Meaning threat requires unexpected incongruity, not incongruity alone.

Evidence

If incongruity alone (or immoral behavior, for that matter) were sufficient for evoking compensatory affirmation efforts, we would have expected both of the Biggles conditions to evoke compensatory affirmation efforts. However, it was only when Biggles was presented in such a way that the incongruities were entirely unexpected (unexpected unexpected) that the story constituted an uncanny experience and evoked compensatory affirmation efforts. Hence, expectations played a crucial role in determining whether participants experienced the Biggles story as a meaning threat. — Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs, When Is the Unfamiliar the Uncanny?…, 62

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s current project checking whether the meaning-maintenance compensatory affirmation observed under intergroup threat replicates under absurdity/meaning threat — this passage is core evidence for that general-mechanism hypothesis.