Ian Mcgregor
Biographic Data
| ID | 184147 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Mcgregor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgregor |
| SIGNATURE | MCGREGOR I |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2936-8883 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 440 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Simple reflection exercises can build efficacy and reduce distress about relationship conflicts
Serious conflicts in close personal relationships can be highly distressing and tempting to ignore, but avoidance of conflict is maladaptive. In the present research, we tested the effectiveness of short conflict‐reflection interventions to promote constructive engagement with conflicts. In Study 1 ( N = 358), a relatively unstructured, conflicted‐reflection intervention significantly reduced distress and bolstered confidence in partners' ability…
Guided by God: Consulting Divine Omniscience During Decision Making
You can't reason with them: Dismissing religious defectors as irrational
Millions of people leave their religion every year. Such defection often results in religious persecution, ostracism, and heightened intergroup conflict. Yet little is known about the underlying perceptions of religious defectors and what intergroup processes predict hostility toward them. In two pre‐registered studies ( N = 512), we investigated how religious group members' thoughts and feelings about defectors may lead to ostracism and a lack o…
Reactive Risk-Taking: Anxiety Regulation Via Approach Motivation Increases Risk-Taking Behavior
Experimental research and real-world events demonstrate a puzzling phenomenon—anxiety, which primarily inspires caution, sometimes precedes bouts of risk-taking. We conducted three studies to test whether this phenomenon is due to the regulation of anxiety via reactive approach motivation (RAM), which leaves people less sensitive to negative outcomes and thus more likely to take risks. In Study 1 ( N = 231), an achievement anxiety threat caused i…
Higher power dynamics: How meaning search and self-transcendence inspire approach motivation and magnanimity
Fidelity with self-transcendent values is hailed as a hallmark of mature and magnanimous character by classic psychological and philosophical theories. Dozens of contemporary experiments inspired by self-affirmation theory have also found that when people are under threat, focus on self-transcendent values can confer magnanimity by improving psychological buoyancy (less anxious and more courageous, determined, and effective) and decreasing bellig…
Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life
Developing sustainability learning in business school curricula – productive boundary objects and participatory processes
Sustainability learning is holistic and complex as it draws on diverse disciplines and can be interpreted differently within individual pedagogies. Embedding sustainability across and within business schools relies on developing suitable boundary objects. These may include representations such as models, frameworks or classificatory schemes that are malleable enough to be adapted for use within the disparate disciplines and pedagogies, yet durabl…
Personal conflict impairs performance on an unrelated self-control task: Lingering costs of uncertainty and conflict
Why bother? Death, failure, and fatalistic withdrawal from life
The current research examines the conditions under which death contemplation will reduce, rather than increase, goal directed activity. By employing a goal-regulation perspective on the problem of death, we hypothesized that death awareness precipitates withdrawal from the goal for continued life when life is experienced as dissatisfying and hope for the future appears bleak. In Study 1, participants with low life satisfaction who contemplated go…
Threat and Defense
Religious magnanimity: Reminding people of their religious belief system reduces hostility after threat
The present research tested the hypothesis that many people's ambient religious beliefs are non-hostile and magnanimous by assessing whether reminding people of their religious belief systems would reduce hostility after threat. Across religious affiliations, participants reported that their religious belief systems encourage magnanimous behavior. In addition, priming their religious belief systems caused them to act more magnanimously, but only …
Anxious Uncertainty and Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) for Religious, Idealistic, and Lifestyle Extremes
Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) theory proposes that the personal uncertainty arising from motivational conflict causes anxiety, and that anxiety draws people to extremes because extremes activate approach‐motivated states that automatically downregulate anxiety. Five new studies consolidate existing evidence for the RAM view of uncertainty‐related threats and reactive extremism. In Studies 1–3, religious, idealistic, and RAM reactions after a…
Issues in Civil Society in a Cosmopolitan World
Climate Governance is Failing Us: We All Need to Respond
