Worldview Accommodation: Selectively Modifying Committed Beliefs Provides Defense Against Worldview Threat

Abstract

Although numerous studies have examined compensatory reactions to ideological threats such as derogation, relatively little research has focused on alternative forms of defense. One such alternative, termed accommodation, involves accepting and incorporating parts of the threatening information into existing belief-structures. The present research employs a terror management framework to assess the effects of worldview threat, death-thoughts, and trait self-esteem on worldview accommodation. Five studies demonstrate that accommodation entails selectively modifying only peripheral worldview beliefs, while retaining core beliefs. Study 1 demonstrates that accommodation increases as a function of death-thought accessibility (DTA) aroused by threat. Studies 2–5 show that self-esteem moderates the effects of threat on accommodation, such that people with low (but not high) self-esteem accommodate their worldview. Moreover, accommodation is found to reduce source derogation (Studies 1–3), fluid defensiveness (Study 4), and DTA (Study 5). Discussion focuses on implications for understanding various means of coping with worldview threats.

Keywords::

• Accommodation
• Threat
• Worldview defense
• Mortality salience
• Self-esteem
• Terror management theory

Notes

^1. Although Study 3 used the same population of participants and worldview threat materials as Studies 1, 4, and 5, it was conducted prior to the other studies and the accommodation items were highly similar but not identical. As such, items from Study 3 were not included in this overall factor analysis. Nevertheless, the three-factor structure of core beliefs versus peripheral beliefs versus author derogation is also found to exist among our items in this study.

^2. One item that cross loaded onto both factors and possessed low factor loadings was excluded from the analyses.

^3. We acknowledge that the inclusion of DTA as a moderator in this analysis introduces problems of multicollinearity due to the fact that it is correlated with worldview threat. At a conceptual level, however, this approach is justified given the terror management assertion that increased worldview defense stems from high levels of DTA. Moreover, there is precedence for using this type of analysis in the work of Das et al. (2009).

^4. It remains possible that reading an article about the origins of life inadvertently primed death. Although the article did not contain explicit reference to death, research has shown that thinking about the value of life can increase DTA by association (see Hayes et al., 2010). This alternative explanation for the between-condition differences in DTA notwithstanding, the relationship between DTA and accommodation in the present study still suggests that worldview threat increased DTA, which in turn increased defensiveness via accommodation or derogation, whichever defense was available first.

^5. The filler questionnaires consisted of the need for cognition scale (Cacioppo, Petty, & Kao, 1984), the self-monitoring scale (Snyder, 1974), and the social desirability scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960).