Threat and Defense : From Anxiety to Approach

The social psychological literature on threat and defense is fragmented. Groups of researchers have focused on distinct threats, such as mortality, uncertainty, uncontrollability, or meaninglessness, and have developed separate theoretical frameworks for explaining the observed reactions. In the current chapter, we attempt to integrate old and new research, proposing both a taxonomy of variation and a common motivational process underlying people’s reactions to threats. Following various kinds of threats, people often turn to abstract conceptions of reality—they invest more extremely in belief systems and worldviews, social identities, goals, and ideals. We suggest that there are common motivational processes that underlie the similar reactions to all of these diverse kinds of threats. We propose that (1) all of the threats present people with discrepancies that immediately activate basic neural processes related to anxiety. (2) Some categories of defenses are more proximal and symptom-focused, and result directly from anxious arousal and heightened attentional vigilance associated with anxious states. (3) Other kinds of defenses operatemore distally andmute anxiety by activating approach-oriented states. (4) Depending on the salient dispositional and situational affordances, these distal, approach-oriented reactions vary in the extent to which they (a) resolve the original discrepancy or are merely palliative; (b) are concrete or abstract; (c) are personal or social. We present results from social neuroscience and standard social psychological experiments that converge on a general process model of threat and defense. Various “threats,” such as personal uncertainty, mortality salience, loss of control, perceptual surprises, and goal conflicts, cause people to heighten commitment to their goals, ideals, social relations, identifications, ideologies, and worldviews. Why do such seemingly unrelated threats lead to this similar set of diverse reactions? We and others have investigated phenomena such as the ones listed above for many years under different theories of threat and defense. In this chapter, we describe how our various research programs converge to provide an integrative general model of threat and defense processes. Although different approaches have offered different conceptual frameworks to understand threat and defense, a shared process model seems possible if we look at these phenomena from both social psychological and neural perspectives. Defensive reactions to threat follow a specific time course and can be mapped onto neural, experiential, and behavioral correlates. We propose that all threats involve the experience of a discrepancy. This discrepancy subsequently activates neural processes related to anxiety, driving a variety of proximal defenses related to attentional vigilance and avoidance motivation. Subsequent distal defenses then serve to activate neural processes related to approach motivation that downregulate the neural processes related to anxiety. We argue that depending on individual traits and salient associations and norms, people use an array of defensive strategies to activate these sanguine, approach-oriented states. In this chapter, we temporarily set aside the long-standing debate about the way different threats might affect different psychological needs (symbolic immortality, control, self-worth, certainty, self-integrity, meaning, etc.) and how different kinds of defenses might restore them. Instead, we build on the simple hypothesis that discrepancies arouse anxiety and thereby motivate diverse phenomena that activate approach-related states that relieve the anxiety. 1. THEORIES EXPLAINING PEOPLE’S DEFENSIVE REACTIONS TO THREAT Social psychological research on threat and defense first proliferated with cognitive dissonance theory (CDT; Festinger, 1957), which focused on the aversive arousal arising from discrepant experiences that conflict with relevant cognitions (e.g., smoking despite knowledge of its dangers; engaging in counter-attitudinal behavior). Conflicting thoughts and actions are still considered the basis of dissonance arousal (Gawronski, 2012; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999). In the current threat and defense literature, cognitive dissonance themes persist across the various theoretical perspectives and form a central element in our integrative model. Specifically, we hold that any experience that is discrepant with prevailing cognitions or motivations arouses anxious vigilance and motivates efforts to reduce this arousal by means of reactive thoughts and behaviors. In the first part of this chapter, before explicating our general process model, we will provide perspective by reviewing some prominent theories that have tried to account for diverse defensive reactions to threats. 1.1. Theories focusing on need for certainty, self-esteem, and social identity A variety of social psychological theories evolved from CDT to focus on uncertainty-related threats. Like CDT, these certainty theories emphasize the need to supplant aversive, “nonfitting cognitions” with consonant ones, and focus on need for cognitive clarity and consistency. Lay epistemic theory (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996), self-verification theory (Swann & Read, 1981), and theories of uncertainty management (Van den Bos, Poortvliet, Maas, Miedema, & Van den Ham, 2005), compensatory conviction (McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001), and uncertainty reduction (Hogg, 2007) emphasize that this need for self-relevant clarity and cognitive closure is bolstered by consensual social validation and identification. When faced with uncertainty about themselves or their environment, people defensively restore certainty, often in unrelated domains with the confidence-inducing help of social consensus and group identification (Hogg, 2007; Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, & De Grada, 2006). For example, personal uncertainty threats increase in-group identification, in-group bias, defense of cultural worldviews, and exaggerated consensus estimates (Hogg, Sherman, Dierselhuis, Maitner, & Moffitt, 2007; McGregor, Nail, Marigold, & Kang, 2005; McGregor et al., 2001; Van den Bos, 2009). At around the same time as consistency theories were proliferating, another family of theories, rooted in neo-analytic ideas of ego-defense (Freud, 1967; Horney, 1945), gained popularity. These theories focus on self-worth and ego-needs. They emphasize self-esteem as the fundamental resource that people protect with compensatory defenses and include theories of egocentricity (Beauregard & Dunning, 1998; Dunning & Hayes, 1996; Tesser, 2000), self-evaluation maintenance (Sedikides, 1993; Tesser, 1988), and the totalitarian ego (Greenwald, 1980). Consensual social validation and identification was also often viewed as playing an important role in the maintenance of self-esteem through others, for example, basking in reflected glory (Cialdini et al., 1976), or being part of a winning team (Sherman & Kim, 2005). The close linkage (Baumgardner, 1990; Campbell, 1990) and substitutability of self-clarity and self-esteem was taken by self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988) as evidence for a more general motive for self-integrity—a sense of the “moral and adaptive adequacy of the self.” If an experience undermines self-viability for whatever reason, then defensive compensatory efforts will be recruited in any available domain of clarity or worth, even relating to group memberships (Fein & Spencer, 1997), to restore a positive