Why Threats Trigger Compensatory Reactions: The Need for Coherence and Quest for Self-Verification

Abstract

There is considerable agreement that threatening people's beliefs may trigger compensatory activity designed to reaffirm the beliefs that have been challenged. Disagreement reigns, however, regarding the nature of the mechanism that underlies such compensatory activity. We propose that the desire for coherence that motivates self-verification processes underlies these processes. For example, research on self-verification has demonstrated that just as people with positive self-views react to negative evaluations by amplifying their efforts to confirm their positive self-views, people with negative self-views react to positive evaluations by amplifying their efforts to confirm negative self-views. Further, whereas past research on self-verification strivings demonstrate that coherence strivings motivate efforts to confirm negative as well as positive self-views, recent work on meaning maintenance activities indicates that people work to verify implicit as well as explicit self-views.