Stereotypes of nihilists are overwhelmingly negative

Existential nihilism is on the rise in modern societies, but no previous work has investigated the social psychology of seeing no meaning in life. In the current research, five studies (N = 1,634) show that targets’ existential nihilist beliefs elicit a range of negative stereotypes about personality traits, commonly valued social traits, and targets’ ability to perform basic adaptive social tasks. Results demonstrate that these negative...