bodhi tree swaying » mortality salience

Mortality salience for atheists

bodhipaksa — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 14:06:15 +0000

From today’s Boston Globe comes this interesting snippet about an experiment or experiments (it’s not clear) showing that thinking about one’s own death reinforces faith in the notion of progress. And denying the idea of progress prompts people to think more about their own death. As I mentioned in a comment to Bob the other day, “when people are reminded of their mortality they become emotionally invested in institutions, like religion or nation, that could be thought of as providing a kind of immortality.” The idea of progress would seem to provide a similar function, in that the individual can see his or her life as being part of a larger pattern involving an onward march to a better world.

For many people, faith in a higher power gets them through dark times. But for those who are less spiritual, is there a comparable source of comfort? Maybe so, according to research suggesting that faith in progress has many of the same psychological effects as spiritual faith. For example, people who were first asked to think about their own death were then less likely to agree with an essay claiming that progress is a myth. Alternatively, people who first read an essay claiming that progress is a myth were then more likely to think about their own death. Also, after having their faith in progress reinforced, people were more able to resist thoughts about death and less defensive about their own worldview.

Rutjens, B. et al., “Things Will Get Better: The Anxiety-Buffering Qualities of Progressive Hope,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (forthcoming).

I don’t necessarily think it’s a good thing that “progressive hope” makes us “more able to resist thoughts about death,” although it’s good when people are less defensive about their worldview. The idea of “progress” is just that — it’s an idea, and not one that’s well-rooted in reality. If we pick certain timescales and then within those timescales ignore much of what was happening in the world, we can have the idea that overall things are getting better. But this is a very selective view. While the living standards of many people improved in the 20th century, for example, we also got “better” at killing millions of people. We’re getting better at exterminating species, making massive changes to the biosphere, and (in the US) making less fuel-efficient vehicles as well. The idea of “progress” may be comforting, but maybe we don’t actually need to be comforted right now. Maybe a bit more discomfort would be good for us.

Nevertheless, these comments have nothing directly to do with the researchers’ findings, which are fascinating. I wonder what research into the Six Element Practice would show? In that practice we contemplate our own impermanence, but we also see that within the wider context of an ever-changing and interconnected world, and we practice letting go. Normally reminders of death make us more conservative, and make us cling more to religion and to group-identity. The Six Element practice encourages us to take a reminder of death and do precisely the opposite — cease clinging to the things we identify with.

(The picture, by the way, is called “The Drunkard’s Progress, from the First Glass to the Grave.” You can click on it for a full-size image.)

Thoughts of death make us cling to group membership

bodhipaksa — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:31:58 +0000

Jesse Bering, who has been mentioned in this blog before, has an interesting column in Scientific American outlining a couple of experiments investigating mortality salience (the effect that an awareness of death has on us).

These rather elegant experiments show that when presented with reminders of death, people are more likely to make patriotic statements and to overestimate how many people share their opinions. In general it seems people cling to group membership as a protection against the idea of their own mortality.

Another such study found that judges presented with cues reminding them of death would set bond almost 10 times higher than they otherwise would.

In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, German psychologist Eva Jonas from Ludwig-Maximilians University and Immo Fritsche from Otto-von-Guericke University teamed up with terror management theory co-founder, social psychologist Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona, to probe the attitudes of residents from Magdeburg, Germany, regarding all things German. Pedestrians who were either in a small shopping area (control condition) or in front of a cemetery’s main entrance “with a funeral home and a stonemason store exhibiting gravestones on the other side of the street” (the mortality salience condition) were approached by an experimenter.

The experimenter asked each person if he or she would be willing to participate in a short survey about “consumption and television behavior.” Much of the survey items (24 questions in total) were simply filler—that is to say, the experimenters weren’t really interested in them, but were included to prevent the participants from cluing in to the true purpose of the study. Below are the key items the researchers used, predicting that those in the mortality salience condition would be more “pro-German” in their responses to these questions than those in the control condition.

(1) Picture you have won in a contest and you can buy a car. How likely is it that you would buy an Audi, Toyota, Volkswagen or Renault?
(2) How much do you like travelling within Germany? How much do you like travelling to foreign countries?
(3) Picture a friend would take you out for dinner. What kind of food would you prefer? How much would you like German cooking? How much would you like international cooking?
(4) What currency do you like better? How much do you like the German Mark? How much do you like the Euro?
(5) How handsome do you think German talk/game show hosts are? How handsome do you think foreign talk/game show hosts are?
(6) How likely do you think it is that Germany will win the soccer world-cup in Japan and become world champion? How likely do you think it is that Brazil will win the soccer world-cup in Japan and become world champion?
(7) How representative/appropriate do you think Paris would be as a capital for a united Europe?

