Social psychologists commonly demonstrate the following effect: threaten people's beliefs or goals, and they will engage in a typical array of compensation behaviors. Often, these behaviors involve the affirmation of alternative beliefs or goals, which may or may not be relevant to the commitments that were threatened. Just as often, an aversive state is assumed to follow from the experience of the threat, which is understood to motivate the compensation efforts. Despite the analogous qualities of these effects, there are many different theories within the “threat-compensation” literature purporting to explain some or all of the analogous phenomena. In this introduction to the special issue (“Threat-Compensation in Social Psychology: Is There a Core Motivation?”), I will outline the rationale for potentially understanding these effects as following from a common psychological mechanism. I will also introduce the contributors to the special issue, who represent several prominent “threat-compensation” persp...