‘Heroes aren’t always so great!’ – Heroic perceptions under mortality salience

Schindler, Simon; Pfattheicher, Stefan; Reinhard, Marc André; Greenberg, Jeff

doi:10.1080/15534510.2019.1656668

Cited by 11 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Last but not least, data collection in the lab was currently impossible due to the pandemic. One could argue that effects like MS are sensitive to contexts and thus should only be conducted in the lab (i.e., highly controlled setting) to keep error variance low; however, producing preregistered MS effects online is in fact possible when taking measures to ensure data quality (e.g., Schindler et al, 2019a;Vail et al, 2019). We therefore only included participants who met our preregistered selection criteria for ensuring data quality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, preregistered and high-powered studies on MS effects are rare (for exceptions, see Dunn et al, 2020;Schindler et al, 2019a;Vail et al, 2019).…”

Section: The Mortality Salience Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After the MS manipulation, we included two commonly used distraction tasks (e.g., Klein et al, 2019;Schindler et al, 2019a): the 60 items of the PANAS-X and the morningness-eveningness questionnaire (Horne & Ostberg, 1976).…”

Section: Procedures and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Defending one’s worldviews under mortality salience – Testing the validity of an established idea

Schindler¹,

Reinhardt²,

Reinhard³

2020

Preprint

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Terror management theory (TMT) posits that mortality salience (MS) leads to more negative perceptions of persons who oppose one’s worldview and to more positive perceptions of persons who confirm one’s worldview. Recent failed replications of classic findings have thrown into question empirical validity for this established idea. We believe, that there are crucial methodological and theoretical aspects that have been neglected in these studies which limit their explanatory power; thus, the studies of this registered report aimed to address these issues and to directly test the worldview defense hypothesis. First, we conducted two preregistered lab studies applying the classic worldview defense paradigm. The stimulus material (worldview-confirming and -opposing essays) was previously validated for students at a German university. In both studies, the MS manipulation (between-subjects) was followed by a distraction phase. Then, in Study 1 (N = 131), each participant read both essays (within-subjects). In Study 2 (N = 276), the essays were manipulated between-subjects. Credibility attribution towards the author was assessed as the dependent variable. In both studies, the expected interaction effects were not significant. In a third highly powered (registered) study (N = 1356), we used a previously validated worldview-opposing essay. The five classic worldview defense items served as the main dependent measure. The MS effect was not significant. Bayesian analyses favored the null hypothesis. An internal meta-analysis revealed a very small (Hedges’ g = .09) but nonsignificant (p = .058) effect of MS. Altogether, the presented studies reveal challenges in providing strong evidence for this established idea.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, preregistered and high-powered studies on MS effects are rare (for exceptions, see Dunn et al, 2020;Schindler et al, 2019a;Vail et al, 2019).…”

Section: The Mortality Salience Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Defending one’s worldviews under mortality salience – Testing the validity of an established idea

Schindler¹,

Reinhardt²,

Reinhard³

2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In the past decade, many additional experiments have been published, providing evidence for the idea regarding various additional social norms, such as helping and responsibility (Gailliot et al, 2008), honesty (Schindler & Reinhard, 2015a;Schindler, Reinhard, et al, 2019), modesty (Du & Jonas, 2015, justice and fairness (Hirschberger et al, 2016;Jonas et al, 2013), tolerance (Greenberg et al, 1992;Vail et al, 2019), individualism andcollectivism (Courtney et al, 2021;Giannakakis & Fritsche, 2011;Jonas & Fritsche, 2012), religious norms (Rothschild et al, 2009;Schumann et al, 2014), pro-environmental norms (Fritsche et al, 2010;Harrison & Mallett, 2013), and the norm of reciprocity (Schindler et al, 2012(Schindler et al, , 2013. However, to date, no metaanalysis has quantified the established interaction effect between MS and social norm salience.…”

Section: Specifying Predictions Of Ms Effects: the Role Of Norm Saliencementioning

confidence: 99%

Do Salient Social Norms Moderate Mortality Salience Effects? A (Challenging) Meta-Analysis of Terror Management Studies

Schindler

Hilgard

Fritsche

et al. 2022

Pers Soc Psychol Rev

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Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypothesized interaction between MS and norm salience revealed a small-to-medium effect of g = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [0.26, 0.41]. Bias-adjustment techniques suggested the presence of publication bias and/or the exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom and arrived at smaller effect size estimates for the hypothesized interaction, in several cases reducing the effect to nonsignificance (range gcorrected = −0.36 to 0.15). To increase confidence in the idea that MS and norm salience interact to influence behavior, preregistered, high-powered experiments using validated norm salience manipulations are necessary. Concomitantly, more specific theorizing is needed to identify reliable boundary conditions of the effect.

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“…In some cases, null results have emerged despite more careful power planning and close adherence to the pre-registration (see Schindler et al, 2021) and despite efforts to adapt methods so they are appropriate to the cultural context of their sample (see Saetrevik & Sjåstad, 2019). On the other hand, there are also counterexamples of successful pre-registered experiments (Dunn, White, & Dahl, 2020;Schindler, Pfattheicher, Reinhard, & Greenberg, 2019;Vail, Courtney, & Arndt, 2019) but the search for the ideal study conditions continues.…”

Section: Managing the Terror Of Publication Bias: A Comprehensive P-curve Analysis Of The Terrormentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing the terror of publication bias: A comprehensive p-curve analysis of the Terror Management Theory literature

Chen¹,

Benjamin²,

Lai

et al. 2022

Preprint

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A key prediction of Terror Management Theory is that people affirm their cultural worldview after they are reminded of death. This mortality salience (MS) hypothesis has been widely explored, yet the presence of questionable research practices may impact the replicability of this literature. We assess the evidential value of the MS hypothesis by conducting a pre-registered p-curve analysis of 860 published studies. Our results suggest that there are nonzero effects in this literature and that power is larger for studies conducted with multiple delays between the independent and dependent variables, for studies that test for main effects in comparison to those that test for interactions, and for studies conducted more recently. However, since the estimated average power of MS studies is 26%, direct replications are unlikely to succeed. We recommend researchers consider our evidence when planning their samples, and that they anticipate smaller effects by increasing their sample sizes.

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‘Heroes aren’t always so great!’ – Heroic perceptions under mortality salience

Cited by 11 publications

References 43 publications

Defending one’s worldviews under mortality salience – Testing the validity of an established idea

Defending one’s worldviews under mortality salience – Testing the validity of an established idea

Do Salient Social Norms Moderate Mortality Salience Effects? A (Challenging) Meta-Analysis of Terror Management Studies

Managing the terror of publication bias: A comprehensive p-curve analysis of the Terror Management Theory literature

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