Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being oneself

Study I participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele, 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced unce rtainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about soc ial issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, elimina ted uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat ca used clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other un certainty-related threats, mortality salience and temporal discontinuity, c aused similar responses: more extreme intergroup bias in Study 3, and more self-consistent personal goals and identifications in Study 4. Going to ext remes and being oneself are seen as 2 modes of compensatory conviction used to defend against personal uncertainty. Relevance to cognitive dissonance and authoritarianism theories is discussed, and a new perspective on terror management theory (J. Greenberg, S. Solomom, & T. Pyszczynski, 1997) is pr oposed.