Existential Guarding
How we shield ourselves from inconvenient, undesirable & threatening facts (and how this process shapes society)
TLDR; aka Abstract
In Existential Guarding, Animal Taggart proposes a psychological framework to explain why humans resist inconvenient, undesirable, or threatening information, both as individuals and as societies. The central concept, “existential guarding,” describes a cascade of cognitive and behavioral responses—voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious—that protect individuals from facts or ideas that could disrupt their well-being, identity, or resource access. Taggart likens this to a physical reflex, such as “splinting” a broken limb or “antinociception” (dampening pain signals), suggesting that the mind instinctively shields itself from psychological threats in a similar way.
Taggart roots this idea in the brain’s evolutionary design, which favors pragmatic heuristic reduction—simplifying complex information for quick decision-making—over detailed analysis. This creates a “limiting threshold” that filters out information misaligned with existing beliefs or priorities, often before it’s consciously perceived as a threat. Unlike reactive defenses like motivated reasoning, existential guarding includes a passive rejection of “irrelevant” information, making it a broader and more automatic process.
The essay stands out for its ambition and interdisciplinary approach, weaving together insights from:
Psychology: Concepts like confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance.
Neurology: The brain’s tendency to conserve energy and rely on somatic markers.
Physiology: Analogies to protective bodily responses.
Sociology: Collective phenomena like echo chambers and tribalism.
Taggart introduces a draft/speculative tool, the “discredibility coefficient,” to estimate how likely someone is to critically evaluate a factual proposition. This heuristic considers factors like the information source, the observer’s relationship to it, and their personal or cultural context.
The framework extends beyond individual psychology to societal effects. Existential guarding, Taggart argues, scales up to create closed-mindedness, polarization, and resistance to evidence-based policy—patterns reinforced by unconscious filtering at both personal and collective levels. While acknowledging overlap with existing theories, Taggart positions existential guarding as a more comprehensive lens by emphasizing its involuntary, pre-conscious nature. Taggart posits the concept as a valuable starting point for understanding human behavior and societal dysfunction, inviting further research.
Key Points and Unique Contributions
Passive and Automatic: Existential guarding isn’t just a reaction to threats—it passively filters out misaligned information before it registers, a subtle but critical distinction from concepts like motivated reasoning.
Broad Scope: It operates physically (e.g., tension in response to stress), socially (e.g., avoiding dissent), and psychologically (e.g., dismissing uncomfortable ideas).
Interdisciplinary Ambition: The essay bridges multiple fields with vivid analogies, making abstract ideas tangible.
Societal Lens: It connects individual cognition to collective issues like echo chambers and policy inertia.
Part 1. Introduction & Background
Introduction
It is difficult to think critically about concepts, ideas, and outcomes that threaten one’s own sense of well-being, and a cascade of physiological processes suppresses this sort of critical thought, creating a kind of “limiting threshold” or impediment that must be overcome in order to engage with potentially threatening, and especially perhaps, merely inconvenient or presumptively irrelevant information.
This threatening or inconvenient information could be anything that jeopardizes social standing, or information that might require one to reevaluate any held position or assumption necessitating an expenditure of energy without clear purpose of reward. It could also be something that moderates access to resources (food, safety, shelter, sexual opportunity, or similar). It might be something that is perceived to interfere with social connections or relationships, emotional stability, narratives from which we derive meaning, and so forth. Importantly, this threatening or inconvenient information might be extremely subtle—it might be downright unimportant to us—all the more reason we may choose to ignore or suppress it, and prioritize usage of our mental and emotional resources elsewhere. We naturally seek to conserve our time, attention, and energy for purposes that align with our biological imperatives and conditioning.
I have personally felt a need to write on this topic, because I often found myself saying some version of this statement: “Every problem in the world points back to basic human psychology. The problem is us.” I was pointing at an automatic collapse in our ability to perceive things. We assume ourselves to be perceptive, moral, intelligent, and any number of other aspirational qualities and in some measure we may be all of these things. But every one of our abilities to interpret data and our senses fail us in ways that are largely invisible to us, and beyond that, symbolic representation of reality by means of language also comes with an inescapable restriction and reduction. At every turn, we run into the limits of our cognition, and while this has been studied, the ramifications have not been articulated to my satisfaction. I wanted to begin this essay to propose an explanatory framework for why the world is stuck—why history repeats itself, if you prefer, why we make the same choices over and again in our personal lives and in society. I’m not certain I’ve quite gotten there yet, but let me attempt to paint for you a coherent picture of a psychological phenomenon that serves to short circuit our ability to process information, in the manner of a “guarding” behavior or protective response, that prevents us from continuing to probe into ideas or concepts that stand at odds with the various needs of instinctive self-preservation, causing a kind of cognitive “wave function collapse” in perceptive ability when confronted with things that contradict or are irrelevant to our self interest, or the self interest of in-groups to which we identify or belong. This process is both voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious, it is a cascade of physiological processes that create distortions, biases, blind spots, and dissociations, the result of which is the creation of an explanatory gap between cognition and rationality.
