REMINDERS OF MORTALITY INCREASE SUPPORT FOR BUSH

Saturday, October 16, 2004

When people have recently been reminded that we all die someday, they become more likely to say they support President Bush and his counterterrorism policies.

"People with subliminal fears of dying choose charismatic leaders at the polls," said The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article summarizing research on the effects of "mortality salience," comparing the reactions of people who have been asked, for example, to think about their funerals or what happens to their bodies when they die, with a control group asked similar questions about, for instance, a very painful visit to the dentist.

I know many readers do not regard Bush as charismatic, but the term is used here to describe a rhetorical style, not a particular person, the kind of candidate who would say things like "you are part of a special nation," contrasted with others who talk about "the goals set out before us" (task-oriented) or "everyone's contributions are valued" (relationship-oriented).

One of the researchers named in the story was Thomas Pyszczynski, a professor of psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who was kind enough to send me copies of two of the papers concerning the research (and I apologize to all his co-authors, who can't be listed in this space).

One is "Deliver Us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush," which appeared in the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Most of the subjects in the four studies they discuss were American college students.

But the other paper finds an analogous result from an (unnamed) Middle East country: Reminders of the inevitability of death increase support for martyrdom attacks among college students who do not support such activities under neutral conditions.

This research is part of "terror management theory," the word terror in this context meaning the personal fear of death, not car bombs and hostage killings. It holds that the inevitability of death, and the possibility that it could come at any moment, is a cause of potentially debilitating anxiety.

People manage this anxiety by adopting a cultural worldview that makes their lives meaningful and allows them to perceive themselves as valued members of that culture.

"If the cultural worldview functions to provide protection against death-related concerns, then reminders of death should intensify efforts to bolster and defend faith in the worldview," the authors of the first paper write.

Since the events of 9/11 dramatically increased the salience of death-related concerns for most Americans, Bush's popularity serves as an "experimental case study" of how fear of death affects support for government leaders.

In the first study, 97 student volunteers at Rutgers University in New Jersey completed a questionnaire, with one group asked, among other questions so they didn't suspect the purpose of the exercise, "Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you," while the other group answered an innocuous question about watching television.

Then they were asked to read a very favorable opinion about Bush's actions regarding Iraq. On a five-point scale, the group reminded of mortality averaged 4.16 agreement with the statement, while the control group averaged 2.09.

In the second study, students did a word-matching test on the computer, unaware that they were seeing one of three possible prompts flashed too briefly for conscious perception. Two images were terror-related, 911 and WTC, and the third was innocuous, the university's area code.

The two groups that saw terror-related prompts were significantly more likely to respond to word-completion tasks with death-related words such as "coffin" or "skull" rather than "coffee" or "skill."

The third study resembled the first, but with the control group asked about something unpleasant, a really tough exam. Support for the president was much higher in the groups who had written about death or 9/11, whether the students identified themselves as conservative or liberal.

The fourth study, done in May after Sen. John Kerry was known to be the Democratic nominee, included 157 students at Brooklyn College, and the control group was asked to write about the thought of being in intense pain.

Answering a question about how they would likely vote, the control group ranked Kerry more highly than Bush by significant margins. In comparison, those in the mortality group ranked Kerry somewhat lower than the control group had, and ranked Bush higher than Kerry and much higher than the control group.

Fascinating stuff.

The researchers sum it all up with the wry comment that theorists "have noted that political allegiances are not always based on the balanced, rational forces of self-interest suggested by the Jeffersonian notion of democracy but also on the operation of nonrational forces of which we are not always aware."

You can say that again.