Offensive Defensiveness: Toward an Integrative Neuroscience of Compensatory Zeal After Mortality Salience, Personal Uncertainty, and Other Poignant Self-Threats

By Ian M McGregor. 2006

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e844aafb673e57cc6a15f59cd3406c13079a856

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Citations in the corpus

Toward an evolutionary social neuroscience of religion (2011, background): “This is why we pay so much attention to things we cannot easily categorize or understand (Tritt et al, 2011 ); and why we find uncertainty and randomness especially aversive (Grupe & Nitschke, 2011 ; Hirsh & Inzlicht, 2008 ; McGregor, 2006 ).”
Belief in conspiracy theories: The influence of uncertainty and perceived morality (2013, background): “Uncertainty, however, has been found to prompt a psychological process termed ‘compensatory conviction’, which means that feelings of uncertainty in one domain increases one’s certainty—both in terms of consistency and clarity—about beliefs or convictions in unrelated domains, such as about politica”
Religious Zeal and the Uncertain Self (2008, background): “At a more general level still, these findings add to a growing body of research demonstrating that various threats with links to uncertainty cause compensatory conviction and zeal about various topics that are far removed from the topics of the threats (reviewed in McGregor, 2006a ).”
Terror Management Theory and Research: How the Desire for Death Transcendence Drives Our Strivings for Meaning and Significance (2014, background): “…either uncertainty about what happens after death (e.g., Hohman & Hogg, 2011) or general personal uncertainty aroused by reminders of death (e.g., McGregor, 2006) is the primary reason that death is upsetting, and that the various responses to MS that have been documented in the literature are…”
God and the government: testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems. (2008, background): “…sense of certainty, self-integrity, or broad-based meaning system that beliefs in order and nonrandomness themselves may feed into (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006; Kruglanski & Webster, 1996; McGregor, 2006; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynksi, 2004; van den Bos, van Ameijde, & van Gorp, 2006).”
Anxious Uncertainty and Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) for Religious, Idealistic, and Lifestyle Extremes (2013, background): “There is also theoretical and empirical reason to believe that the extremism may be mediated by approach motivation (Hirsh et al., 2012; Marigold, McGregor, & Zanna, 2010; McGregor, 2006; Nash et al., 2011).”
Threat and defense: From anxiety to approach (2014, background): “…convictions activate approach-motivated states (Harmon-Jones, 2004; Urry et al., 2004) and their ease of mobilization may account for the relief from anxiety with which they are associated (Creswell et al., 2005; Inzlicht, McGregor, Hirsh, & Nash, 2009; McGregor, 2006b; Nash et al., 2011).”
The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making (2012, background): “Following from a Compensatory conviction perspective, the violation of personal goals evokes the affirmation of personal values (McGregor, 2006)—as motivated by anxious uncertainty (McGregor, 2007).”
Evidence for the specificity of control motivations in worldview defense: Distinguishing compensatory control from uncertainty management and terror management processes. (2011, background): “It is important to note that this does not suggest that accounts that seek to integrate these various effects into one over-arching model are incorrect (Heine et al., 2006; McGregor, 2006; McGregor et al., 2010).”
Does Extreme Political Ideology Predict Conspiracy Beliefs, Economic Evaluations and Political Trust? Evidence From Sweden (2017, unknown): “Somewhat paradoxically, uncertainty in one domain of life results in an increase of certainty, reflected in extreme convictions, in other (frequently political) domains (McGregor, 2006; McGregor & Marigold, 2003).”
The psychology of emotion regulation: An integrative review (2009, background): “…forget the information (Sedikides & Green, 2004), make self-serving attributions (Campbell & Sedikides, 1999), inflate their self-conceptions in a non-threatened domain (McGregor, 2006), engage in downward social comparison (Taylor & Lobel, 1989), and derogate others (Fein & Spencer, 1997).”
When Callings Are Calling: Crafting Work and Leisure in Pursuit of Unanswered Occupational Callings (2010, result): “This pattern is consistent with recent social psychological research suggesting that when negative events trigger prevention-focused states, individuals often cope by pursuing their passions, which helps to ward off undesirable feelings (McGregor 2006).”
Psychological Correlates of Populist Attitudes (2021, background): “To avoid the psychological burdens of uncertainty, people tend to rely on dichotomous, arguably Manichean thinking via the belief that there are always simple solutions to complex societal problems (McGregor, 2006).”