Background
The human brain is a marvel of organic complexity. Through various processes of cognition our minds enable us to achieve all manner of social and technological wonders, and, because of this, we often incorrectly make the assumption that our brains are delivering to us a map of the world that is close to accurate, one that is proximally as complex as the objective matter stimulating our senses. We imagine our view of the world to have immense resolution. If our picture of reality is high resolution, compared to what, I wonder? On what scale and on what time horizon? In what domain of perception?
Our minds, that is, the cumulative synthesis of our cognition and awareness, are precisely tools for pragmatic heuristic reduction, not photorealism or modeling complexity. The purpose of all of our biological sensory and processing hardware is to rapidly and efficiently reduce the complexity we encounter in the environment. We do this in favor of energy conservation. We are oriented towards the protection and propagation of species, and one of the ways we do this is by working only as hard as we need to in order to meet the edicts of our biology. It was pointed out to me by Erwan Le Corre that only living things that move evolved brains. Non-ambulant life, trees, for instance, don’t require the same level of neural complexity that primates do, their interactions with the environment occur at a different cadence. One fundamental purpose for the complexity reduction mechanisms of our cognitive processes is to maintain an ability to rapidly respond to events in a highly chaotic and variable environment, one that is at any time potentially filled with unseen dangers. The human mind is an organ of simplification, not convolution. For example, our brains enabled our primitive ancestors to survey jungle scenes with dense foliage for possible threats, or to leap from stone to stone across rapidly moving waterways to evade predation or to capture prey. We scan the environment for what is relevant and discard any detail that isn’t useful. Like most animals, humans have evolved to prioritize conservation of resources under many conditions.
While it’s true that we can apply ourselves to complex feats of cognition, we often do so with great effort and at significant cost. Though we may learn to love learning and do it for its own sake (based on successive positive outcomes and a dopaminergic response to novelty or mastery), in many, perhaps even most circumstances, when we are not marshaling our intention towards the consumptive task of information processing with a critical eye, we fall back into a more laissez faire mode of cognition within which there remains a wide assortment of well-documented cognitive distortions, fallacies, omissions, and biases. Taken together, these documented, and perhaps as of yet undiscovered flaws of accuracy in human cognition comprise a profound feature of the human experience. The significant aspect of this “profound feature” that I want to articulate is an instinctive “guarding” behavior that both actively and passively limits our ability to process information critically, and in some cases, at all.
We may conceive of this as existential guarding. Existential guarding then is a cluster of interrelated cognitive biases, omissions, and distortions that, taken together, manifests as both neurological and behavioral responses to protect the human organism from potential, actual, or perceived threats to the overall well-being of an individual person, relationship, or group. This process occurs in both voluntary and conscious, as well as through involuntary and unconscious mechanisms. Existential guarding manifests physically, socially, and psychologically. Existential guarding is fundamentally an involuntary protective response, but one that can, and does, enter into the conscious mind as well. Indeed, we may consider that the distinction between the conscious awareness and unconscious or autonomic processes of the organism’s will towards self protection is indistinct, and in many respects, irrelevant for the purposes of understanding this phenomena, building on behaviorism.
Existential guarding can be moderated from the most subtle manifestation, such as a thought process being truncated early, before an undesirable awareness or conclusion might be reached, or something more definite, such as ongoing tangible and coordinated action to protect an organism’s perceived locus of identity, meaning, or well-being, either introspectively or within a social hierarchy. This idea builds on a number of related concepts, some of which I will attempt to outline and synthesize at a very high level. In essence, existential guarding describes the cumulative ramifications of related phenomenon from multiple cognitive biases and tendencies of perception, characterized by an organism’s propensity to cling to existing beliefs and schemas, both well-formed and indefinite, in the face of contradictory evidence, or, moreover, the regular failure to perceive contradictory evidence in the first place. While not completely new, my hope in naming this concept distinctly is to add value by crystallizing a multifaceted, and extremely subtle phenomenon under one precise term, to create more widespread understanding discourse, and potentially research in this area. Scholars in various fields have described related concepts getting at how directional needs and motives shape information processing in a biased, or goal-oriented, manner. The next steps would be formally theorizing the parameters, mechanisms, and moderators of the phenomenon, then designing rigorous experiments to empirically test its existence and boundaries. With enough accumulated experimental data, it could be established as a robust psychological concept that fills the gap in existing frameworks, although motivated cognition appears to come close, more on that later.
Guarding behavior (splinting)
Guarding behavior, in the context of an injury, refers to a protective posture or movement used to avoid pain or further injury. It is an involuntary reflex to prevent the affected area from being moved or used. Guarding can often occur after an acute injury like a sprain, strain, or fracture. The person will instinctively try to splint, or immobilize, the injured area by holding it in a certain position. Guarding can also develop over time from chronic conditions like arthritis. Gradual wear and pain make people instinctively avoid using the impacted joint through a certain range of motion. It is considered a sign of potential injury when a person is guarding an area and avoiding normal motion. It indicates pain or instability in the affected joint or muscles. So too with existential guarding, we see that such instinctive behavior may happen due to an acute or chronic response, and further, that such behavior may originate either consciously or unconsciously, and may move between these states at any time.
