Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: going to extremes and being oneself.
Study 1 participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele. 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced uncertainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about social issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, eliminated uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat caused clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other uncertainty-related threats, mortality salience and temporal discontinuity, caused similar responses: more extreme intergroup bias in Study 3, and more self-consistent personal goals and identifications in Study 4. Going to extremes and being oneself are seen as 2 modes of compensatory conviction used to defend against personal uncertainty. Relevance to cognitive dissonance and authoritarianism theories is discussed, and a new perspective on terror managenment theory (J. Greenberg, S. Solomom, & T. Pyszczynski, 1997) is proposed.
McGregor
I
I
Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. ianmc@yorku.ca
Zanna
M P
MP
Holmes
J G
JG
Spencer
S J
SJ
D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001293:Attitude to Death; D001318:Authoritarianism; D003073:Cognitive Dissonance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012649:Self Concept; D012945:Social Values; D013997:Time Factors