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 awareness, intention, and efficacy. I subsequently consider three ways people may achieve the apparent paradox of being aware of their own biased mental processes while also believing the conclusions that result from them. The third of these is a novel conceptual approach to the illusion of objectivity, which highlights the potential for dissociation between the objectivity of our mental processes and of our mental products. Finally, I outline the implications of this work for future theoretical and applied research.