Social Identity and Worldview Validation: The Effects of Ingroup Identity Primes and Mortality Salience on Value Endorsement

Abstract

In this article, the authors report an investigation of the relationship between terror management and social identity processes by testing for the effects of social identity salience on worldview validation. Two studies, with distinct populations, were conducted to test the hypothesis that mortality salience would lead to worldview validation of values related to a salient social identity. In Study 1, reasonable support for this hypothesis was found with bicultural Aboriginal Australian participants (N = 97). It was found that thoughts of death led participants to validate ingroup and reject outgroup values depending on the social identity that had been made salient. In Study 2, when their student and Australian identities were primed, respectively, Anglo-Australian students (N = 119) validated values related to those identities, exclusively. The implications of the findings for identity-based worldview validation are discussed.

Normology: Integrating insights about social norms to understand cultural dynamics

“…Situations that make an outgroup salient or contain threats to one's identity also heighten adherence to ingroup norms (Elsbach, 2003;Petriglieri, 2011). Halloran and Kashima (2004) found that bicultural Australian aboriginals were more affected by group primes when under the condition of mortality anxiety, consistent with the hypothesis that group identifications buffer people against existential threats. Individuals also engage in prototypical behavior to earn standing within the group, which entitles them to leadership or idiosyncrasy (van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003).…”

Identity motives and cultural priming: Cultural (dis)identification in assimilative and contrastive responses

“…Similarly, the epistemic motive of need for closure leads to heightened conformity to the norms of one's culture in attributional judgments (Chiu, Morris, Hong, & Menon, 2000) and conflict resolution decisions (Fu et al, 2007). Biculturals with high levels of these existential and epistemic motives tend to conform to whichever of their two cultures has been made most salient by the situation (Halloran & Kashima, 2004;Kosic, Kruglanski, Pierro, & Mannetti, 2004).…”

Indigenous reconciliation in Australia: do values, identity and collective guilt matter?

“…Value expression is assumed to be tied to specific situations and contexts (Seligman & Katz, 1996). Research by Halloran and Kashima (2004) has shown, for instance, that Australian students supported egalitarianism more so when their Australian identity rather than when either their student or personal identity was made salient. Thus, participants in Study 1 were asked to complete a measure of a range of value types and a measure of reconciliation attitudes under two instructional sets: either as an Australian or an individual.…”