jost_j_t_kay_a_c_thorisdottir_n_social_and_psychological_bas

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P A R T I V

Epistemic and Existential Motives

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findings on the social psychology of uncertainty management processes and will especially focus on how these processes predict how people react toward fair and unfair events and to other events that bolster or violate their cultural and ideological worldviews. Thus, I will examine the role uncertainty management processes play in understanding and explaining system justification, ideology, and other human reactions pertaining to worldview defense.

First, after introducing the core topics of this chapter, I will show that management of personal uncertainty concerns may be driving people’s reactions to various social issues, including their responses to socially deviant people and their behavioral and other reactions to homeless individuals. I also will review research findings that reveal that salience of personal uncertainty is important in understanding the psychology of religion and how people react toward messages that violate or support their religious worldviews. I suggest that, at least sometimes, uncertainty management may better explain processes of system justification and worldview defense than another approach, namely, terror management theory (TMT).

I will subsequently focus on the social psychological processes underlying uncertainty management effects and will argue that a combination of experiential conditions with individual tendencies to show intense affective reactions determines people’s reactions toward fair and unfair events, as well as their reactions to innocent victims of crimes and other misfortunes. I will discuss also the possible implications of recent insights regarding the human alarm system with respect to these processes. In discussing these issues, I will note the implications of these findings and theories may have for our understanding of the psychology of system justification, ideology, and related issues such as the belief in a just world. The next section introduces briefly the uncertainty management assumption that drives the core elements of this chapter.

THE UNCERTAINTY MANAGEMENT ASSUMPTION

People can encounter different types of uncertainties (Van den Bos & Lind, 2002), but the uncertainty management work I concentrate on here focuses on the experience of personal uncertainty, which involves the implicit and explicit feelings and other subjective reactions people experience as a result of being uncertain about themselves (see, e.g., Van den Bos, 2001, 2007; Van den Bos, Poortvliet, Maas, Miedema, & Van den Ham, 2005; see also De Cremer & Sedikides, 2005; Hogg, 2005; McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001). I define personal uncertainty as a subjective sense of doubt or instability in self-views, worldviews, and the interrelation between the two (Van den Bos &

Lind, in press). Personal uncertainty entails both stable individual differences, such as differences in emotional uncertainty (Greco & Roger, 2001), and situational fluctuations, such as conditions in which people’s personal uncertainties have (versus have not) been made salient (Van den Bos, 2001).

I work from the assumption that experiencing personal uncertainty is a “hot-cognitive” social psychological process (Abelson, 1963; Kunda, 1999; Stapel, 2003), involving a combination of both cognitive and affective reactions (Van den Bos, 2007). I also think that personal uncertainty more often than not involves visceral and intuitive (rather than more reasoned and rationalistic) reactions (Van den Bos & Lind, in press). Experiencing personal uncertainty about one’s attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and perceptions, as well as about one’s relationship to other people, is generally aversive (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Hogg, 2000; Lopes, 1987; Sorrentino & Roney, 1986), and personal uncertainty therefore often motivates behavior that seeks to reduce it. Although experiencing personal uncertainty may sometimes be sought out and occasionally may instigate contemplation or introspection (see, e.g., McGregor & Marigold, 2003; Sorrentino, Bobocel, Gitta, Olson, & Hewitt, 1988; Weary & Jacobson, 1997), I argue that it is more common for people to find experiencing personal uncertainty an alarming event that does not allow for contemplation and introspection, but instead requires people to respond rather quickly to what is going on (Van den Bos, Ham, Lind, Simonis, Van Essen, & Rijpkema, in press).

Although a full review of uncertainty management models is beyond the scope of this paper (for more complete descriptions, see, e.g., Hogg, 2007; McGregor, 2004; Van den Bos & Lind, 2002), it is noteworthy that uncertainty management models start with the observation that the world is an uncertain place. For example, many people have jobs with indefinite tenure, and success at work often depends on adaptability and flexibility in the face of an uncertain future (Lord & Hartley, 1998). Rapid changes are happening everywhere, and news of layoffs as well as national and international conflicts reaches us almost daily. Furthermore, people are unpredictable, and most of us have experienced both unanticipated disappointments and unexpected successes in our personal, work, or political worlds.

Based on various social psychological theories and notions (see, e.g., Festinger, 1954; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Hogg & Mullin, 1999; Lopes, 1987; Sorrentino & Roney, 1986; Weary, Jacobson, Edwards, & Tobin, 2001), uncertainty management models assume that people have a fundamental need to feel certain about their world and their place within it, that uncertainty can be threatening, and that people generally feel a need either to eliminate uncertainty or to find some way to make it tolerable and cognitively manageable (for some exceptions to this rule, see, e.g., Sorrentino & Roney, 1986).

