Collaborative Research: Assessing the Terror Management Analysis of Affective, Cognitive, and Motivational Factors in Mortality Salience Effects

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This project expands the study of terror management theory, a broad analysis of human behavior that is directly relevant to understanding the psychological processes involved in recent trends toward increased ethnic and intergroup conflict and violence. The theory proposes that the potential for anxiety engendered by the human awareness of the fragility of life and the inevitability of death drives people to grasp onto culturally based conceptions of the world that enable them to view life as orderly, meaningful and permanent, and themselves as valuable contributors to this meaningful reality. Terror management theory suggests that connections to nations, ethnicities, religions, and other cultural institutions function to manage the potential for anxiety that results from awareness of the precarious nature of the human condition. This new program of research will use contemporary methods for assessing conscious and non-conscious processes to further our understanding of the basic motivational, emotional, and cognitive processes underlying the human inclinations to cope with fear by investing in and defending our own belief systems and modes of self-esteem striving, and the role that such processes play in human conflict. One set of studies will explore the operation of potential and unconscious anxiety in these processes. A second set will examine the cognitive architecture of the belief systems that protect people from this anxiety and the role that unconscious activation of belief systems and ideologies play in promoting inter-group bias and conflict. A third set will explore how concerns about death relate to other existential issues such as the needs for certainty, structure, meaning, and simple answers to basic questions about life and the nature of reality. The final set will explore how terror management concerns interact with approach motivation in leading to change and growth in existing systems of belief and values.