What happens when entire populations are exposed to news of impending existential threats? In the current study, we address this question by investigating the association between existential threats and the certitude of societal discourse. According to appraisal theory, threats give rise to anxiety and perceptions of uncertainty; as such, it predicts that exposure to life-threatening events will increase expressions of uncertainty. An alternative possibility is that people will respond to threats by utilizing psychological compensation mechanisms that will give rise to greater expressions of certainty. Across two studies, we measured linguistic certainty in more than 3.2 million tweets, covering different psychological contexts: (i) the 15 major terrorist and school shooting events that took place between 2016 and 2018; (ii) the COVID-19 pandemic. Consistent with the idea of compensatory processing, the results show that levels of expressed certainty increased following intentional and natural existential threats. We discuss the implications of our findings to theories of psychological compensation and to our understanding of collective response in the age of global threats.

当整个人口都接触到迫在眉睫的生存威胁的消息时会发生什么？在当前的研究中，我们通过调查存在威胁与社会话语确定性之间的关联来解决这个问题。根据评估理论，威胁会引起焦虑和对不确定性的感知；因此，它预测暴露于危及生命的事件会增加不确定性的表达。另一种可能性是人们将通过利用心理补偿机制来应对威胁，这将产生更多的确定性表达. 在两项研究中，我们测量了超过 320 万条推文的语言确定性，涵盖了不同的心理背景：(i) 2016 年至 2018 年期间发生的 15 起重大恐怖分子和学校枪击事件；(ii) COVID-19 大流行。与补偿性处理的想法一致，结果表明，在有意和自然存在的威胁之后，表达的确定性水平增加。我们讨论了我们的发现对心理补偿理论和我们对全球威胁时代集体反应的理解的影响。