Consider the threats that can accompany uncertainty: uncertainty deprives one of confidence in how to behave and what to expect from the physical and social environment within which one finds oneself. Uncertainty about one’s attitudes, beliefs, feelings, and perceptions, as well as about one’s relationship to other people, is generally aversive, and uncertainty therefore often motivates behavior that reduces subjective uncertainty (Van den Bos & Lind, 2002). Furthermore, epistemic motives related to uncertainty are important social psychological phenomena. Festinger (1954), for example, based social comparison theory on the proposition that knowing that one is correct is a critical human motivation that drives people to make interpersonal social comparisons when nonsocial means are unavailable.

Thus, uncertainty management models assume that managing uncertainty is an important motive that often drives people’s reactions and behaviors. This is not to say that people want to reduce uncertainty all the time or that all uncertainties are the same. Of course, being completely certain about all or many aspects of one’s life may make one’s life rather dull, and there are clearly instances in which people strive for uncertainty rather than seek to reduce it. For example, sometimes people want to experience new, uncertain events, and on occasion some of them even seek the thrill of possible danger, like bungee jumping or parachuting. This may be true, but still, uncertainty management theories argue that even when uncertainty is sought, it usually is still managed, at least to some extent. Thus, bungee jumping or parachuting can be thrilling experiences, but most people who engage in these kinds of activities make damn sure that they have information that the ropes and parachutes they are using are safe and can be trusted.

PERSONAL UNCERTAINTY AND WORLDVIEW DEFENSE

Based on the above-reviewed literature, I propose that people want to protect themselves from being in or thinking of situations in which they were uncertain about themselves. One way in which people can do this is by adhering to their cultural norms and values (e.g., Van den Bos et al., 2005). That is, work that others and I have been doing proposes that an important psychological function of cultural worldviews is that these worldviews provide certainty and stability (e.g., Van den Bos, Euwema, Poortvliet, & Maas, 2007; Van den Bos, Van Ameijde, & Van Gorp, 2006). Worldviews make the world a more predictable place and constitute buffers against threats, thus giving people an opportunity to cope with threats to their socio-political system and corresponding ideologies. An implication of the psychological function of worldviews may be that experiences that are supportive of people’s cultural

worldviews lead people to be less uncertain about themselves or to be able to better tolerate the uncertainty (e.g., Van den Bos, Heuven, Burger, & Fernández Van Veldhuizen, 2006). As a result, uncertainty management theories hypothesize that people who are uncertain about themselves or who have been reminded about their personal uncertainties will react very positively toward worldview-supportive experiences (e.g., Van den Bos, 2001). In contrast, experiences that threaten or impinge on people’s worldviews do not help people to cope with their uncertainties, hence people will respond very negatively toward these worldview-threatening experiences (e.g., Van den Bos et al., 2005).

In this respect, it is noteworthy that fairness may be one of the most important social norms and values in human life (Folger, 1984; Folger & Cropanzano, 1998; Tyler & Smith, 1998). In most situations, most people judge unfair treatment to be in violation of cultural norms and values, and think of fair treatment as being in correspondence with norms and values of good behavior and conduct (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, & Huo, 1997). In other words, unfair treatment violates people’s cultural worldviews, whereas fair treatment bolsters people’s cultural worldviews (Van den Bos & Miedema, 2000; see also Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). This is not to say that people always expect or even appreciate fair events in the world. In fact, evidence suggests that sometimes unfairness best fits people’s worldviews (Major, Kaiser, O’Brien, & McCoy, 2007) and that sometimes unfair treatment may have good aspects (Van den Bos, Bruins, Wilke, & Dronkert, 1999). That said, most of the time, people want to be treated fairly and detest being treated in an unfair manner. Combining this observation with the earlier mentioned uncertainty management hypothesis led me, in 2001, to test the prediction that people would react more strongly toward variations of fair and unfair treatment under conditions in which personal uncertainty was (versus was not) made salient (Van den Bos, 2001).

