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Introducing Handbook of Personal Security
Aaron L. Wichman, Patrick J. Carroll, and Robert M. Arkin
This volume brings together many different researchers, each with their own unique approaches to the topic of security. Of course, although these contributions help to illuminate its properties, personal security has historically been a difficult idea to conceptualize. One of the many problems in conceptualizing security is that we have trouble accurately assessing our own level of security in daily life.
Several well-known judgment heuristics can help to illustrate this. For instance, the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) we use is relevant to this problem. People have a tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by how easily that event comes to mind. This has some tragically humorous consequences, such as when people come to think that shark attacks are more likely than slipping to one’s death in the bathtub, but also other consequences. One example of this has to do with the continued argument about and ban on small knives when flying in the U.S., stemming from the 9/11 hijackers’ use of box-cutters. Reinforced cockpit doors have greatly reduced the probability of cockpit take-overs and reduced the chances of a repeat of 9/11; the presence or absence of pen-knives does not change this.
Nevertheless, the easy availability (and subjective ease does play a role; see, e.g. Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998) of the image of terrorists using box-cutters to bring about disaster distracts us from the reality of reinforced cockpit doors. In the meantime, no one seems concerned that food-borne illness is killing an estimated 3,000 people per year and hospitalizing 128,000 in the U.S. alone (Centers for Disease Control, 2014). The difference is that September 11, 2001, is a contemporary day of infamy, and Uncle Bob’s stomach bug just does not seem very salient compared with that.
The topic of salience is important for the availability heuristic, and also because salient objects are judged to be more important than non-salient ones. For instance, prior work has used salience as an index of the importance of different needs in defining satisfying and distressing life experiences (Carroll, Arkin, Seidel, & Morris, 2009; Sheldon, Elliot, Kim, & Kasser, 2001). In this work, the salience of missing security was the strongest predictor of negative affect evoked by distressing experiences (Carroll et al., 2009; Sheldon et al., 2001). Moreover, social cognition research shows that the more salient a person is, the more causally important people view that person to be (e.g. Taylor & Fiske, 1975). Salience can stem from sources that are explicitly divorced from reality, as in the case when people who are asked to imagine their college football team having a good season subsequently think that winning a major football title is actually more likely for their team (Carroll, 1978). This research also showed that imagining one candidate winning an election increased that candidate’s perceived odds of winning the election.
Often, people do not need to imagine things themselves to be exposed to information that increases the salience of threat. For instance, the more news media covering terrorism that people watch, the greater the perceived risk of terrorism is (Nellis & Savage, 2012). With this example in mind and considering the previous paragraph, it is worth considering the case of the official who explains how terrorists might contaminate a city’s water supply and paints a vivid picture of how terrorists could acquire poisonous substances and transport them to the reservoir for release. The vividness (Mazzocco & Brock, 2006) of this description helps to increase its salience, and water supply risks become more accessible and are seen as more likely to occur.
Among other effects, the vividness of the description for such attacks makes it easier to mentally simulate the prospect of future attack. People then come to think that such an attack is more likely than they otherwise would (Anderson & Godfrey, 1987; Kahneman & Tversky, 1982). Mental simulations can take their cues from low frequency (but high salience) realities. Consider Richard Reid, the shoe bomber who attempted to blow up an airliner with explosives hidden in his shoe (Wikipedia, 2014). Thanks to Richard, millions of people have removed their shoes for screening at airports. Compare this concern with a failed attack with the lack of concern for the approximately 90 people per day who are killed on highways in the U.S. (33,000 per year; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2013).
Of course, beyond the availability heuristic, many other judgment biases can contaminate intuitive security assessment. For instance, people are not very good at working with base rates. Instead of using base-rate information, we tend to be influenced by the representativeness of stimuli (Kahneman & Tversky, 1974). The representativeness heuristic involves making a likelihood judgment based more on the perceived similarity of a target to some category than on the true probability of a given target belonging to that category. Often, this works well: when traveling, we are more likely to ask directions of someone walking a dog than of someone walking around looking lost. Dog walkers are representative of people who know the area. Confused-looking tourists are not. However, this type of approach can make life difficult as well. Single men of Middle Eastern appearance are often investigated more stringently in airports than are other people. Even so, probabilistically, the likelihood of any of these men attempting a terrorist attack is stunningly small.
