A parable is a story that teaches a lesson—unless it’s by Franz Kafka, in which case it just reinforces that life is a series of meaningless tasks and disheartening setbacks that will probably end in shame, a knife in the heart, or possibly both.

But does reading Kafka threaten our sense of meaning? To find out, researchers had participants read either the parable “An Imperial Message,” about a hopeless messenger and his futile mission, or the “Tortoise and the Hare,” the Aesop classic about why it’s good to be slow and steady. And also why hares are jerks.

After they read one of the parables, participants took a test that assessed their mood. Then they were told to sort some objects (the sorting wasn’t integral to the study; it was just to create a “distraction period”). Finally, they were asked to rate the importance of their birth country, nationality, and native language.

While scores on the mood test were similar, people who had read Kafka’s absurd tale placed more importance on their cultural identity than those who had read the reassuring Aesop story. The theory is that when a person’s sense of meaning has been challenged by something uncanny, he or she clings more tightly to “another meaning framework,” as the authors put it, even if that alternate framework is completed unrelated.

From the paper:

If Kafka’s goal with “An Imperial Message” was to provoke a meaning threat, our data suggest that he was successful. Participants who were presented with this uncanny parable later compensated for the meaning threat by affirming an alternative meaning framework, such that they evaluated aspects of their cultural in group as being more important to their identity than did participants who had read a story that did not violate meaning frameworks.

The moral of this blog item: Always ask a turtle to deliver your messages.

(The article, titled “When Is the Unfamiliar the Uncanny? Meaning Affirmation After Exposure to Absurdist Literature, Humor, and Art” was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The abstract is here. The authors are Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs.)