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 6.1):
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 management process that parsimoniously explains all observations? Here, we draw on basic evolutionary concepts to propose a meta-theoretical framework within which to systematically integrate seemingly disparate threat management accounts. We introduce the concept of psychological homology, then consider the implications of this approach for the threat management literature, with special attention to the ideas discussed in the present chapters.
