ABSTRACT
While human (and animal) behavior is doubtlessly striving for security as an ideal end of all important behaviors (regarding health, mating, achievement, survival, etc.), many means toward this end are energized by insecurity. From Bjork and colleagues, we have learned that good learning is effortful, not easy, or fluent. Partial reinforcement schedules lead to better performance than secure reinforcement, as impressively shown by Lawrence and Festinger. Inferiority and minority status trigger better argumentation than a superior majority status (Moscovici). Bischof’s Zürich model of social motivation offers a refined ethological and evolutionary account for the twofold need for both familiarity and unfamiliarity, security and novelty. We presume that the malleability of trade-off problems allows ordinary people and researchers to misperceive the asymmetry of security versus insecurity strategies, favoring the former and neglecting the latter. A taxonomy of established trade-off paradigms demonstrates that (a) there seem to be more normative reasons for insecurity strategies, although (b) the pertinent literature renders security strategies more prominent and intuitively plausible.