In the context of an injury, treatment for this sort of splinting behavior focuses on managing the underlying condition. This may involve rest, immobilization, medication, physical therapy, or surgery. Indeed, depending on the context, the guarding behavior may be desirable and protective in a way that encourages healing, though this may not always be the case and guarding behavior may cause other issues, such as muscle spasms or asymmetrical muscular development as a result of long term compensations. Generally, as the injury improves, the guarding should decrease. If it persists it may signify incomplete healing or another complication. When applied to our working conception of existential guarding, we could theoretically expect similar mechanisms, and it would be fairly straightforward to design testable hypotheses around these, a task I will leave to the academy.
A more technical term to describe such guarding behavior in the context of injuries is “splinting”. Splinting involves involuntary muscle tightening and stiffness around an injured region to prevent motion and further injury. Splinting minimizes use of the affected muscles and joints, which helps avoid further pain and damage. Prolonged splinting due to chronic conditions can lead to secondary complications like muscle contractures or loss of range of motion. Treatment aims to address the underlying cause while also working to gradually restore normal motion and flexibility. We may hypothesize that similar such gradual restoration of movement and flexibility psychologically might be possible in cases of existential guarding as well.
Antinociception
A related concept from medical literature that may be usefully applied to human psychology in the context of existential guarding is antinociception. Antinociception refers to the dampening or blocking of signals transmitted along pain pathways in the nervous system. It is distinct from the involuntary guarding response of splinting around an injured area. Some key differences between antinociception and splinting are that antinociception is an active process that inhibits pain perception through natural or medicated means. Antinociception acts centrally by dampening pain signaling at the spinal cord or brain levels. Splinting acts locally at the site of injury through muscle contraction. Common causes of antinociception include release of endorphins, administration of pain medications, nerve blocks, or spinal modulation. Splinting is caused by activation of neuromuscular reflexes. We see this antinociceptive effect in human psychology through the administration of certain drugs, such as MDMA (acutely) and in antidepressant therapy with long term administration, just to name a few.
To further clarify a distinction between these mechanisms, antinociception reduces the sensation of pain but does not physically immobilize the area whereas splinting rigidly immobilizes the area through stiffened muscles, acting as a splint. Assessment of antinociception involves testing pain perception thresholds whereas assessment of splinting looks for restricted active/passive range of motion. To sum up, antinociception and splinting both involve reducing pain but through different mechanisms—one by centrally blocking pain signals, and the other by locally splinting the injured area with guarded muscle contractions. They are distinct processes that can occur simultaneously.
In the context of existential guarding behavior, we may usefully take from both of these physiological responses in building our conceptual understanding of the processes by which an observer may reach discernment. There is an interesting underlying parallel here: just as the body instinctively guards against physical harm, the mind reflexively protects against psychological threats and does so to both significant and insignificant threats, to both physical needs (safety, resources, access to sex, etc) and also to cognitive stability and coherence (social status, identity, reputation, etc). Existential guarding then can be understood in a more positive reframe from the previous statement referencing the “complicated futility of ignorance” when we learn to see the group of related phenomena as a kind of "cognitive splinting" or perhaps even more apt, as a kind of "psychological immune response" of the organism to potentially disadvantageous information. This involuntary denial of inconvenient facts is in essence a kind of "psychological inflammation" process, whereby distorting reality provides short-term relief coupled with a potential for long-term maladaptation as the organism's view of reality is partially decoupled. The mind is splinting and guarding its perception of mental integrity and function.
A neurological investigation for some of the processes in existential guarding may be linked to the “somatic marker hypothesis” (Bechara and Damasio, 2005; Damasio et al., 1991) that highlights the importance of emotions in decision making. This hypothesis postulates that reasoned decision making is influenced by biasing signals (somatic markers) arising from changes in the body periphery. Essentially stating that decisions involve a complex interplay between emotional and body states. In the context of existential guarding, inconvenient facts that produce negative somatic markers may drive denial or inability to perceive information that appears contravital. This causes a kind of psychological "immobilization" or mental "limping" around inconvenient truths that clash with identity, desire, or other orientation. An implication here might be that just as prolonged physical guarding may lead to dysfunction, refusal to process threatening information may likewise lead to cognitive decline and rigidity within an individual and by extension a subculture, culture, or civilization.
We may further expand our analogy between mental and physical dysfunction in useful ways as we consider the accumulated knowledge of treatments, for instance, taking inspiration from real world “physical” therapy methods to gradually unpack the processes at play in existential guarding to restore psychological suppleness and flexibility, such as guided exposure to contradictory facts. This is fundamentally the promise of many therapies such as psychedelics and modalities like exposure therapy, trauma-informed therapy, or CBT more generally.
Part 2. Related Social Theories and Psychological Concepts
Similar psychological mechanisms
In order to better describe the idea of existential guarding it is useful for us to do a high-level survey of some of the existing psychological research that can be conceptually related to psychological splinting and antinociceptive processes:
Avoidance - As when someone avoids certain activities, people, or situations in order to reduce psychological pain or distress. This is akin to "splinting" in that the person restricts their normal behavior to protect themself.