As hypothesized, the data analyses revealed that “compared to participants in the control condition, mortality salience participants showed a [highly significant] decreased liked of the foreign items as well as an increased liking of German items.” The main reason the study was published in the Journal of Economic Psychology—as opposed to some other scientific journal—was the investigators’ curiosity about why the introduction of the Euro had met with some resistance in Germany. Like many other European countries, the introduction of the Euro aroused fear of negative economic consequences in Germany. Among the 12 members of the European Monetary Union, only Finland was less favorably disposed to the introduction of the Euro. The authors conclude that, “the reservations German citizens had against the Euro can be better understood when considering the function the cultural worldview serves in managing existential fears. Since the German currency represents Germany, many people feel that the loss of their national currency threatens their national identity.”

In an earlier study published in a 1996 issue of Psychological Science, another prominent terror management theorist, Tom Pyszcynski from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and his colleagues found a very similar effect of mortality salience with people from this largely conservative American town. In this study, 124 pedestrians of both genders and ranging in age from 15 to 86 years were randomly assigned to be interviewed by a female experimenter 100 m before, directly in front of (mortality salience condition), or 100 m after a funeral home. Those in the mortality salience condition were interviewed so that they faced the funeral home—“the nature of the establishment,” Pyszcynski and his co-authors assure us, “was obvious to anyone standing in front of the building.”

In this clever study, participants were asked two very simple questions: “What percentage of Americans do you estimate believe that Christian values should be taught in public schools?” and “Do you believe that Christian values should be taught in public schools?” The prediction was that participants in the mortality salience condition would overestimate the percentage of Americans who shared their views, but only if they held the minority view. The authors reason that people in the minority feel vulnerable and insecure, with their cultural worldviews at risk of being eclipsed by the majority view. In this case, the minority (45 percent) was in favor of teaching Christian values in public schools. In fact, mortality salience (facing a funeral home) led these participants to view themselves as being in the majority on this issue, an effect not seen for similarly minded participants in the two other conditions (100 meters before or after the funeral home). The authors explain it this way: “When people are reminded of their mortality, enhanced estimates of social consensus can serve to sustain the anxiety-buffering effectiveness of their cultural worldviews.”

Awareness of death, and ego-defense

bodhipaksa — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:54:11 +0000

Fascinating post on The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer’s site on neuroscience.

I’ve been writing about impermanence a lot recently, as part of a book project I have on the go. The topic of the book is the Six Elements, which is a Buddhist framework for reflecting on impermanence and mortality. It’s a given in Buddhist thinking that the ego is driven by a fear of its own destruction, but this is the first time I’ve seen experimental evidence to support that notion.

Over at Mind Matters, I’ve got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death and then observed how this affected their judicial decisions:

LEHRER: How does this theory relate to mortality salience (MS)? And what’s an experimental example of mortality salience at work?

SOLOMON: A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that MS increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.

Our first experiment was conducted with 22 municipal court judges in Tucson, Ariz. We told the judges we were studying the relation between personality traits, attitudes and bond decisions. A bond is a sum of money a defendant pays prior to trial to be released from prison in the interim. The judges completed a set of questionnaires consisting of some standard personality assessment instruments. Embedded in the personality assessments were two questions designed to trigger mortality salience: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.” Only half of the judges were randomly given these questions to answer.

The judges were then given a legal case brief virtually identical to one they would typically see before a trial. The brief stated the arresting charge, which was prostitution, and the defendant’s address, employment record and length of residency. A copy of the citation issued to the defendant when she was arrested was also included. Finally, the judges were given a form to set bond for the defendant. We chose judges for the study because they are rigorously trained to make rational and uniform decisions based solely on evidence relative to existing laws. And we had them pass judgment on an alleged prostitute because prostitution offends the moral sensibilities of the average American. To the extent that cultural worldviews serve to mitigate mortal terror, we hypothesized that judges who thought about death would set higher bonds than those in the control condition. The results were striking. Judges in the control condition set an average bond of $50, which was typical for this charge in actual cases at the time. However, judges who thought about their death set an average bond of $455.