TITLE:
The Possibility of Self-Determined Death Eliminates Mortality Salience Effects on Cultural Worldview Defense: Cross-Cultural Replications
AUTHORS:
Hongfei Du, Immo Fritsche, Zenobia Talati, Emanuele Castano, Eva Jonas
KEYWORDS:
Lack of Control, Self-Determined Death, Mortality Salience, Group-Based Control
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.7 No.7,
July
1,
2016
ABSTRACT: Contemplating the inevitability of one’s
own death can deeply affect a person’s subjective sense of control, eliciting
symbolic responses to restore control through cultural worldview defense.
Re-search supporting this perspective has shown that reminders of one’s own
death (i.e., uncontrol-lable death) can increase worldview defense, whereas
self-determined dying (i.e., controllable death) does not (Fritsche, Jonas,
& Fankhänel, 2008). To date, all supportive evidence comes from the German
culture and it remains unclear whether this effect can be replicated in
non-German cultures. We conducted two studies to investigate the cross-cultural
validity of this effect and rep-licated the effect in both a highly
individualistic culture (i.e., the United States) and a highly collec-tivistic
culture (i.e., China). The increased ingroup identification observed after
reminders of un-controllable death supports the model of group-based control.