Dissociation - This involves mentally "checking out" or disconnecting from a psychologically intense situation as a self-protective response. It is similar to "antinociception" in that it numbs or dampens mental anguish.
Repression - This defense mechanism involves unconsciously blocking out traumatic or troubling memories. Like "antinociception," it inhibits the brain from perceiving psychological pain signals.
Self-soothing behaviors - These refer to coping strategies that calm psychological distress, like comfort eating, rocking, or distraction techniques. They mimic the endorphin response of "antinociception."
Catastrophizing - This cognitive distortion involves an exaggerated negative mental set around pain or distress, which can reinforce avoidance similar to "splinting."
So in essence, avoidance and dissociation are psychological analogs to splinting and antinociception respectively.
Evidence for existential guarding
Empirical research provides considerable evidence that the human mind has evolved tendencies for involuntary denial, distortion, or forgetting of objective facts when they contradict important or desired narratives. Our brains unconsciously “edit” reality in various ways that are largely invisible to us, creating a de facto involuntary denial of inconvenient facts. Research examining the phenomenon and processes of involuntary or unconscious denial of inconvenient facts and truths includes:
Motivated Reasoning - The concept of "motivated denial" or "motivated reasoning" does come up in some prior psychological literature, though not always with precisely the same meaning or framework I am developing here. Social psychologist Ziva Kunda wrote about "motivated reasoning" in the 1990s, describing how directional goals or needs influence reasoning processes when evaluating information. People are prone to denials and distortions in service of desired conclusions. Research demonstrates that people apply more critical scrutiny to data that goes against their ideology, while uncritically accepting consistent data. This lets them dismiss inconvenient info. When new information clashes with important motivations like preserving a positive self-image or group identity, people are more likely to irrationally dismiss rather than rationally engage with it. Similarly, psychologists David Dunning and Ian Glover discuss "motivated blindness"—the tendency to be unaware of inconvenient facts that threaten cherished views and identities. They describe it as a form of motivated reasoning. Research in political psychology uses "motivated skepticism" or "identity-protective cognition" to explain partisan biases in assessment of facts, though focused more on deliberate than involuntary processes. Philosopher Amelie Rorty describes "motivated invincible ignorance"—willful avoidance of inconvenient facts to protect valued belief systems and conceptions of self. Literary scholar Daniel O'Hara writes about techniques of "motivated refusing"—rhetorical devices for suppressing unpalatable knowledge while maintaining denial. Psychoanalysts have long posited defense mechanisms like denial and repression as unconscious means to avoid "motivated knowing" of troubling truths.
Motivated Forgetting - Studies show people are more likely to unconsciously forget information that contradicts strongly held beliefs, ideologies, or self-image. This allows inconvenient facts to be involuntarily “blocked” from memory.
Motivated Inattention - Evidence indicates people unconsciously avoid perceiving undesirable details in their environment. Inconvenient facts can literally go unnoticed even when physically salient.
Repression - This classic Freudian defense mechanism involves involuntary forgetting of traumatic memories and truths that threaten the ego. Repressing inconvenient facts renders them inaccessible to conscious awareness.
Biased Assimilation - Research shows we automatically interpret ambiguous information as consistent with our prior views. This can lead to unconsciously distorting inconvenient facts to 'fit' internal narratives.
Normalcy Bias - This cognitive bias causes people to underestimate or minimize threats. It can lead to unintentional blindness to disturbing facts signaling threats or problems requiring change.
Illusory Truth Effect - Studies demonstrate unconscious perception of a statement as true after repeated exposure, regardless of its actual accuracy. This enables involuntary acceptance of misinformation as fact.
Confirmation Bias - Studies show people preferentially seek out and recall information that confirms their existing views. This bias allows people to intentionally avoid information that contradicts their narratives. The tendency to seek out and favor information that confirms existing beliefs can lead to persevering in potentially flawed beliefs through subconscious preferential attention and recall of confirmatory over contradicting information. Confirmation Bias allows inconvenient facts to fade from focus.
Cognitive Dissonance - When someone's beliefs are contradicted by new information, it can create mental discomfort. Research shows people are more likely to reject or avoid the discordant information in order to reduce this dissonance.
Choice Supportive Bias - After making a decision, this bias leads people to ignore post-choice info that undermines their choice in order to avoid regret. It enables sticking with willful ignorance.
Solution Aversion - Some studies show individuals are less likely to accept factual information about a problem if it also presents a solution they ideologically oppose. The solution aversion leads to avoiding inconvenient facts.
Belief bias - Evaluating the logical strength of arguments based on their plausibility or consistency with beliefs rather than purely on logic. Can contribute to belief perseverance.
Congruence bias - The tendency to more readily accept conclusions that fit within our system of beliefs over incongruent conclusions. Leads to maintaining beliefs despite contradictions.
Cognitive inertia - The persistence of existing thought patterns and resistance to changing beliefs even when presented with disconfirming information.
Conservatism bias - A theoretical principle where people stick with prior beliefs and fail to update enough in response to new evidence.
This list is by no means exhaustive but serves to demonstrate that a range of cognitive biases and mechanisms for the sort of motivated reasoning that comprise existential guarding have been thoroughly demonstrated in psychological research, enabling people to intentionally maintain ignorance by avoiding, dismissing, or forgetting information that contradicts their beliefs, desires, or ideology. The mind protects itself from mental dissonance much like it physically protects injuries through guarding.