This is actually reminiscent of the classic “Linda” problem (Tversky & Kahneman, 1983). It reads like this: “Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.”
Which is more probable?
- Linda is a bank teller.
- Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
The conjunction of Middle Eastern and terrorist cannot exceed the probability of just being a terrorist. The entire population of terrorists includes those that are Middle Eastern plus those of every other origin (e.g. Irish Republican Army, Euskadi ta Askatasuna [ETA], American “Freedom Fighters” like Timothy McVeigh). Yet because we see Middle Eastern men as representative of the terrorist category, people ignore other exemplars that might fit that category in favor of a focus on these groups. This selective threat perception does no one any favors.
We see threat where we expect it. As such, we are less likely to identify threats that do not correspond to our preconceived ideas of threat. Preconceived ideas of what threats look like, and what their causes are, can alter our perceptions. Although using our theories of how the world works can be helpful, it can also be problematic. Theories can be wrong. They can lead us to see ambiguous information in theory-consistent ways (see Kunda, 1987, 1990). These naïve theories can even lead us to completely dismiss or ignore theory-inconsistent information. For instance, we might think that religious affiliation represents the only cause of terrorism (a false theory). We might pay special attention to a suspected terrorist’s religious habits (interpretation of ambiguous information in a theory-consistent matter). We might even dismiss information about a person’s known criminal associates in favor of an investigation of the person’s religious practices (dismiss theory-inconsistent information; cf. Nisbett & Ross, 1980).
Defining the Elusive Experience of Personal Security
So far, we have outlined many factors that interfere with accurate security assessment. The many difficulties that people face with accuracy remind us that it makes psychological sense to think of security not as an objective, measurable state of the environment but rather as a subjective assessment. Although many of the chapters offer definitions of security or insecurity, we would like to provide our own as well, one that captures the subjective quality of security. We define personal security as freedom from concern over loss. Personal insecurity we define as the experience of concern over loss.
This definition integrates the variety of loss concerns that people can have with the important condition of concern. We take concern to have the meaning supplied by the law of concern (Frijda, 1988). This law states that only events that are relevant to important goals, motives, or concerns will elicit emotions. Events rising to a level of concern thus may be accorded precedence over goals for which concerns are not registered. This has implications for the myriad ways in which security can affect unrelated goal pursuit. We return to this point below. Logically, it follows from this application of the law of concern that possible or actual losses that do not matter to us will not affect perceptions of security. In the following, we will refer to security-related emotions and thoughts with names such as “threat” or “safety”. These terms should be interpreted through the lens of our definition, where threat causes a state of concern with loss, and safety is marked in part by lack of concern.
To flesh out our definition, the state of security is marked by freedom from the pressures associated with loss appraisals. Each time one registers loss or threat of loss, coping processes are initiated to deal with it. Whether coping aims to change the world, or to change the self (cf. Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982), responses to loss concerns may overwhelm other active goals. Faced with a choice to either address goal-relevant loss concerns or continue as if concerns were not present, most people should opt to address their loss concerns. In fact, it is difficult to imagine otherwise.
The literature on goal shielding (Shah, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002) shows that active goals inhibit goals that do not serve the active ones. This shielding effect appears to be especially pronounced in the presence of anxiety (Shah et al., 2002). In other words, concerns with loss, and the anxiety that accompanies them, should move goals associated with the object of loss concern to positions of priority in the self-regulatory system. The priority accorded these goals will decrease the importance of other, previously high priority goals. If loss concerns become pre-eminent, people will re-orient themselves to address these concerns, at the expense of their other goals, as well as with negative consequences for executive function (Masicampo & Baumeister, 2010).
