The problem of hostile attitude

Abstract

The data of our earlier studies of the connection of hostility with the constructive thinking allowed us to put forward a hypothesis about the influence of the hostile installation on the process of processing information. In particular, we assumed a leading of negative expectations to the fear of novelty, complexity and ill-structurality, and the process of generalization. It was also expected that in the cognitive sphere, hostility manifests in excessive sharpness, resoluteness of judgments, over-sureness in one’s own ability to correctly understanding in what is happening. Our empirical study was conducted on 189 subjects of different ages using 10 techniques. It made it possible to clarify the concept of the mechanism of work of the World Image as an integral formation of cognitive-affective processes, and to consider a number of various psychological characteristics as a complex of regular manifestations of the hostile attitude. It has been shown that hostility, narcissism, categorical thinking, personal insignificance feeling, anomie bias, and extra-punitive reactions constitute a system with positive feedback, where strengthening one of these qualities leads to the strengthening of all others. It was found that in adults, hostility is associated with the ill-processing of information, and in youth, there is not such a connection. In young people with high hostility, the feeling of the complexity and incomprehensibility of the world is independent of the hostile attitude, and in hostile adults, it is the danger bias that predetermines both the reaction to the new / complex and the confidence in the fidelity of one’s own "conspiracy theory". It has been suggested that the hostile image of the world, only due to the accumulation of experience begins to influence the internal "landscape" and induce the interpretive mechanisms that process information in the key of trouble-anticipating; so, the tension caused by the new / complex turns into intolerance to uncertainty, and the interest in the motives of another person's actions becomes a conviction in the accuracy of one’s own suspicions.