Similar, but divergent theoretical frameworks
There has been some psychological research examining how threats and disincentives to core needs and motives can make people resistant or even incapable of processing information. A good deal of psychological research has demonstrated that when new information clashes with key psychological needs, like preserving a coherent sense of identity, belonging, or meaning, or when ideas or information make desired outcomes more difficult, people are prone to subconsciously resist rather than rationally consider it. The mind autonomically protects itself from even subtle and inconsequential threats, especially when doing so comes at a low perceived cost.
Among these a handful of theories attempt to fuse some of these concepts into a more unified model, though none that I have found capture exactly what I hope to signify under the umbrella of existential guarding.
Some psychologists have proposed unified models that bring together these various cognitive biases and defense mechanisms under an overarching framework for how the mind avoids threatening information. For example, Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory proposes an "experiential system" rooted in emotion and instinct, which defends against information that would require acknowledging threatening ideas that clash with identity, relationships, or worldviews held by the "rational system". Terror Management Theory posits that all defense mechanisms and motivated biases ultimately serve death anxiety defense. Information that surfaces mortality fears triggers an overarching "distal defense" that distorts information processing to suppress the threat. Motivated Social Cognition integrates theories of cognitive dissonance, self-affirmation, and social identity to propose a motivation-driven model. Information that threatens the need for self-consistency, group belonging, or certainty prompts biased cognition that distorts truth. The Strategic Ignorance model unifies rational ignorance and willful ignorance under one framework driven by defense of mental coherence. Information discordant with narrative identity is suppressed by a mix of unconscious and deliberate avoidance to maintain psychological equilibrium. Self-Affirmation Theory research shows people are less able to be objective about information that threatens their sense of self-integrity or adequacy. Affirming an unrelated core value can temporarily reduce this defensiveness. Naive Realism posits that people see their own views as objective reality. Contradictory worldviews seem fundamentally biased or flawed. This makes it nearly impossible to comprehend opposing perspectives. Classic Freudian defense mechanisms like denial, repression and projection are ways the ego copes with threatening information by distorting reality and blocking truths from awareness.
So while not definitive, each of these integrative theories attempt to fuse empirical research under an umbrella framework for how our minds unconsciously distort threatening truths to protect our core needs, stability, and perceived realities—much like the body's physical immune responses. More multidisciplinary work could further unify these psychological mechanisms.
Of the theories and research I discovered, motivated social cognition appears, to my untrained mind, to be the most similar to what I have conceptualized as existential guarding. I am not a trained social scientist, but rather an individual observer trying to call attention to a complex process that governs and limits our ability to think. My model appears to make some distinctive predictions that are falsifiable and useful like worse comprehension for belief-threatening facts, even without emotional investment, as well as the application of the idea to broad societal issues and heuristic assessment, but I accept that I may be restating concepts that have already been articulated in the field of psychology and welcome such feedback from someone who actually studies this stuff.
Part 3. Objections to the concept of existential guarding
Some potential objections or criticisms to the proposed concept come to mind that I want to briefly address. Foremost, it may be that it's just a re-description of existing concepts—if this is the case, it is due to my own ignorance of the related fields of psychology and evolutionary biology. On the other hand, existential guarding may build usefully on prior theories and consolidate them into an explanatory framework with distinct parameters.
Amoral
It is critical that we understand the process of existential guarding without seeing it through a moralistic lens. It is tempting to judge failures of discernment as “bad” and accuracy as “good”.
Criticisms and qualifications
Another criticism may be that I have focused too much on motivation here. I should state unequivocally that failures of discernment are not only an effect of motivational processes, but may also stem from non-motivated biases and other perceptual or cognitive failures and deficiencies. Both motivated and non-motivated pathways can work in parallel.
Similarly, it can be said that I have not fully defined boundary conditions for existential guarding as a concept, keeping it intentionally broad, as to capture the entire impact and effect of bringing together disparate facets of our cognitive unreliabilities. It operates on a continuum versus being a single system. The framework is conceptualized as a tendency/effect rather than an absolute, individual moderators like an observer’s proclivity for an analytic thinking style would be expected to moderate the effect. It will be easier to test in the context of central rather than peripheral beliefs and perceptions, but it is precisely the more subtle aspects of the phenomenon that need the most investigation and that add up to significant, invisible social dysfunction.
Another area for potential criticism is that existential guarding could be over-applied as a concept and used nefariously to reinforce conspiracy theories, more on this later. To put a finer point on it, this framework does not imply all unaccepted facts are true, only that they may be, even those that are widely held. As ever, it is ultimately evidence that matters. Understanding mechanisms of denial and failed discernment is not the same as endorsing those things. The goal is revealing a core characteristic of cognition and its impact on society. I want us to realize that we cannot overcome this—and the best defense is to create tools to reveal it that can be leveraged readily in daily life. We may overcome a bias in a discrete moment, but we should avoid overly optimistic prognostications that they can be permanently changed. Vigilance and mnemonics may be the best strategy for mitigation.
