The New Republic has an article called "Death Grip: How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success." It reports on the research of psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynsk, who believe "a fear of our own mortality guides many of our political choices without our ever realizing it."
Their first experiment was published in 1989. To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense" -- their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religi- osity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger -- they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality. One asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead." They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.
Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called "mortality salience" affected people's view of other races, religions, and nations. When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jewish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.) They also conducted numerous experiments to show that mortality exercises evoked patriotic responses. The subjects who did the exercises took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States than the control group did and also expressed greater veneration for cultural icons like the flag. The three even devised an experiment to show that, after doing the mortality exercises, conservatives took a much harsher view of liberals, and vice versa.
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Wow. It'd be interesting if there were a similar, undiscovered key in the opposite direction, making people unconsciously more tolerant.
Folks need to read Ernest Becker now more than ever.
what else is the department of homeland security but the institutionalized fear of death...land of the monitored and home of the fearful... twisted little pissant country we have become
recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense" -- their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religiosity to a preference for law and order
The researchers refer to a preference for law and order as an "emotion," i.e. because it can be influenced by emotion, ergo it is implied to be purely irrational. They use the term "religiosity" without defining it, but imply by context that it's a bad thing (it comes right after "intolerance," which most people would agree is bad), instead of a term like "spirituality" which would risk raising eyebrows (what, Buddhist monks are driven by fear?).
So basically it's your typically sloppy psychology research combined with a political agenda.
I've had the privilege of knowing several researchers in this area. It's always fascinating to read their papers or hear their presentations - I should get to hear lots more at a social psychology conference next week.
Like the study says, "worldview defense" is probably the most accurate term for what happens when mortality is made salient. So a person who defines tolerance as a part of their worldview will in fact become more tolerant rather than less so. The typical results of people becoming more nationalistic and conservative only occurs when people are already leaning that way to begin with (which is fairly common.) Raise the mortality salience of a bunch of Quakers and you would find they would become even more peace-loving and trans-national than normal.
As a graduate student, I worked with one of the psychology professors/researchers above. The theory that they coined is called "terror management theory" if you want to investigate it further.
The results of their research around raising one's awareness of mortality did tend to show the "world-view defense." Some argue that the theory is just another interpretation of psychological control theories, which posit that people like to keep perceived control over their universe, and that death is the ulitmate in uncontrollable. Thus, almost from an evolutionary perspective, we tend to support those similar, and discount those who are different.
With that being said, these guys were the tree most liberal professors I've still ever met, and their research often focused on finding outcomes that explained why conservatives "were bad people."
If you study the psychology in depth, you find that A. Psychologists tend to be pretty darn liberal (note the traditions of Berkley), B. like to vilifiy conservative political philosophies and explain them away (e.g., Conservatives = Authoritarians = Racists).
So for terror management theory, they suggest that "When death saliency is raised, conservatives become racists and liberals become much more open and accepting."
Value-based research like this permeates the literature... But still it is a pretty cool theory.
The researchers refer to a preference for law and order as an "emotion," ... So basically it's your typically sloppy psychology research combined with a political agenda.
That is what the mainstream newspaper article says, not the researchers. Anyone who has been the subject of a media article/story will know that however well meaning the journalist, the story will be botched/miscommunicated in important ways. I can assure you social psychologists do not simply lump all these things together as emotions and psychologists certainly do not hold a universally derogatory view towards emotions or religiosity. Operational definitions of these terms and how they were derived can be found in the research articles themselves (try Google Scholar), but it would not be feasible to include all of the technicalities and methods in a short news article.
Thanks for posting this, Mark. This is the most interesting thing I've read in a long time.
Perhaps Al Gore can use the technique to aid the action against Global Climate change.
Big surprise here.
I've been saying for years now that humans work on an obviously primate neuropsychology entirely based on the fear of death.
Read Alan Harrington's "The Immortalist". He explained all this decades ago. The fear of death underlies absolutely every single act a human undertakes. The only question is whether the act will be a "fight" response or a "flight" response. Ninety percent of human actions are "flight" responses - a denial of the fact of death and an evasion of responsibility for coming up with a fight response to deal with it.
Socially, humans work on the following basis:
"If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong. And I'll kill you if I have to to prove it."
Nice to see some scientific verification of this fact, but it has been obvious to me for a couple decades now.
David Glenn wrote about this in The Chronicle of Higher Education prior to the 2004 elections (though apparently few were swayed by the idea that they were voting based on fear). See http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=xv3gDrszXNtmFWnkmxGsxCtqTzqCrwNf (link is good for 5 days).
This fits with one of my most striking memories post-9/11. My uncle, a retired psychiatrist, and his wife have always been conservative, but their support of the invasion of Iraq really surprised me because they're both quite intelligent and the invasion was so obviously irrational.
My aunt said, during one of our discussions of the invasion, "Well, one thing I know for sure is I don't want to die," or something like that. The risk of an elderly white couple living in Seattle actually experiencing a terrorist attack is as close to zero as possible, yet this fear was offered as a reason for their support of the invasion. I thought it was very strange at the time, and Solomon et al. finally explain it for me.
"If you're right, I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm dead - and that can't be allowed. So I'm right and you're wrong. And I'll kill you if I have to to prove it."
- pure briliance! I lov it. We ARE rodents. . ,
(Re: #13 "We ARE rodents. . ,"):
Actually, we're pigeons; however, the rats are sufficiently advanced that they're indistinguishable from pigeons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
The link gives me:
"This Article is Available to Subscribers Only. Subscribe today and get 4 Weeks FREE, or, you can take our 4-week Free trial offer and try out TNR Digital at no risk. [...]"
Or... I could just google the headline?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22How%20Political%20Psychology%20Explains%20Bush%27s%20Ghastly%20Success%22&meta=
I wonder what's the effect of thinking about birth?
The question I want to ask then is: The liberal turn we've seen in the latter half of the last century, is that just a consequence of people managing to push away thinking of death a lot better?
Or have we, like Christovir's Quakers, managed to turn our fear of death into something positive? FWIW, I know they exist, people who simply become even better people when they arguably should be afraid. I've met a few, but not many. So I am indeed worried that a great deal of everyday humanism and liberalism may be poorly rooted.
To "Phaser3000"
The author of this article wrote your quotation, not the study. We don't know from that how they worded their conclusion. Journalists are notorious in the scientific community for paraphrasing ass-backwards. If you want to get picky about your quotation it's not even a decent sentence--I highly doubt that's how the researchers put their findings. Not saying you're wrong or not, but I wouldn't judge from this.