The role of control motivation in mortality salience effects on ingroup support and defense.

Abstract

Terror management research has shown that mortality salience (MS) leads to increased support and defense of cultural ingroups and their norms (i.e., worldview defense, WD). The authors investigated whether these effects can be understood as efforts to restore a generalized sense of control by strengthening one's social ingroup. In Studies 1-3, the authors found that WD was only increased following pure death salience, compared with both dental pain salience and salience of self-determined death. As both the pure death and the self-determined death conditions increased accessibility of death-related thoughts (Study 4), these results do not emerge because only the pure death induction makes death salient. At the same time, Study 5 showed that implicitly measured control motivation was increased in the pure death salience condition but not under salience of both self-determined death and dental pain. Finally, in Study 6, the authors manipulated MS and control salience (CS) independently and found a main effect for CS but not for MS on WD. The results are discussed with regard to a group-based control restoration account of terror management findings.

Between the Lines of Us and Them: Identity Threat, Anxious Uncertainty, and Reactive In-Group Affirmation: How Can Antisocial Outcomes be Prevented?

“…In fact, Stollberg et al ( 2015 ) found that, when reminded of lacking personal control, people were more prone to identify with agentic (vs. non-agentic) groups. In addition to mere identifi cation, people have been shown to cope with threatened personal control by engaging in collective behaviour, indicated by increased in-group bias (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008 ;Greenaway, Louis, Hornsey, & Jones, 2014 ), conformity with in-group norms (Stollberg, Fritsche, & Jonas, submitted ), and pursuit of in-group goals . The latter effects of threatened personal control have been shown to be most pronounced when in addition to personal control threat, in-group agency was also at stake or when in-group identifi cation was high submitted ).…”

Experimental Manipulations of Personal Control do Not Increase Illusory Pattern Perception

“…For instance, researchers have used an autobiographical memory manipulation, by asking participants to recall and describe specific life episodes where they were lacking control (Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008;Rutjens, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2010); participants have been shown pictures related to a loss of control (de Arcos, Verdejo-Garcia, Peralta-Ramirez, Sanchez-Barrera, & Perez-Garcia, 2005); participants have been instructed to complete unsolvable tasks (Reed, Frasquillo, Colkin, Liemann, & Colbert, 2001); or participants performed a task in which they did not have control over actions they were asked to perform (Maier & Seligman, 1976). By using these manipulations it has been found that control threat results in a stronger endorsement of spiritual beliefs (Kay et al, 2009), a stronger belief in paranormal abilities (Greenaway, Louis, & Hornsey, 2013), an enhanced tendency to detect illusory patterns in noise (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), a stronger attachment towards in-groups (Agroskin & Jonas, 2014;Fritsche et al, 2013;Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008), a stronger preference for governmental control (Kay et al, 2008), more belief in science (Rutjens et al, 2010), and more prejudice toward outgroup members (Greenaway, Louis, Hornsey, & Jones, 2014). Thus, the empirical evidence for the notion that lack of control triggers compensatory strategies for restoring subjective feelings of control and predictability is quite impressive (for recent review, see : Landau et al, 2015).…”

On the perpetuation of ignorance: System dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information.

“…In the same way that people turn to interpersonal others and social groups to help them cope with various psychological needs and problems (e.g., Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhänel, 2008;Harkins, Latané, & Williams, 1980;Latané, Williams, & Harkins, 1979;Tajfel & Turner, 1986), so too do they turn to their political and institutional systems. As such, to the extent that an important issue is presented to people in a way that makes it appear especially complex, rather than motivating increased individual effort at addressing that issue, it may elicit increased dependence on the government.…”