An unflinching, partially, but not wholly, pessimistic stance on human cognitive capacity is warranted given our self-knowledge, psychological research, and the historical record.
Falsifiability and Research
Falsifiability may be raised as an objection. While it is beyond my ability or interest to design laboratory tests to falsify some of the hypotheses I’m outlining here, here are some rough ideas and constraints I would suggest. Comprehension studies to test comprehension/recall of factual information that contradicts both strongly held beliefs and subtle and inconsequential “inconveniences” versus neutral facts. If no significant difference emerges, it would falsify the hypothesized effect. Careful consideration would need to be given in determining tests that would capture the more subtle dismissals and omissions of thought. Neuroimaging could be used to scan people exposed to belief-threatening versus neutral facts. If threatening information does not provoke greater activity in areas like the amygdala or ACC involved in emotional processing, it would undermine the theory. Attention tracking could be used in the form of eye movement tracking or some other measurement of attention while people review texts containing challenging facts versus ones that align with their beliefs. Equality of attention would falsify the concept. Further, a study could be devised to assess the characteristics of fact obviation: if denial of particular facts is not predicted by strength of prior beliefs, need for cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity and other key psychological characteristics, it would weaken the hypothesis. If techniques like self-affirmation that reduce defensiveness do not make people more receptive to inconvenient facts, it would suggest motivational protection is not a factor. Measuring denial rates between participants trained in analytical thinking versus controls could determine if existential guarding is mitigated by deliberative thinking, as predicted. Assess how much value individuals place on seeking truth. Lack of correlation between this trait and denial of threatening facts could potentially undermine the theory, in a properly designed study. Finally, consistently failing to reproduce the effect under rigorous experimental conditions focused on involuntary responses would cast doubt on its validity.
Some potential research directions for investigating existential guarding might include neuroimaging studies on neural correlates of processing desire-mitigating and identity-threatening facts that imply existential instability or frustration of the organism. This could help reveal unknown mechanisms. Experiments assessing comprehension and recall of desire- and belief-challenging facts versus neutral facts controlling for motivation. This could demonstrate the involuntary nature of the effect. Longitudinal studies on how existential guarding tendencies in youth affect assimilation of information over lifespan and throughout educational experiences. This could reveal developmental factors.
Part 4. Existential guarding as a conceptual lens
Existential guarding as a label is meant to be an intriguing name that evocatively conveys the sense of defending one's desires and assumptions, including those that provide meaning and coherence to existence, but also those that merely shore up one’s access to resources, comfort, and the like. Critically, this cascade of cognitive processes occur not only for core beliefs and matters of identity, but are also present in almost imperceptible interactions and thought processes. We see existential guarding behaviors when we encounter contradictions to narratives that lend stability and purpose, when self-protective responses are triggered by discordant data or facts that force us to confront the fragility of our preferred assumptions about our wants, self image, community, origins, morality, ontology, teleology and other schemas that imbue life with security and significance. Taken together, we see diverse "pathways" that produce the overall downstream phenomenon of existential guarding, when an organism is confronted with inconvenient realities. Guarding responses can be triggered both by threats and by mere inconveniences to the conceptual frameworks we use to make sense of the world, as well as by obstacles to our physical and material security or well-being that tie into our survival instincts.
Personal implications of existential guarding
At the individual level, existential guarding can have significant implications for a person's psychological health, relationships, and ability to perceive reality accurately. When our minds reflexively protect beliefs, desires, and assumptions from contradictory facts, it can reinforce distorted thinking, rigidity, and both adaptive and maladaptive ways.
Existential guarding prevents us from updating our mental models of reality, leading to a disconnect between our beliefs and actual events. This can make it harder to anticipate problems or changes in our social and physical environments. It can promote ignoring red flags and warning signs. Clinging to comfortable illusions over inconvenient truths puts us at an evolutionary disadvantage. Guarding behaviors that distort or avoid negative feedback may promote both overconfidence in flawed strategies or under-confidence in positive experimentation causing repeated mistakes and inhibiting performance improvements. At an emotional level, existential guarding provides momentary relief by blocking out cognitive dissonance but long-term avoidance of processing difficult truths may ultimately intensify malaise, anxiety, depression, and decrease life satisfaction when those suppressed realities inevitably resurface. The phenomenon of existential guarding has a wide range of impacts for each of us personally, including:
Closed-mindedness
Strong tendencies for guarding can make us resistant to ideas that challenge our worldviews, compromising openness to new perspectives. This can limit personal growth and constrict optionality in our lives.
Echo chambers
We may self-select into social groups and media that align with and reinforce our existing narratives. This can isolate us from discordant ideas and create "echo chamber" effects.
Relationship breakdowns
Friends or family members with clashing assumptions or ideologies may experience tension, conflict or dissolution of their connections due to the inability to bridge divergent worldviews. Each person guards their own narrative.
The inability to assimilate contradictory knowledge also fuels interpersonal conflicts. When family or community members cannot acknowledge factual realities that threaten shared worldviews, it shuts down discourse and fractures relationships. It prevents finding common ground. Existential guarding magnifies epistemic disagreements.
