The Psychological Immune System: Pitfalls, Prospects, and (Research) Program

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.