With Eyes Wide Open: How and Why Awareness of the Psychological Immune System Is Compatible With Its Efficacy.

Life is full of negative events that threaten our self-worth, and we deploy a wide range of potent psychological strategies—such as dissonance reduction, motivated reasoning, downward comparison, self-serving attribution, and outgroup derogation—to defend our egos. People are highly adept at using these psychological immune system strategies while remaining blind to the fact that they have done so. In fact, prominent voices in the field have suggested that this lack of awareness is a necessary condition for the psychological immune system’s efficacy; how else could someone continue to believe a self-serving attribution while being aware that the attribution was generated precisely because it favored him or her? In this article, I outline the argument underlying why awareness might be a threat to the efficacy of the psychological immune system and then closely review the empirical literature for evidence supporting this claim. On the contrary, the data indicate people can and do use these strategies with a...