Peer reviewed introduction to the Special Issue on Global Climate Change Policy: Post-Copenhagen Discord, guest edited by Chris Riedy and Ian M. McGregor, University of Technology, Sydney
Threat and defense as goal regulation: From implicit goal conflict to anxious uncertainty, reactive approach motivation, and ideological extremism
Four studies investigated a goal regulation view of anxious uncertainty threat (Gray & McNaughton, 2000) and ideological defense. Participants (N = 444) were randomly assigned to have achievement or relationship goals implicitly primed. The implicit goal primes were followed by randomly assigned achievement or relationship threats that have reliably caused generalized, reactive approach motivation and ideological defense in past research. The thr…
Religious Belief as Compensatory Control
The authors review experimental evidence that religious conviction can be a defensive source of compensatory control when personal or external sources of control are low. They show evidence that (a) belief in religious deities and secular institutions can serve as external forms of control that can compensate for manipulations that lower personal control and (b) religious conviction can also serve as compensatory personal control after experiment…
Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion
In 3 experiments, participants reacted with religious zeal to anxious uncertainty threats that have caused reactive approach motivation (RAM) in past research (see McGregor, Nash, Mann, & Phills, 2010, for implicit, explicit, and neural evidence of RAM). In Study 1, results were specific to religious ideals and did not extend to merely superstitious beliefs. Effects were most pronounced among the most anxious and uncertainty-averse participants i…
Anxious uncertainty and reactive approach motivation (RAM)
In 4 experiments anxious uncertainty threats caused reactive approach motivation (RAM). In Studies 1 and 2, academic anxious uncertainty threats caused RAM as assessed by behavioral neuroscience and implicit measures of approach motivation. In Study 3 the effect of a relational anxious uncertainty threat on approach-motivated personal projects in participants' everyday lives was mediated by the idealism of those projects. In Study 4 the effect of…
Threat, high self-esteem, and reactive approach-motivation: Electroencephalographic evidence
Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives
Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: The roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects
Three studies tested the roles of implicit and/or explicit self-esteem in reactions to mortality salience. In Study 1, writing about death versus a control topic increased worldview defense among participants low in implicit self-esteem but not among those high in implicit self-esteem. In Study 2, a manipulation to boost implicit self-esteem reduced the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense. In Study 3, mortality salience increased th…
Conservative Shift among Liberals and Conservatives Following 9/11/01
Can ingroup affirmation relieve outgroup derogation
The mask of zeal: Low implicit self-esteem, threat, and defensive extremism
Theorists have long proposed that vulnerable people turn to zeal in the face of perceived self-threats because doing so somehow masks the threats. The present study supports this idea, and suggests that low implicit self-esteem may be a key vulnerability that predisposes individuals toward defensive zeal. Undergraduate participants with low implicit self-esteem, as assessed by an Internet version of the Implicit Association Test, reacted to an ex…
Personal projects, life stories, and happiness: On being true to traits
Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being oneself
Study 1 participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele. 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced uncertainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about social issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, eliminated uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat caused clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other un…
Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives
Thinking and caring about cognitive inconsistency: When and for whom does attitudinal ambivalence feel uncomfortable
The relation between conflicting evaluations of attitude objects (potential ambivalence) and associated unpleasant feelings (felt ambivalence) was investigated. Participants indicated their potential and felt ambivalence about capital punishment (Studies 1 and 2) and abortion (Studies 1-3). The simultaneous accessibility (J. N. Bassili, 1996) of participants' potential ambivalence (i.e., how quickly and equally quickly conflicting evaluations cam…
Personal projects, happiness, and meaning: On doing well and being yourself
Defensive Zeal and the Uncertain Self: What Makes You So Sure
