Moral Memories and Identity Protection

Abstract

In 1998, Gilbert and Wilson et al. coined the term “psychological immune system” to refer to the set of cognitive mechanisms that help individuals fend off psychological discomfort and undesirable negative affect (Gilbert et al. 1998). Although, as they themselves acknowledged, this idea had been suggested previously in the literature (Freud, 1936; Vaillant, 1993), they utilized the term to explain and understand a number of different phenomena—including, of course, biases in affective forecasting (Gilbert, 2006). Gilbert, though, did not mean for the notion of a psychological immune system to be taken literally. A few years after the publication of that seminal paper, in an interview published by The New York Times, Gilbert explicitly stated that he and Wilson meant for the term to be interpreted metaphorically: “We’ve used the metaphor of the ‘psychological immune system’ –it’s just a metaphor, but not a bad one for that system of defenses that helps you feel better when bad things happen.” (Gertner, 2003). The claim that our mind is furnished with a psychological immune system was, therefore, offered as an attractive and useful strategy for explaining and understanding diverse psychological phenomena, and the interpretation of which was meant to be merely figurative. Gilbert’s ontological hesitation does not appeal to Sedikides, who has written an intriguing piece inviting us to think of the psychological immune system in a literal sense: as an actual, evolved set of cognitive mechanisms and operations whose adaptive purpose is to protect our sense of personal identity (Sedikides, this issue). The proposal builds heavily upon a series of connections drawn from features of our biological immune system and features of our putative psychological immune system. As a result, it comprises a large number of moving parts, some of which stand on shakier ground than others, and some of which leave us with more questions than they seem to answer. For instance, some of the evidence Sedikides adduces in support of his view comes from the fact that certain psychological tendencies and biases are conducive to beneficial behaviors for the organism. Since such individual benefits are taken to be adaptive, then the conclusion that the system that brought them about must have evolved for said purpose—i.e., psychological homeostasis—seems ineluctable. Unfortunately, the jump from “beneficial to me” to “selected for” or “having the function of” is often an unwarranted line of reasoning (Garson, 2016). One can easily engage in behaviors that are beneficial for oneself, but those behaviors can simultaneously be not-adaptive for organisms like us, in the sense of conferring evolutionary advantages. When psychologists use the term ‘adaptive’ they normally mean something like ‘non-detrimental for the organism’, which is not identical to the biologists’ sense of ‘adaptive’—meaning the organism’s propensity toward increased fitness in a local environment—which is the sense needed to underwrite functional and evolutionary claims. These concerns aside, the idea that many of our cognitive faculties operate as if they were safeguarding our sense of self through time is attractive and definitively worth exploring in detail. Yet, we believe that it is worth further examining whether we should take the ‘as if’ literally, as Sedikides insinuates, rather than metaphorically, as Gilbert and Wilson originally advised. Because, after all, there seems to be a rather evident and critical disanalogy between the biological immune system and the alleged psychological immune system, the existence of which Sedikides wants us to believe in. On the one hand, most of the components of our biological immune system—whether innate or adaptive—are specialized and perform specific roles in contributing to the overall function of (and lets agree with Sedikides here) preserving homeostasis. Leucocytes, innate lymphoid cells, B cells, T cells, and most other components of the biological immune system evolved to play very specific, narrow roles. On the other hand, we have no evidence whatsoever to the effect that there are specialized cognitive processes whose sole function in our cognitive economy is to help to protect our self-concept. Instead, what seems more likely is that we redeploy cognitive processes that are typically used for other purposes— such as perception, memory, imagination, and the like—in the service of preserving and protecting certain features of our self-concept. If so, then the conclusion we ought to draw is not that there actually is—ontologically speaking—a psychological immune system, as suggested by Sedikides, but rather that our cognitive processes often behave as if they were a psychological immune system—but they aren’t, really, no matter how appealing analogies between the biological and psychological immune systems may seem. In this brief commentary, we argue in favor of this alternative conclusion. We focus primarily on a specific aspect of our personal identity, namely our moral identity. Over the course of the past decade, there has been rapidly growing