distal defense

n. Distal defense is a strategy used to defend against a psychological threat that does not appear to be logically or semantically related to the threat. The concept of psychological defense was popularized by Sigmund Freud. Psychological defenses are strategies to minimize the amount of negative affect that a particular thought might arouse in an individual.

The concept of distal defense is part of a dual-defense model developed to account for findings from research designed to assess terror management theory. The theory posits that because humans are aware of their own mortality, they have a deep-seated unconscious fear of death, which is controlled by continual psychological defenses. These defenses serve to sustain the belief that the individual is an enduringly significant contributor to a meaningful universe. This belief allows people to deny they are just material creatures fated only to obliteration upon death and thereby minimize their potential death-related anxiety. The primary hypothesis derived from the theory is that reminding people of their own death (known as a mortality salience induction) will lead them to bolster faith in the worldview by which they view life as meaningful and faith in their self-worth within the context of that worldview.

Mortality salience inductions have been found to lead to a sequence of two types of defenses. The first type of defense, known as proximal defense, occurs immediately after mortality is made salient and is directed toward denying that death is a problem and removing death-related thoughts from consciousness. Study participants are generally very quick to remove these thoughts from focal attention, a phenomenon known as thought suppression. However, after participants have successfully distracted themselves from death-related thoughts, the thoughts remain close to consciousness or high in accessibility. It is when death-related thought is not in focal consciousness but is high in accessibility that distal defenses occur. These distal defenses bear no logical relationship to the problem of death, but they serve terror management by strengthening individuals’ faith in their worldview or in their self-worth. For example, after a mortality salience induction and a distraction task, American participants become more favorable toward a pro-American essay and more unfavorable toward an anti-American essay. Once these defenses are engaged, the potential for death-related anxiety is reduced and the heightened death thought accessibility is reduced to the level where it was prior to the mortality salience induction.

This dual-defense model developed from terror management research may also be applicable to defenses against other threats. For example, poor performance on an exam could threaten a student's self-esteem.

A common proximal defense against this threat is to blame the teacher or the poor construction of the exam. But another defensive response to such a threat, known as compensation, is to exaggerate one’s abilities in another self-esteem relevant domain, such as athletic prowess. Compensation can be viewed as a distal defense because it is not logically or semantically related to the original threat, poor performance on the exam.

- JG