In Studies 1-3, undergraduates with high self-esteem (HSEs) reacted to personal uncertainty-threats with compensatory conviction about unrelated issues and aspects of the self. In Study 1 HSEs reacted to salience of personal dilemmas with increased implicit conviction about self-definition. In Study 2 they reacted to the same uncertainty-threat with increased explicit conviction about social issues. In Study 3, HSEs (particularly defensive HSEs, …
Anxious uncertainty and reactive approach motivation (RAM)
In 4 experiments anxious uncertainty threats caused reactive approach motivation (RAM). In Studies 1 and 2, academic anxious uncertainty threats caused RAM as assessed by behavioral neuroscience and implicit measures of approach motivation. In Study 3 the effect of a relational anxious uncertainty threat on approach-motivated personal projects in participants' everyday lives was mediated by the idealism of those projects. In Study 4 the effect of…
How storytelling shapes memory and impressions of relationship events over time
In 4 longitudinal studies, the authors explicated how storytelling about relationships biases subsequent impressions in the direction of the story told. In Study 1, storytelling about a relationship conflict vignette biased impressions of blame 2 weeks later, even with memory bias neutralized. Study 2 tracked 2 distinct and variable influences on blame,—storyt elling heuristic and memory mediated mechanisms—over a 40-week period. Heuristic but no…
Conservative Shift among Liberals and Conservatives Following 9/11/01
Defensive pride and consensus: Strength in Imaginary Numbers
Failure (Study 1) and attachment separation thoughts (Study 2) caused exaggerated consensus estimates for personal beliefs about unrelated social issues. This compensatory consensus effect was most pronounced among defensively proud individuals, that is, among those with the combination of high explicit and low implicit self-esteem (Study 1) and the combination of high attachment avoidance and low attachment anxiety (Study 2). In Study 3, another…
Anxious Uncertainty and Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) for Religious, Idealistic, and Lifestyle Extremes
Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) theory proposes that the personal uncertainty arising from motivational conflict causes anxiety, and that anxiety draws people to extremes because extremes activate approach‐motivated states that automatically downregulate anxiety. Five new studies consolidate existing evidence for the RAM view of uncertainty‐related threats and reactive extremism. In Studies 1–3, religious, idealistic, and RAM reactions after a…
Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: The roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects
Three studies tested the roles of implicit and/or explicit self-esteem in reactions to mortality salience. In Study 1, writing about death versus a control topic increased worldview defense among participants low in implicit self-esteem but not among those high in implicit self-esteem. In Study 2, a manipulation to boost implicit self-esteem reduced the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense. In Study 3, mortality salience increased th…
Threat and defense as goal regulation: From implicit goal conflict to anxious uncertainty, reactive approach motivation, and ideological extremism
Four studies investigated a goal regulation view of anxious uncertainty threat (Gray & McNaughton, 2000) and ideological defense. Participants (N = 444) were randomly assigned to have achievement or relationship goals implicitly primed. The implicit goal primes were followed by randomly assigned achievement or relationship threats that have reliably caused generalized, reactive approach motivation and ideological defense in past research. The thr…
Can ingroup affirmation relieve outgroup derogation
Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion
In 3 experiments, participants reacted with religious zeal to anxious uncertainty threats that have caused reactive approach motivation (RAM) in past research (see McGregor, Nash, Mann, & Phills, 2010, for implicit, explicit, and neural evidence of RAM). In Study 1, results were specific to religious ideals and did not extend to merely superstitious beliefs. Effects were most pronounced among the most anxious and uncertainty-averse participants i…
Threat, high self-esteem, and reactive approach-motivation: Electroencephalographic evidence
Why bother? Death, failure, and fatalistic withdrawal from life
The current research examines the conditions under which death contemplation will reduce, rather than increase, goal directed activity. By employing a goal-regulation perspective on the problem of death, we hypothesized that death awareness precipitates withdrawal from the goal for continued life when life is experienced as dissatisfying and hope for the future appears bleak. In Study 1, participants with low life satisfaction who contemplated go…
Personal conflict impairs performance on an unrelated self-control task: Lingering costs of uncertainty and conflict
Personal projects, life stories, and happiness: On being true to traits
Religious magnanimity: Reminding people of their religious belief system reduces hostility after threat