Loss concerns come in many forms, from threats to relationships to threatening doubts about competence, or terrorism. The chapters in this book show how, so long as these concerns are active, many different types of behavior may occur in the pursuit of reducing these concerns. Unfortunately, this panoply of effects linked to loss concerns can have several negative implications for mental health and adjustment. So long as concerns with loss drive behavior, people are so busy reactively bolstering themselves against loss that they may be relatively unable to implement new ways of thinking that transcend the existing, apparently negative interdependencies that make up their perceived social environment. Threat makes people cognitively rigid (Plessow, Fischer, Kirschbaum, & Goschke, 2011).
Consistent with Maslow’s hierarchy (1955), we believe that humans can actualize themselves according to the growth needs we all share only when loss concerns are reduced. Otherwise, they will have their actualization goals shielded and will suffer the negative cognitive consequences of unfulfilled security goals, as well as the possibility of actual loss. The lack of loss concern is therefore essential for human flourishing. Only in the absence of emotions stemming from possible loss appraisals can people fully devote themselves to proactive growth.
Different Kinds of Security
Security as we have defined it is a particular cognitive and emotional state. Because there are many influences on these states, it may be useful to think of two basic ways that one can experience security—that is, volitionally and incidentally.
Volitional security comprises all of the behaviors and cognitions that work to minimize our concern with loss. Examples include different kinds of insurance (e.g. for crops or homes), concrete blast barriers, water treatment plants, anti-theft devices, use of alternate test forms to reduce the chances of students copying from each other, and a note to remember one’s wedding anniversary. Some of these clearly serve the sole purpose of reducing the likelihood (e.g. concrete blast walls) or consequences (e.g. insurance) of loss. Others are more ambiguous, such as the note to remember an anniversary. A note to remember one’s wedding anniversary in order to celebrate is very different from a note to remember one’s wedding anniversary in order to avoid hurting one’s spouse’s feelings. In this latter case, forgetting the anniversary might be taken to mean dissatisfaction with the relationship. These varied ways in which we can address loss concerns are an interesting current topic of research (e.g. Scholer & Higgins, 2013), and should be noted, but it is not essential for our treatment here.
The wedding anniversary example demonstrates how important the concept of loss avoidance is. When one’s primary motivation is to prevent bad things from happening, this has far-reaching consequences, whether the avoidance motivation proximally avoids terrorists or avoids forgetting one’s anniversary. Although people may be less at risk from the losses they guard against, they will still be influenced by their avoidance motivation. Because of this, volitional security strivings may lead people who have objectively lower risk for loss to share the same mindset as people who are at objectively higher risk for loss. For example, people who are ensconced behind concrete blast barriers, powerful people who control access to database systems or other facilities, or people who openly carry weapons may all to some extent share the mindset of a refugee trying to escape civil war or of a hungry person guarding food. In spite of their differences in power, each of these people may then subjectively experience similar psychological consequences of this motivation. We return to this point below.
A second type of security, incidental security, comprises non-volitional lack of concern with loss. Incidental security refers to the state where possible loss is not even a glimmer on one’s cognitive horizon. It can be transiently activated, such as when one is immersed in gain-focused goal pursuit. It can also be a more enduring state, influenced by factors such as a secure attachment style, or absence of direct personal exposure to loss, or lack of exposure to media depicting loss.
Where volitional security is a reactive state that occurs in response to threat, incidental security can be reactive or not. In some non-reactive cases, this security is incidental to a non-threatening personal history or incidental to identified (i.e. Deci & Ryan, 2012) promotion-focused striving. In other cases, incidental security may arise from a non-volitional reaction to threat. For instance, a large body of research demonstrates that people may respond to threat outside of conscious awareness, whether by showing increased worldview defense (Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Simon, 1997; Wichman, Brunner, & Weary, 2014) or by reporting increased religiosity (Wichman, 2010). These studies show that, in general, one way that people respond to threat is with zeal-type behaviors (McGregor, Prentice, & Nash, 2009; Van den Bos et al., this volume), whereby threat triggers reactive approach motivation. Reactive incidental security includes changes in post-threat behavior following exposure to attachment figures (e.g. Mikulincer & Shaver, this volume), as well as increased relationship striving in the face of threat (e.g. Hart, this volume). As we will describe, incidental security should have different c...
