Kern, Matthew (2026) The Psychological Immune System: Pitfalls, Prospects, and (Research) Program. In: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

The psychological immune system is said to be a suite of cognitive traits and defense mechanisms designed to protect the self from affectively threatening information, at the expense of tracking the truth. The PIS construct has been advanced by authors such as Norman et al. (2024) and Sedikides (2021) as referring to a real psychological system. I argue for ontological skepticism about the PIS but defend the usefulness of the concept as an idealization (Potochnik 2017) that illuminates psychological causal patterns. Lastly, I argue that work on the PIS can productively refine Tekin (2025)’s MuSe model of the self.

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Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Kern, Matthew kern.m@wustl.edu 0009-0007-7224-5495
Keywords:	idealization, immune system, psychiatry, cognitive immunology, cognitive dissonance, heuristics and biases, rationalization, the self, Freud, MuSe, social psychology
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Psychology > Judgment and Decision Making General Issues > Models and Idealization Specific Sciences > Medicine > Psychiatry Specific Sciences > Psychology > Social Psychology
Depositing User:	Matthew Kern
Date Deposited:	31 May 2026 12:49
Last Modified:	31 May 2026 12:49
Item ID:	29822
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Psychology > Judgment and Decision Making General Issues > Models and Idealization Specific Sciences > Medicine > Psychiatry Specific Sciences > Psychology > Social Psychology
Date:	27 May 2026
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/29822

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