The present research tested the hypothesis that many people's ambient religious beliefs are non-hostile and magnanimous by assessing whether reminding people of their religious belief systems would reduce hostility after threat. Across religious affiliations, participants reported that their religious belief systems encourage magnanimous behavior. In addition, priming their religious belief systems caused them to act more magnanimously, but only …
Hate and meaning in life: How collective, but not personal, hate quells threat and spurs meaning in life
Developing sustainability learning in business school curricula – productive boundary objects and participatory processes
Sustainability learning is holistic and complex as it draws on diverse disciplines and can be interpreted differently within individual pedagogies. Embedding sustainability across and within business schools relies on developing suitable boundary objects. These may include representations such as models, frameworks or classificatory schemes that are malleable enough to be adapted for use within the disparate disciplines and pedagogies, yet durabl…
Personal projects, happiness, and meaning: On doing well and being yourself
How storytelling shapes memory and impressions of relationship events over time
In 4 longitudinal studies, the authors explicated how storytelling about relationships biases subsequent impressions in the direction of the story told. In Study 1, storytelling about a relationship conflict vignette biased impressions of blame 2 weeks later, even with memory bias neutralized. Study 2 tracked 2 distinct and variable influences on blame,—storyt elling heuristic and memory mediated mechanisms—over a 40-week period. Heuristic but no…
Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being oneself
Study 1 participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele. 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced uncertainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about social issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, eliminated uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat caused clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other un…
Thinking and caring about cognitive inconsistency: When and for whom does attitudinal ambivalence feel uncomfortable
The relation between conflicting evaluations of attitude objects (potential ambivalence) and associated unpleasant feelings (felt ambivalence) was investigated. Participants indicated their potential and felt ambivalence about capital punishment (Studies 1 and 2) and abortion (Studies 1-3). The simultaneous accessibility (J. N. Bassili, 1996) of participants' potential ambivalence (i.e., how quickly and equally quickly conflicting evaluations cam…
Defensive Zeal and the Uncertain Self: What Makes You So Sure
In Studies 1-3, undergraduates with high self-esteem (HSEs) reacted to personal uncertainty-threats with compensatory conviction about unrelated issues and aspects of the self. In Study 1 HSEs reacted to salience of personal dilemmas with increased implicit conviction about self-definition. In Study 2 they reacted to the same uncertainty-threat with increased explicit conviction about social issues. In Study 3, HSEs (particularly defensive HSEs, …
Defensive pride and consensus: Strength in Imaginary Numbers
Failure (Study 1) and attachment separation thoughts (Study 2) caused exaggerated consensus estimates for personal beliefs about unrelated social issues. This compensatory consensus effect was most pronounced among defensively proud individuals, that is, among those with the combination of high explicit and low implicit self-esteem (Study 1) and the combination of high attachment avoidance and low attachment anxiety (Study 2). In Study 3, another…
Personal projects, life stories, and happiness: On being true to traits
The mask of zeal: Low implicit self-esteem, threat, and defensive extremism
Theorists have long proposed that vulnerable people turn to zeal in the face of perceived self-threats because doing so somehow masks the threats. The present study supports this idea, and suggests that low implicit self-esteem may be a key vulnerability that predisposes individuals toward defensive zeal. Undergraduate participants with low implicit self-esteem, as assessed by an Internet version of the Implicit Association Test, reacted to an ex…
Can ingroup affirmation relieve outgroup derogation
Threat, high self-esteem, and reactive approach-motivation: Electroencephalographic evidence
Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives
Terror management theory and self-esteem revisited: The roles of implicit and explicit self-esteem in mortality salience effects
Three studies tested the roles of implicit and/or explicit self-esteem in reactions to mortality salience. In Study 1, writing about death versus a control topic increased worldview defense among participants low in implicit self-esteem but not among those high in implicit self-esteem. In Study 2, a manipulation to boost implicit self-esteem reduced the effect of mortality salience on worldview defense. In Study 3, mortality salience increased th…
