Role of consciousness and accessibility of death-related thoughts in mortality salience effects.

Abstract

On the basis of terror management theory, research has shown that subtle mortality salience inductions engender increased prejudice, nationalism, and intergroup bias. Study 1 replicated this effect (increased preference for a pro-U.S. author over an anti-U.S. author) and found weaker effects when Ss are led to think more deeply about mortality or about the death of a loved one. Study 2 showed that this effect is not produced by thoughts of non-death-related aversive events. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that this effect occurs only if Ss are distracted from mortality salience before assessment of its effects. Study 4 revealed that although the accessibility of death-related thoughts does not increase immediately after mortality salience, it does increase after Ss are distracted from mortality salience. These findings suggest that mortality salience effects are unique to thoughts of death and occur primarily when such thoughts are highly accessible but outside of consciousness.

Adjusting to death: The effects of mortality salience and self-esteem on psychological well-being, growth motivation, and maladaptive behavior.

“…Then, to assess varying levels of death-related cognition, we had participants complete a measure of DTA recently used in this way by Vess et al (2009). The measure is a word completion task consisting of 28 word fragments, six of which can be completed with either a neutral or a death-related word (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994;Mikulincer & Florian, 2000;. For example, the fragment COFF_ _ can be completed as COFFEE (a neutral word) or COFFIN (a death-related word).…”

Terror management and cognitive-experiential self-theory: Evidence that terror management occurs in the experiential system.

“…Participants consistently have not reported elevated affect in response to mortality salience inductions, and, in debriefings, they have uniformly denied any awareness that the mortality salience treatment was particularly impactful or that it affected their responses to the targets they subsequently evaluated. In addition, a recent set of studies (Greenberg et al, 1994) indicated that participants who were distracted from the topic of death after a mortality salience induction engaged in heightened worldview defense, whereas participants who were forced to keep death-related themes in consciousness did not. Among participants who simply listed whatever thoughts came to mind after the mortality salience induction, a tendency to avoid further thoughts about death was associated with higher levels of worldview defense.…”

“…As in our prior research (e.g., Greenberg et al, 1994), we computed composite measures of evaluations of the targets--reactions to the authors and reactions to the arguments made by the authors--and conducted separate 2 (condition: mortality salience vs. control) × 2 (experimenter: informal vs. formal; between-groups) × 2 (target: pro-vs, anti-American; within-subjects) ANOVAs on each measure. The ANOVA on the author composite revealed a main effect for the target variable, with participants preferring the pro-(M = 6.31) over the anti-American (M = 3.87) target, F( 1, 43) = 80.79, p < .001.…”

“…By using one of these styles, the experimenter conducted a typical mortality salience study in which participants were induced to consider either their own mortality or a neutral topic and then were asked to evaluate two foreign students, one who wrote a pro-U.S, essay and one who wrote an anti-U.S, essay (e.g., Greenberg et al, 1994;Greenberg, Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Chatel, 1992). We predicted that although mortality salience would lead to exaggerated worldview defense when the experimenter was informal, this effect would be reduced or eliminated when the experimenter was formal.…”

“…This effect seems to be specific to the problem of death. Neither thoughts about other aversive events, such as an important exam, public speaking, or intense pain (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994;Greenberg et al, 1995), actual or imagined failure (HarmonJones et al, 1997), nor contemplating the worries of life after college have led to the same biasing of evaluations. Further support for the specificity of these effects to death is provided by the fact that thinking about these other aversive events has led to an increase in negative affect, whereas the mortality salience treatments used in our studies have not.…”