Anxious attachment (hypervigilant detection of and reactivity to social inconsistency and unreliability) heightens pattern deviancy (distortions of repeated forms or models) aversion, contributing to prejudice

Anxious Attachment as an Antecedent of People's Aversion Towards Pattern Deviancy. Anton Gollwitzer, Margaret S. Clark. European Journal of Social Psychology, Dec 2018, https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2565

Abstract: Research suggests that people's aversion towards pattern deviancy – distortions of repeated forms or models – contributes to social phenomena, such as prejudice. Yet, the factors motivating pattern deviancy aversion remain unclear. Potentially, anxious attachment, as it entails hypervigilant detection of and reactivity to social inconsistency and unreliability, heightens pattern deviancy aversion. In Studies 1 (N = 137) and 2 (N = 102), anxious but not avoidant attachment predicted aversion towards broken patterns of geometric shapes. In Studies 3 (N = 310) and 4 (N = 470), experimentally inducing anxious versus avoidant and secure attachment (Study 3), and versus a neutral prime (Study 4), heightened pattern deviancy aversion. Controlling for participants’ aversion towards unbroken patterns, novel objects, and negative stimuli did not change these results. Our findings demonstrate that anxious attachment is one antecedent of pattern deviancy aversion, and suggest that pattern deviancy aversion may underlie links between anxious attachment and certain social phenomena.

Anxious Attachment as an Antecedent of Pattern Deviancy Aversion

We hypothesize that anxious attachment may activatea domain-general response towards patterns in a per-son’s environment, specifically, in the form of an aversion towards broken patterns. In other words, wepropose that the fear of social unreliability and inconsistency entailed in anxious attachment (e.g., Bartz &Lydon, 2008) extends to a domain-general aversion towards inconsistencies. In support of this possibility, anxiously attached individuals lack a secure base from which to explore irregularities in their environment (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bowlby, 1973). And further, some evidence suggests that anxiously attached indi-viduals seek out consistency in their surroundings outside of the social domain. For instance, anxious attachment is related to engaging in compulsive ritualsto reduce stress (American Psychiatric Association,2000; Doron, Sar-El, Mikulincer, & Talmor, 2012).In addition, shared correlates of anxious attachment and pattern deviancy aversion support our hypothesis.For instance, anxious attachment has been linked to heightened prejudice (e.g., Di Pentima & Toni, 2009; Mikulincer, 1997; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2001), andaversion towards pattern deviancy also relates to prejudice (Gollwitzer et al., 2017). Further, anxious attachment (compared to secure attachment) relatesto increased seeking of meaning in life (Bodner, Berg-man, & Cohen-Fridel, 2014), and Heintzelman et al.(2013) found participants to report a higher meaningin life after viewing patterned as opposed to random non-social stimuli. Researchers have also found participants from Asian cultures and with Asian backgrounds to exhibit higher levels of anxious attachment than those from Western cultures (e.g., Wang & Mallinckrodt, 2006; Wei, Russell, Mallinckrodt, & Zakalik, 2004), and members of East Asian cultures exhibit a greater dislike of non-social pattern deviancy than do European Americans (Gollwitzer et al., 2017; Kim & Markus, 1999). Additionally, anxious attachment is associated with neuroticism (Shaver & Brennan, 1992), a construct that is related to pattern deviancy aversion as well (Gollwitzer et al., 2017).

Finally, anxious attachment and aversion towards broken patterns both relate to heightened moral concern with regard to harm and purity violations (Gollwitzer,Martel, Bargh, & Chang, 2019; Koleva, Selterman, Iyer, Ditto, & Graham, 2014). Aside from these overlapping relationships, anxiously attached individuals fear inconsistencies and unreliability in the social domain, and these are exactly the qualities that pattern deviancy aversion captures more generally.

Whereas we expected anxious attachment to predict pattern deviancy aversion, we did not expect avoidant attachment to predict such aversion. Avoidant individuals have models of other people as unworthy of trust (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2003) and consistently act in accord with this conclusion—they simply avoid intimate social relationships (e.g., Beck & Clark, 2009). Unlike anxious attachment, avoidant attachment is neither associated with seeking reliability and consistency in close relationships, nor with fearing unreliability and inconsistency, and thus should not relate to pattern deviancy aversion.

A general aversion towards novel stimuli could potentially account for an effect of anxious attachmenton pattern deviancy aversion. Bowlby (1973) theoretically conceptualized anxious people as averse to novel stimuli, and some researchers have linked anxious attachment to an aversion towards novel, unfamiliar stimuli (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Arend, Gove, &Sroufe, 1979). Importantly, however, novel stimuli do not always break the surrounding consistencies. For instance, when novel stimuli (e.g., exotic fruits) are categorized into their own category (e.g., the category, exotic fruit; Murphy, 2004), rather than compared top revious examples, they should not be evaluated as pattern deviant. To account for novelty aversion, we included a measure of aversion towards novel stimuli that are not necessarily pattern deviant in Studies 1 through 4.

Aside from novelty aversion, we also controlled for participants’ aversion towards negative stimuli. We did so to control for the possibility that anxious attachment predicts pattern deviancy aversion simply because anxious attachment induces a general aversion towards negative stimuli (pattern deviant stimuli are generally evaluated negatively; Gollwitzer et al., 2017). Though we are unaware of any research linking anxious attachment to such negativity aversion, we wished to control for this possibility nonetheless. To do so, we included a measure of aversion towards negative but not necessarily pattern deviant stimuli in Studies 3 and 4 (aversion towards bad weather).