Conservative Shift among Liberals and Conservatives Following 9/11/01
Religious Belief as Compensatory Control
The authors review experimental evidence that religious conviction can be a defensive source of compensatory control when personal or external sources of control are low. They show evidence that (a) belief in religious deities and secular institutions can serve as external forms of control that can compensate for manipulations that lower personal control and (b) religious conviction can also serve as compensatory personal control after experiment…
Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion
In 3 experiments, participants reacted with religious zeal to anxious uncertainty threats that have caused reactive approach motivation (RAM) in past research (see McGregor, Nash, Mann, & Phills, 2010, for implicit, explicit, and neural evidence of RAM). In Study 1, results were specific to religious ideals and did not extend to merely superstitious beliefs. Effects were most pronounced among the most anxious and uncertainty-averse participants i…
Anxious uncertainty and reactive approach motivation (RAM)
In 4 experiments anxious uncertainty threats caused reactive approach motivation (RAM). In Studies 1 and 2, academic anxious uncertainty threats caused RAM as assessed by behavioral neuroscience and implicit measures of approach motivation. In Study 3 the effect of a relational anxious uncertainty threat on approach-motivated personal projects in participants' everyday lives was mediated by the idealism of those projects. In Study 4 the effect of…
Climate Governance is Failing Us: We All Need to Respond
Peer reviewed introduction to the Special Issue on Global Climate Change Policy: Post-Copenhagen Discord, guest edited by Chris Riedy and Ian M. McGregor, University of Technology, Sydney
Threat and defense as goal regulation: From implicit goal conflict to anxious uncertainty, reactive approach motivation, and ideological extremism
Four studies investigated a goal regulation view of anxious uncertainty threat (Gray & McNaughton, 2000) and ideological defense. Participants (N = 444) were randomly assigned to have achievement or relationship goals implicitly primed. The implicit goal primes were followed by randomly assigned achievement or relationship threats that have reliably caused generalized, reactive approach motivation and ideological defense in past research. The thr…
Anxious Uncertainty and Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) for Religious, Idealistic, and Lifestyle Extremes
Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) theory proposes that the personal uncertainty arising from motivational conflict causes anxiety, and that anxiety draws people to extremes because extremes activate approach‐motivated states that automatically downregulate anxiety. Five new studies consolidate existing evidence for the RAM view of uncertainty‐related threats and reactive extremism. In Studies 1–3, religious, idealistic, and RAM reactions after a…
Issues in Civil Society in a Cosmopolitan World
Threat and Defense
Religious magnanimity: Reminding people of their religious belief system reduces hostility after threat
The present research tested the hypothesis that many people's ambient religious beliefs are non-hostile and magnanimous by assessing whether reminding people of their religious belief systems would reduce hostility after threat. Across religious affiliations, participants reported that their religious belief systems encourage magnanimous behavior. In addition, priming their religious belief systems caused them to act more magnanimously, but only …
Why bother? Death, failure, and fatalistic withdrawal from life
The current research examines the conditions under which death contemplation will reduce, rather than increase, goal directed activity. By employing a goal-regulation perspective on the problem of death, we hypothesized that death awareness precipitates withdrawal from the goal for continued life when life is experienced as dissatisfying and hope for the future appears bleak. In Study 1, participants with low life satisfaction who contemplated go…
Personal conflict impairs performance on an unrelated self-control task: Lingering costs of uncertainty and conflict
Developing sustainability learning in business school curricula – productive boundary objects and participatory processes
Sustainability learning is holistic and complex as it draws on diverse disciplines and can be interpreted differently within individual pedagogies. Embedding sustainability across and within business schools relies on developing suitable boundary objects. These may include representations such as models, frameworks or classificatory schemes that are malleable enough to be adapted for use within the disparate disciplines and pedagogies, yet durabl…
Psychology (28 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (19 works) · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion (15 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (8 works)