Year: 2015
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Social and personality psychologists have accumulated an enormous corpus of data documenting interrelationships between threat processes and ideological modes of cognition. Unfortunately, these important findings are embedded in a formidably dense and contested patchwork of theories. Indeed, the four chapters making up this section highlight only a subset of the diverse, productive, yet largely disconnected theoretical approaches that have grown around worldview defense (i.e., the intensification of ideological adherence upon detection of a threat). Consider the following selection of perspectives posited to account for the relationship between threat detection and worldview defense (Table 1): Insert Table 1 about here That’s a lot of parallel theories. Perhaps surprisingly, we will argue that it is not the proliferation of proposed threat management systems that poses the greatest concern. Rather, the deeper problem is the murkiness surrounding how any of these theories might be meta-theoretically integrated, and what sort of evidence is necessary to compel retaining a theory rather than abandoning it as redundant. Can multiple accounts be usefully complementary, or is there one underlying threat
Authors: Colin Holbrook, Daniel M. T. Fessler
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1220659271