Life trajectory
Significant guarding behaviors early in life could theoretically narrow a person's development, foreclosing exploration of alternative beliefs, values or interests divergent from familial or cultural norms. This may impact life paths.
Wellness outcomes
Some research links conditions like depression and anxiety to cognitive distortions like those underlying existential guarding. Guarding may maintain negative thought patterns and undermine resilience.
Decision-making
Business leaders or policy makers who experience these effects of inherent existential guarding may dismiss inconvenient data, projections and advice that contradict their plans or mental models, compromising decision quality and adaptation.
Truth orientation / pain tolerance / orientation toward a higher ideal
Proactively orienting oneself on a core identity level towards objective truth may provide a partially protective effect against some of these processes. Put into practice this amounts to a form of training to increase pain tolerance in the face of difficult and undesirable facts. Methods to mitigate personal implications could involve deliberately exposing oneself to opposing ideologies, consciously fact-checking one's beliefs, or techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy to bring problematic thought patterns to light. Overall, recognizing one's own existential guarding tendencies is the first step toward addressing associated downsides.
Critically, we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that these biases are surmountable. We cannot overcome our cognitive deficiencies entirely, they will always significantly impact our ability for discernment. Instead of seeking merely to rid ourselves of them, bringing them more fully into our view is the path to understanding. We become the lens that is aware of its convection, range, depth, and perspective. We train ourselves to understand that when we perceive reality, we are perceiving ourselves.
Societal implications of existential guarding
As we begin to understand the mechanisms of existential guarding in the individual we can extrapolate these effects on society as a whole. There is no combined number of human beings that may free themselves entirely from the reality-distorting effects of existential guarding. This means that all of our sciences, institutions, and crowd-sourcing are impacted by the same restricting and distorting factors. Strong convergence on in-group ideologies and assumptions creates intergroup divides. This can breed tribalism and animosity between identity groups each guarding separate worldviews. Government or media sources can manipulate target audiences by triggering existential guarding against inconvenient narratives that threaten power structures or undermine social control through the use of propaganda. Heavily guarded, but false assumptions across legislative and regulatory bodies can make evidence-based reforms difficult when they clash with institutionalized mental models and incentives. This creates policy resistance and inertia.
The framework of existential guarding is particularly useful to clearly point out why the majority opinion might often be wildly inaccurate. We see that distorted, incomplete, and flawed understanding is a matter of course, in all contexts. This guarding mechanism is a feature of our species, not a bug as it allows us to overlook realities that are at odds with our own needs, wants, desires, etc. With this in mind, we may begin to understand that we are in some sense always wrong, and that the question is not one of if, but a matter of, to what degree.
Existential guarding operates at collective levels powerfully shaping all cultures and societies. At the collective level, existential guarding has concerning societal impacts in terms of polarization, institutional dysfunction, and cycles of historical errors. When groups reflexively dismiss inconvenient facts that threaten shared ideologies and stability, this propagates collective ignorance of both risks and current problems. Critical signals get ignored and otherwise stifled. Widespread existential guarding behavior distorts inconvenient facts to protect both dominant and subcultural paradigms, leading to phenomena like groupthink, mass delusions, and normalization of corruption. Society loses touch with factual reality. The phenomenon reinforces belief echo chambers and confirmation biases across networks. When whole communities dismiss contradictory evidence, false beliefs become entrenched when doing so shores up in-group power. Questioning gets suppressed. This forms a foundation for extreme social polarization.
Existential guarding creates an empathy gap across ideological lines, preventing groups from understanding different worldviews and finding common ground. Well-meaning people can behave destructively often without realizing it. The cycle of demonization and tribalism accelerates. Societies that lack the ability to process hard truths and adapt struggle to respond effectively to threats. Mass denial of reality has a fundamentally erosive effect on social and individual health over time, though for some groups and individuals it may provide various advantages in the short term.
On the other hand, cultures that retain cognitive flexibility, that hold up truth-seeking behavior as a moral and social guiding ideal, and that prioritize open discourse may have a long term advantage in the face of complex threats. More mental diversity and less existential guarding allows faster reactions to risk factors. There is something life-giving about truth, even if its pursuit comes at a great personal cost.
Societies fail to learn from past mistakes because we have so far failed to become aware of the limitations of our own perceptions. Potential mitigations could include improving critical thinking education, raising awareness of existential guarding as a societal blind spot, incentivizing intellectual honesty in media and policy debates, and encouraging pluralistic discourse across ideological divides using tools of behavioral modification. Recognizing existential guarding as a systemic issue is prerequisite to designing interventions that could moderate associated harms. Recognizing that all “systemic” issues are themselves issues of human—and closer to home—our own personal psychology is a required first step. We do not overcome our fallibilities but we may become aware of them. This is the actual nature of the integration of the shadow. It is not a process of making the darkness within us less destructive or antisocial, it is about bringing those aspects of ourselves and our societies under the microscope, and into our own estimation of ourselves as we move through the world. I recently re-read Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. What struck me so profoundly this time around reading those texts as an adult was that understanding them as an indictment of authoritarian government is only the most surface read. Orwell was holding up a mirror, and his indictment was against each and every one of us. Orwell was warning us about the nature of our own minds. It is our own psychology that creates the world as it we encounter it and it is through reaching a more complete understanding of that psychology that we may open up new avenues for societal development.
