Loss Shapes Political Views? Terror Management, Political Ideology, and the Death of Close Others

Exposure to the Death of Others during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Growing Mistrust in Medical Institutions as a Result of Personal Loss

BACKGROUND AND AIMS

The prominence of death during the COVID-19 pandemic was heightened by the potential of personally knowing someone who lost their life to the virus. The terror management theory (TMT) suggests that the salient presence of death has a pronounced effect on behavior and may result in the ossification of beliefs and actions aligned with one's worldview (i.e., the mortality salience hypothesis). In this study, we evaluated how death exposure early in the COVID-19 pandemic could enact the process of firming up held beliefs and attitudes related to health and safety. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that exposure to a personal loss during the pandemic would strengthen participants' baseline attitudes and behaviors regarding COVID-19 safety guidelines.

METHOD

Data were analyzed from a prospective, regional survey administered at two time points during the pandemic, June-July 2020 and May 2021, in five United States northeastern states. Baseline and follow-up surveys were administered approximately 12 months apart, with adherence to public guidance and death exposure measured at both timepoints and other safety measures at follow-up only.

FINDINGS

Our results indicated that there were significant main effects of death exposure on guideline adherence and support for COVID-related public policy. Contrary to the mortality salience hypothesis, death exposures after baseline were related to higher medical mistrust at follow-up for those high in adherence at baseline, rather than those with low adherence.

CONCLUSION

Our results offer some conflicting evidence to the mortality salience hypothesis. Rather than entrench people in their worldviews, death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to sway people away from their initial stances. This finding has important implications for TMT literature and for the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Morbid Polarization: Exposure to COVID-19 and Partisan Disagreement about Pandemic Response

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of all Americans, but the severity of the pandemic has been experienced unevenly across space and time. Some states saw sharp rises in COVID-19 cases in early March, whereas case counts rose much later in the rest of the country. In this article, we examine the relationship between exposure to COVID-19 and citizens' views on what type of measures are required to deal with the crises and how experience with and exposure to COVID-19 is associated with greater partisan polarization. We find consistent evidence of partisan divergence in pandemic-response policy preferences across the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic: Republicans support national control measures whereas Democrats support welfare policies, and interparty differences grow over time. We find only limited evidence that exposure or experience moderates these partisan differences. Our findings are consistent with the view that Americans interpret the COVID-19 pandemic in fundamentally partisan manner, and that objective pandemic conditions play at most a minor role in shaping mass preferences.

Is Nationalism Rising in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic? Individual-Level Evidence from the United States

Following the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, analysts have noted a global rise of nationalism as countries have engaged in a number of nationalist moves in response to the pandemic. However, the implication of policy changes at the individual-level remains unclear: do citizens support those nationalist government responses? More importantly, do people tend to be more nationalistic following the outbreak? Building on terror management theory (TMT), this article examines whether and how ideological beliefs affect individuals' support for nationalist policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to TMT, to cope with death anxiety, people are predisposed to ideological defense, resulting in cohesion with individuals who validate their beliefs and hostility toward those who threaten them. Thus, we argue that when states' nationalist policies are aligned with their ideology, people tend to support them; yet, when states' nationalist policies contradict their ideology, people tend to withdraw their support. Specifically, this study found that as non-conservatives (compared to conservatives) are more concerned with the virus, they are more likely to show an inclination of ideological validation. Given that their ideology advocates more tolerance, non-conservatives are less likely to support nationalistic policies. To test the hypotheses, we applied structural equation modeling to a March 2020 CNN Poll (nationally representative US data about COVID-19). The statistical analysis demonstrated strong support for our arguments.

Loss and lastingness? Further exploring the relationship between the death of a close other, belief in an everlasting soul, and terror management processes

This research explored the relationship between the death of a close other (DOCO) and terror management processes. In Study 1 (n = 810), university students who experienced DOCO (vs. not) reported higher university and American identification; greater self-esteem and meaning in life; lower death-thought accessibility; greater "death-as-passage" representations; and higher belief in an everlasting soul. We pre-registered Study 2 (n = 497) as an attempt to replicate these findings; although the patterns of means were consistent with Study 1, the tests did not reach statistical significance. However, analyses on the merged data (N = 1,307) supported the present theoretical analysis.

Does the thought of death contribute to the memory benefit of encoding with a survival scenario?

Four studies tested whether the thought of death contributes to the survival processing advantage found in memory tests (i.e., the survival effect). In the first study, we replicated the "Dying To Remember" (DTR) effect identified by Burns and colleagues whereby activation of death thoughts led to better retention than an aversive control situation. In Study 2, we compared an ancestral survival scenario, a modern survival scenario and a "life-after-death" scenario. The modern survival scenario and the dying scenario led to higher levels of recall than the ancestral scenario. In Study 3, we used a more salient death-thought scenario in which people imagine themselves on death row. Results showed that the "death-row" scenario yielded a level of recall similar to that of the ancestral survival condition. We also collected ratings of death-related thoughts (Studies 3 and 4) and of survival-related and planning thoughts (Study 4). The ratings indicated that death-related thoughts were induced more by the dying scenarios than by the survival scenarios, whereas the reverse was observed for both survival-related and planning thoughts. The findings are discussed in the light of two contrasting views of the influence of mortality salience in the survival effect.

Changing Minds: A Psychodynamic Interpretation of Kuhnian Paradigm Change

Thomas Kuhn's model of the structure of scientific revolutions is, to this day, one of the most influential attempts to understand central processes in the history of science. While Kuhn coached his theory in historical and sociological terms, this article argues that modern existential psychology can be used to add a psychodynamic dimension to Kuhn's model. Specifically, while Kuhn famously claimed that scientific paradigms are worldviews held by scientists and described their pattern of change, terror management theory (TMT) emphasizes the existential importance of worldviews and specifies the conditions under which individuals will either radicalize or abandon their worldviews when they are faced with threat or negative evidence. This article shows that the stages Kuhn describes in the history of science can fruitfully be elucidated by central TMT concepts, and exemplifies their applicability through two examples in the history of psychology. The resulting psychological interpretation of scientists' existential attachment to their worldview might prove fruitful in understanding crucial dynamics in the history of science.