The Psychological Immune System: What Needs Defending?

The theory of the self has been built up by work of countless scholars across multiple disciplines. It has taken input from very different fields of study. Psychologists’ views have been edified and informed by many other fields. Sedikides (this issue) extends this rich, integrative tradition by borrowing insights and models from immunology. Many of his thought-provoking analyses offer potential insights into psychological phenomena, indeed some of whose implications extend beyond the task of building psychological theory to understanding society-wide problems. As a particular example that struck us, his parallel between biological inoculation and the development of psychological defenses offers a fresh and powerful insight into a much-discussed problem facing modern universities as a whole. Many scholars have noted that in the past five years college students have become increasingly fragile. Whereas earlier generations of students demanded to be allowed to hear radical, challenging ideas, modern students demand to be shielded from them. (Lukianoff and Haidt [2018] have offered a trenchant analysis of this sweeping change.) Modern students often claim that some ideas threaten their right to exist—even, famously, a newspaper op-ed that did no more than document that university administrators are more politically left-leaning than the faculty (Abrams 2018; see Morabito 2019; Paresky 2019). Some students demand trigger warnings to alert them in advance that a lecture or reading might mention topics or theories that would disturb them (even though accumulating evidence indicates that trigger warnings do not reduce anxiety and indeed may increase it; see Bellet et al. 2020). This widespread student malaise and fragility (derided as “snowflake” mentality by critics) can be usefully understood in Sedikides’s terms as a failure of inoculation. By all accounts, American parents shifted in the 1990s to become hyper-protective of their children, as documented by Lukianoff and Haidt (2018). Psychologists bear some responsibility for this shift, as that era was obsessed with the ostensible importance and fragility of self-esteem (e.g., California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility 1990). As is typical with scientific work, the complexities, debates, and limitations of the actual scientific research got lost as the message was transmitted via the mass media to the general public. The result was that parents became reluctant to criticize their children and sought to protect them from failure, challenge, or even unsettling ideas. This contrasted sharply with the style of child-rearing emphasized in earlier generations, which wanted above all to avoid a spoiled or prideful child. Insofar as 21-century parents succeeded at sheltering their children from anything negative, they produced young adults who lack the psychological immune system with the power to cope with having their self-views or worldviews threatened. Indeed, it is possible that Sedikides’s analysis of deficient inoculation could be used to persuade new parents to abandon the overprotective style and resume a more balanced approach to child-raising. The message that children need to encounter some problems and failures, and to learn to cope with them themselves, might potentially benefit future generations.