To belong or not to belong, that is the question: Terror management and identification with gender and ethnicity.

The terror management prediction that reminders of death motivate in-group identification assumes people view their identifications positively. However, when the in-group is framed negatively, mortality salience should lead to disidentification. Study 1 found that mortality salience increased women’s perceived similarity to other women except under gender-based stereotype threat. In Study 2, mortality salience and a negative ethnic prime led Hispanic as well as Anglo participants to derogate paintings attributed to Hispanic (but not Anglo-American) artists. Study 3 added a neutral prime condition and used a more direct measure of psychological distancing. Mortality salience and the negative prime led Hispanic participants to view themselves as especially different from a fellow Hispanic. Implications for understanding in-group derogation and disidentification are briefly discussed. Terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991) posits that to function securely in the face of the uniquely human aware-ness of the inevitability of death, people live their lives embedded in a culturally derived conception of reality that provides meaning to experience and value to themselves. Group identifications are o

Can we level the playing field? The effects of ease of denial on psychological reactions to threat for people with high and low self-esteem

A good deal of research suggests that high self-esteem individuals cope with failure by engaging in self-serving biases that allow them to deny the negative implications of failure. If high self-esteem individuals cope successfully with failure through a process of denial, then making it easier for low self-esteem individuals to deny negative feedback might allow them to cope successfully with failure too. To test this notion, high and low self-esteem participants took a test of creativity and were given feedback that they were either creative or non-creative. Following this procedure, the ease of denial of the feedback was manipulated by telling the participants that the creativity test was either highly valid or invalid. Participants' evaluations of the test, positive and negative mood, and self-ratings on creativity were then assessed. It was expected that high self-esteem participants would generally make more self-serving evaluations of the test than low self-esteem individuals, and as a result, experience more pleasant affect and view themselves more positively on creativity than low self-esteem individuals following negative feedback. However, it was also expected that if the negative feedback was easy to deny, low self-esteem individuals would be just as self-serving as high self-esteem individuals in their evaluations of the test and experience a similar increase in positive mood, and rate themselves higher on creativity. The results did not support these predictions. Both high and low self-esteem individuals made self-serving evaluations of the test regardless of the ease of denial manipulation. Limitations of the current research and directions for future research are discussed

Self-Esteem: A Human Solution to the Problem of Death

Abstract Terror management theory (TMT) posits that the need for self-esteem develops out of the socialization process in which children learn to abide by parental and, eventually, societal standards of 'goodness' to feel securely embedded in a cultural belief system. According to TMT, feeling safely immersed in a meaningful conception of reality (i.e., the cultural worldview) ultimately functions to protect people from anxiety due to the uniquely human capacity to be cognizant of their eventual death. After presenting the basic tenets of this perspective, we review several lines of research supporting it and then address some common questions and criticisms of the theory such as how is a TMT view of anxiety consistent with evolutionary principles, why do people commit suicide, and how is self-esteem pursued in non-Western, self-effacing cultures? Finally, we discuss some implications of TMT for understanding social problems and for pursuing meaning and self-esteem in healthier, more socially productive ways. In this article, we advance the central proposition of terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) that self-esteem functions to buffer people from anxiety resulting from an awareness of human mortality. This notion was originally formulated by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose all-consuming passion was to answer the broad question, 'Why do people behave the way they do?' Becker felt that the only way to answer this question was to piece together the most basic insights about the human condition gleaned from the biological and social sciences. Through his search

Tools to Increase Preservice Teacher Confidence While Discussing Controversial Identity Issues

This collaborative, descriptive research project in urban Texas looked at the at the development, implementation, and student perception of effectiveness of a multi-stage pedagogical intervention in a classroom to help preservice teachers become more confident during discussions of controversial identity issues; specifically, ableism, classism, heterosexism, racism, and sexism. Researchers developed classroom experiences based upon worldview threat and defense as well as mindfulness, using qualitative analytic strategies to “foresee” and “assert” the effectiveness of these experiences via mid- and end-point course evaluation surveys. Participants felt more confident and capable when talking to others with differing worldviews due to the experiences and tools provided.Educatio

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT The Scrooge Effect: Evidence That Mortality Salience Increases Prosocial Attitudes and Behavior

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of mortality should intensify the desire to express culturally pre-scribed prosocial attitudes and engage in culturally prescribed prosocial behaviors. Two studies supported these hypotheses. In Study 1, people were interviewed in close proximity to a funeral home or several blocks away and were asked to indicate their atti-tudes toward two charities they deemed important. Those who were interviewed in front of the funeral home reported more favorability toward these charities than those who were inter-viewed several blocks away. In Study 2, the authors found that following mortality salience, people gave more money to a charity supporting an American cause than people who had been exposed to an aversive control topic. However, mortality salience had no effect on the amount of money given to a foreign cause. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed

Terrorist attacks escalate in frequency and fatalities preceding highly lethal attacks.

Highly lethal terrorist attacks, which we define as those killing 21 or more people, account for 50% of the total number of people killed in all terrorist attacks combined, yet comprise only 3.5% of terrorist attacks. Given the disproportionate influence of these incidents, uncovering systematic patterns in attacks that precede and anticipate these highly lethal attacks may be of value for understanding attacks that exact a heavy toll on life. Here we examined whether the activity of terrorist groups escalates--both in the number of people killed per attack and in the frequency of attacks--leading up to highly lethal attacks. Analyses of terrorist attacks drawn from a state-of-the-art international terrorism database (The Global Terrorism Database) showed evidence for both types of escalation leading up to highly lethal attacks, though complexities to the patterns emerged as well. These patterns of escalation do not emerge among terrorist groups that never commit a highly lethal attack