Appendix.
Another goal for this work is to create a shorthand for understanding a given observer’s likelihood of being able to reach discernment about a given facticity. We might imagine the creation of a simple formula for the analysis of potential veracity in an individual’s internal cognition, taking into account a reductive set of parameters. For a given factual proposition about reality (R) we might calculate a heuristic, or algorithmic, “discredibility coefficient” (C) on a normalized scale from 0 to 1 to discount the likelihood that an individual observer (O) might be able to reach critical discernment about the facticity of (R) given their relationship to the source (S) of (R) taking into account confounding biases and alignment (A), based on the both the physical and psychosocial environment of the observer (O). This could include their personal and cultural situation, identity, beliefs, desires, incentives and aversions, both conscious and unconscious.) Such a formula would not be able to be applied universally because assessments and situations are too complex, however, in a given context such a reductive tool might find a usefulness.
For example:
C = (w1S + w2R + w3A + w4O) / (w1 + w2 + w3 + w4)
Where:
C = Discredibility coefficient (C) is a number between 0 and 1 that indicates the discount rate for the likelihood that an observer (O) will be able to reach critical discernment (D) of a factual proposition or piece of information about reality (R).
S = Source score (0 to 1) a weighted assessment for the alignment the observer has with the source of R. Characteristics of the information source:
Type: Empirical data vs. Interpretive claims
Reliability: Level of credibility based on historical accuracy, transparency of methodology, etc.
Bias: Extent to which the source displays inherent partiality.
Alignment with O: Degree to which the source perspective aligns with observer's worldview.
R = Information score (0 to 1) a weighted assessment for the alignment the observer has with R (in other words, does O wish R to be true). Inherency of the information:
Empirical basis: Whether grounded in objective, verifiable evidence
Logical coherence: Internal consistency and soundness of reasoning
Cognitive complexity: Difficulty for O to fully comprehend
A = Assimilation score (0 to 1) a weighted assessment for the alignment the observer has with R (in other words, does O wish R to be true).
Perceived benefits and drawbacks for O in assimilation
Emotive content: Level of emotional triggers or salience for O
Social effects: Impacts to interpersonal relationships and standing
Psychological factors: Threats/opportunities related to identity, biases, beliefs
Functional value: Upsides/downsides applicable to instrumental goals
Sunk-cost impediments: Retracting previously held positions
O = Observer score (0 to 1) a weighted assessment for the observer’s ability to engage with R. Observer dispositional factors:
Critical thinking capability: Innate capacity and cultivated tendency for objective analysis
Confirmatory biases: Level of motivated reasoning and belief preservation
Dogmatism: Degree of ideological rigidity and resistance to contrary views
Need for cognitive closure: Urgency for unambiguous beliefs and conclusions, avoidance and resolution of cognitive dissonance
w1.....w4 = weights for each component (sums to 1)
Each sub-component (S, R, A, O) is rated on a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning complete impartiality and 1 meaning high discredibility. The weights allow flexibly dialing the relative importance of the factors based on applied context. The final equation takes the weighted average of the components and normalizes to a 0 to 1 range via dividing by the sum of weights. This normalized design allows the coefficient to give the probability that discredibility will occur, spanning the full range of 0% to 100%. It also allows neat decomposition into sub-factors each with the same consistent interpretation.
We might further convolute our model, which I will sketch out at a high level:
Defining source (S). Is R empirical data Re or is it interpreted data Ri as put forth by another human or group (S)?
If Ri, is the group or individual powerful and if so, how powerful is A in relation to the observer O?
Is S powerful?
How powerful and how proximal is the potential for this power to be exerted on O?
Is O aligned with S?
If so, in what realm and to what extent?
If S is empirical data Re, does it conflict with any aspects of the psychosocial environment of the observer?
If so, in what domain and to what extent?
Does discernment or acceptance (D) of R:
Provide benefit or detriment (B) to O?
Is B direct or indirect?
How impactful or costly is B for O?
In what domain(s) is B accrued (resources, status, opportunity, social, personal)?
Does D align with/violate any aspects of O’s identity, needs, wants, desires, or beliefs?
Is this alignment core to O or more casual or more loosely identified?
Does D create or mitigate an opportunity cost?
Is D connected to instinctive O drives or fears?
In what direction?
Obviously, this sketch is far from complete, but one can readily see how a useful heuristic might be created by a relatively fixed set of parameters and employed programmatically. The goal for such a model would be to identify the minimal set of parameters that might yield predictably reliable and useful information about the ability to think critically to create an accurate enough model for an applied context. We are looking for something efficient and on the whole accurate, perhaps following the Pareto principle, where 80% reliability is a good enough heuristic depending on context. Ironically, the model would be limited by the same discredibility coefficient as its results, garbage in, garbage out, as they say. How capable are we of discerning and assessing each of the parameters in the model? With some further revision and research we may begin to approach a functional model for what Kurt Vonnegut dubbed “the complicated futility of ignorance”.