Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being oneself.

Abstract

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.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory After 50 Years of Development

“…The correction of the problem often involves following through with the commitment to the behavior or decision. This view of dissonance is consistent with past as well as present theorizing on the function of dissonance and dissonance reduction (e.g., Beckmann & Kuhl, 1984;Jones & Gerard, 1967;McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001;Newby-Clark, McGregor, & Zanna, 2002).…”

Uncertainty and religious reactivity: Uncertainty compensation, repair, and inoculation

“…For instance, we know that uncertainty causes compensatory conviction, the hardening of attitudes in response to uncertainty (McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001). This work demonstrates that exposure to uncertainty causes participants to increase the extremity and certainty of their social convictions (such as attitudes toward the death penalty or gun control).…”

“…This work demonstrates that exposure to uncertainty causes participants to increase the extremity and certainty of their social convictions (such as attitudes toward the death penalty or gun control). Participants also sometimes will compensate for uncertainty by pursuing personal projects that are more consistent with important personal values (McGregor et al, 2001). Previous research thus demonstrates that uncertainty paradoxically can cause increased certainty in both socially relevant attitudes and the self.…”

“…This self-threat conceptualization of uncertainty suggests that self-enhancing manipulations might reduce some of uncertainty's effects, an idea that has received limited attention. McGregor et al (2001) found that a post-uncertainty self-affirmation task (e.g. Steele & Liu, 1983) blocked the impact of uncertainty on compensatory conviction.…”

“…First, unlike previous research, this work focuses on how uncertainty threat influences individual religious faith, not on the problems of religious intolerance (van den Bos et al, 2006), zeal, or support for religious war (McGregor et al, 2001). Individual religious faith may form an important schema that underpins a wide variety of behaviors, and has important implications for the kinds of values that people endorse (e.g.…”