Motivation, Threat, and Defense: Perspective From Experimental Social Psychology

Target article authors March, Gaertner, and Olson (this issue) define threat as pertaining specifically to stimuli that can cause “immediate bodily harm” (p. 3). In social psychology, however, the application of the term “threat” is much broader and refers to the presence of any stimulus or predicament that might undermine either physical (i.e., bodily harm) or psychological well-being (i.e., self-esteem loss, relationship rejection or ostracism, loss of control, cognitive dissonance, etc.; see Jonas et al., 2014, for a recent review). In the decades of social psychological research on threat, the main criterion to determine whether a stimulus was threatening has been its capacity to elicit seemingly irrational defensive responses. That is, if a stimulus results in an irrational response that appears to provide some form of defense against a deficit or vulnerability highlighted by the stimulus, then the stimulus is considered to be an experiential threat. This guiding assumption echoes psychodynamic notions of ego-defensiveness in response to anxiety-provoking experiences (Freud, 1967; Horney, 1945). Support for the experiential, nonrational nature of threat and defense processing has come from evidence showing that participants generally are unaware that their defensive responses are due to the anxiety-provoking stimulus and that their defensive responses diminish if given the chance to misattribute the source of their anxiety (Kay, Moscovitch, & Laurin, 2010; Proulx &Heine, 2008; Zanna &Cooper, 1974). This defensiveness criterion toward threat was most fully integrated into social psychology with Festinger’s (1957) cognitive dissonance reduction findings, showing that people become more extreme and self-serving in their opinions after experimentally engineered cognitive conflicts. This work was an extension of the work by Festinger’s advisor, Kurt Lewin (1935), whose work showed that goal conflicts cause defensively extreme reactions, for example, authoritarianism, aggression, and flight to fantasy. Lewin’s (1935) main insight was that goal conflicts (or what he referred to as conflicting fields of force) result in anxious arousal (what he referred to as tension) that can lead people to go to defensive extremes for relief. Lewin took relatively vague psychodynamic ideas about ego defense and translated them into motivation and goal-related language and operationalizations that were testable in the lab. From his perspective, all threats were motivational threats that essentially involved one (or more) salient goal(s) being blocked by other goals. This insight is consistent with the most recently proposed motivational process theories revolving around discrepancy and conflict, that parsimoniously integrate the threat and defense literature in social psychology (Jonas et al., 2014; Proulx, Inzlicht, & Harmon-Jones, 2012). Before describing the contemporary manifestation of Lewin’s insight, and how it casts doubt on the dual implicit process model (DIPM), we review how research in experimental social psychology was similarly drawn, from the 1980s through the 2000s, to the idea that there might be different threat-processing systems for survival-based versus merely negative stimuli. After the flurry of attention to how conflict was related to threat, beginning with work by Lewin and Festinger through to the 1970s, research on threat and defense in the 1980s to 2000s began to gravitate back to ideas reminiscent of the old egodefense and compensation view, that threats are particularly threatening when they undermine some form of critical, general intrapsychic resource. Along these lines, the notion of “fluid compensation” often came up in these general resource theories, as increasing evidence suggested that the defenses for various threats need not be in the same domain as the threat itself (Allport, 1943; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006; Horney, 1950; Randles, Inzlicht, Proulx, Tullett, & Heine, 2015; Steele, 1988). A multitude of theories proposed different forms of general resources as the critical psychological resource to account for the apparent, interchangeable diversity of threats and compensatory defenses, for example, symbolic immortality (Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997), self-esteem (Tesser, 2000), meaning (Heine et al., 2006; Peterson, 1999), control (Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008), certainty (McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001; Van den Bos, 2009), and so on. The premises of these models were highly similar, intuitive, and reminiscent of the old ego-defense ideas. The main area of disagreement was identifying the precise motivational resource that people were motivated to defend so reflexively. Was it selfesteem, meaning, control, certainty, or was it a more directly survival-related concern that motivated defenses?