In the three experiments reported in this article (Van den Bos, 2001), personal uncertainty was made salient by asking university students to complete two simple questions: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your being uncertain arouses in you,” and “Please write down, as specifically as you can, what you think physically will happen to you as you feel uncertain.” People in the uncertainty nonsalient conditions were not asked these questions, or were asked to think about their watching television (an issue that does not make personal uncertainty salient among most university students). In some experiments, the uncertainty salience manipulation was followed by giving people an opportunity to voice their opinions about a decision that had to be made or not giving them such an opportunity. In another experiment, participants responded to a job selection process in which

either all of the relevant information was carefully taken into consideration (accurate procedure) or only some of the relevant information was taken into account (inaccurate procedure). Participants judged both the voice and accurate procedures to be more fair than the no-voice and inaccurate procedures. More interestingly, when personal uncertainty had been made salient, participants reacted with more positive affect toward the fair procedures and with more negative affect toward the unfair procedures. In correspondence with what was predicted by the uncertainty management hypothesis, this suggests that, when personal uncertainty is salient, people react more positively toward events (such as fair procedures) that bolster their cultural norms and values, and they respond more negatively toward events (such as unfair treatment) that violate their cultural norms and values.

In further correspondence with uncertainty management predictions, other research findings suggest that the experience of fairness can have ameliorative effects on uncertainty by making uncertainty more tolerable. We (Van den Bos, Heuven, et al., 2006) interviewed employees at a chemical business company who had survived an influential reorganization process in which the majority of the company’s employees had been laid off. As expected on the basis of the uncertainty management hypothesis, the experience that the outcomes of the reorganization process were fair made people feel less uncertain about their current jobs. Thus, after reorganizations, outcome fairness can have ameliorative effects on job uncertainty, and this provides suggestive evidence for the uncertainty management model’s claim that people may use fairness judgments to cope with the uncertainty resulting from reorganizations and co-worker lay-offs.

Because people’s reactions to cultural norms and values encompass more than how they react to fair and unfair treatment, we also studied other worldview defense reactions in other research studies. More specifically, we noted that social groups and the values that they convey enable individuals to alleviate important human concerns by providing self-esteem resources, as well as epistemic knowledge (e.g., Dechesne, Janssen, & Van Knippenberg, 2000; Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997; Hogg, 2000). In correspondence with this notion, we (Van den Bos, Euwema, et al., 2007, Study 1) showed that asking (as opposed to not asking) people to think about their uncertainties may lead them to react more negatively toward a person who has been communicating negative things about their home country.

Uncertainty concerns also influenced how a representative sample of over 1200 citizens of Dutch society reacted to encounters with homeless persons. We argued that, for those citizens who hold negative attitudes about vulnerable people in society, homeless people deviate from the citizens’ ideas about how people should behave in their socio-political system,

possibly representing a threat to their cultural worldviews. We further proposed that, especially when emotional uncertainty is a concern for those citizens, they would show strong negative responses toward homeless individuals. As hypothesized, findings reveal that especially those persons who have a relatively negative attitude toward vulnerable people and who consider uncertainty to be a relatively emotionally threatening experience react most negatively in terms of both affective and protest reactions toward interactions with a homeless individual (Van den Bos, Euwema, et al., 2007, Study 2). Uncertainty salience may also lead people with negative attitudes toward homeless people to objectively distance themselves from belongings and materials associated with homeless individuals (Van den Bos, Euwema, et al., 2007, Study 3), indicating that uncertainty concerns can reliably affect human behavior.

Furthermore, building on the observation that extremely antireligious statements may threaten most people’s religious beliefs and/or may violate their views of how one should communicate about religious issues, we (Van den Bos, Van Ameijde, & Van Gorp, 2006) hypothesized and showed that personal uncertainty may also moderate the social psychology of religious worldview defense. An Internet study including more than 1500 respondents and a more controlled laboratory experiment among university students provided evidence for the hypothesis that salience of personal uncertainty concerns may lead people to have more negative affective reactions toward extremely negative statements about religion, especially when people are inclined to think of personal uncertainty as an emotionally threatening experience and when they are strongly religious.

Other studies also provide supportive evidence for the predictions of related uncertainty management models. Hofstede (2001), for example, showed that, compared to people who are low in uncertainty avoidance, those high in uncertainty avoidance are more conservative, less tolerant of diversity, less open to new experiences and alternative lifestyles, want immigrants to be sent back to their countries of origin, and reject people from other races as their neighbors. McGregor and colleagues (e.g., McGregor, 2004; McGregor & Marigold, 2003; McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001) revealed that people who are made uncertain about themselves react more defensively toward events that threaten their cultural worldview, and that people do so because, in this way, they can restore their sense of self (i.e., being persons who can be certain about themselves; see also Martin, 1999). Related to this, Hogg showed in various publications that extreme self-uncertainty can motivate people to believe more strongly in ideological belief systems related to orthodoxy, hierarchy, and extremism (e.g., Hogg, 2000, 2004, 2005; see also Towler, 1984). Furthermore, some recent research findings suggest that, at