving social stability. This isn’t about avoiding threats; it’s about actively maintaining something valuable that already exists. Conservatives aren’t primarily motivated by fear of change—they’re motivated by commitment to preservation.
The problem was that psychology had no framework for this type of motivation. We were trying to squeeze maintenance-oriented behavior into avoidance-oriented explanations, creating a fundamental mismatch between psychological theory and political reality.
What I discovered about political maintenance
To test my theory, I used machine learning to analyze the motivational orientation of political messaging across three countries: the United States, Germany, and Belgium. Using sentence-level semantic embeddings, I trained models to detect the underlying motivational orientations expressed in political text—whether passages reflected approach-oriented thinking, avoidance-oriented thinking, or maintenance-oriented thinking.
Next, I presented participants with various political texts and measured their degree of support for each message. I tested whether conservatives and liberals showed different patterns of support based on the goal orientations embedded in those texts.
The results were striking. Conservative participants across all three countries showed significantly stronger support for maintenance-oriented political messages compared to their liberal counterparts.
But here’s what was even more revealing: Avoidance-oriented messages did not lead to greater support among conservatives. In fact—when the topic was environmentalism—protection-oriented framing actually led to less support among conservative participants. Conservative support wasn’t about avoiding negative outcomes—it was about preserving positive ones.
This finding aligns perfectly with broader theories of conservatism that emphasize the value of stability, tradition, and institutional continuity. For the first time, we had psychological language that matched what political scientists had long observed about conservative ideology. The pattern seemed stable and predictable: Conservatives favor maintenance.
But then the reality of contemporary politics entered the picture.
When maintenance fails: the crisis of American conservatism
Beginning around 2016, something unprecedented started happening in American politics. The party traditionally associated with “law and order” and institutional stability began embracing disruption. Conservative politicians and voters started calling for the dismantling of government institutions, rejecting established democratic norms, and explicitly advocating for political upheaval.
Recent polling captures this reversal in stark terms: 53% of Americans indicated that they prefer major change and a “shock to the system,” while only 37% favored a return to stability. More puzzling still, this shift appears most pronounced among conservative voters. The very people who should be most motivated to preserve existing systems have become the most eager to tear them down.
How could my research have been so wrong? Had I misunderstood something fundamental about political motivation?
The psychology of maintenance crisis
The answer, I came to suspect, lies in understanding what happens when maintenance goals can no longer be satisfied within existing structures. When people feel that institutions have fundamentally failed—that they can no longer maintain the social order they value—maintenance motivation doesn’t simply disappear. Instead, it transforms.
If you believe the current system is so broken that it cannot be repaired, then maintaining it becomes counterproductive. Suddenly, disruption isn’t the opposite of maintenance; it’s the only path toward it. Rather than holding on to existing systems, this response centers on opposition—opposing the people, ideas, and changes perceived as obstacles to maintenance. The underlying motivation to preserve what is valued remains genuine, but the strategy becomes reactive rather than constructive.
This transformation is understandable as a human response to threat, but it might be counterproductive for actually achieving the maintenance goals that motivated it in the first place.
Understanding the deeper currents
What appears to be a fundamental shift in conservative ideology may actually represent continuity in underlying motivations expressed through radically different strategies.
All people—conservatives and liberals alike—are motivated to preserve the status quo. This tendency was demonstrated in the classic “inheritance experiment”: Researchers told participants they had inherited money from an uncle and needed to decide how to invest it. One group chose from four investment options. Another group was told their uncle had already invested the money in one option and asked if they wanted to switch. People were much more likely to stick with whatever the uncle had “already chosen”—even though his choice was completely arbitrary.
Similar patterns emerge everywhere: People watch whatever TV channel happens to be on when they turn on the television, employees stick with default retirement contribution rates for years, and one researcher famously documented a colleague who ordered the exact same sandwich for lunch every day for decades.
Even the most progressive individuals have things they want to maintain: relationships, communities, rights they’ve fought to secure. Nevertheless, individuals differ in the degree to which they let maintenance goals guide their political preferences and worldviews.
Finding common ground in uncommon times
Perhaps most intriguingly, liberals and conservatives may respond to the same threats and instability in different ways. In my lab, we’re currently investigating the hypothesis that when failing to maintain valued states, conservatives move toward protection while liberals move toward progress.
For conservatives, an unstable social order calls for resistance to changes that might introduce further uncertainty. For liberals, that same instability signals the need for reform and advancement. Rather than safeguarding against undesirable changes, the liberal response is to bring about desirable change. We’re not mainly interested in testing which of these two approaches is right or wrong; to us as researchers, they represent different strategies for achieving security and well-being in an uncertain world.
So what does this mean for those of us trying to navigate political conversations in our daily lives? How can understanding maintenance psychology help us build bridges across seemingly unbridgeable divides?
It’s essential to recognize that people’s current political behavior may not reflect their deep motivational preferences. Someone embracing disruptive political strategies might actually be motivated by a desire for stability—they just believe that disruption is the path to get there. This recognition can help us approach political conversations with greater empathy and less assumption about others’ underlying values.
Remember that fierce protection responses typically emerge from a sense of threat and institutional failure. Rather than dismissing these concerns as irrational, try to understand what people are trying to preserve. What institutions do they feel have failed them? These questions can open up more productive conversations than arguments about specific policies or tactics.
