Are you afraid of the dark?: Exploring death, social isolation, & cultural enlightenment
Date
2006
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Terror management theory claims that human behavior is driven by a subtle but profound fear of personal death, a consequence of advanced cognitions. Coalitional psychology, on the contrary, claims that human behavior is driven by a desire for social affiliation, as a fitness related adaptation. In the present study, we conducted two experiments in order to evaluate the competing claims of terror management theory and coalitional psychology, with sensitivity to the influence that culture is known to have on cognitive processes. The first experiment investigated the effects of cultural priming (individualism or collectivism) and salience priming (mortality, social isolation, or neutrality) on death-, social isolation-, and fear-related thought accessibilities, as measure by the frequency of semantically-related word completions. A mixed-factorial ANOVA found no significant effect of salience prime on the types of word completions, but did find a significant main effect of salience prime within the neutral salience condition. The second experiment investigated the effects of cultural priming and salience priming on cognitive processing, as measured by field dependency and attributio1nal tendency. A mixed-factorial ANOVA found no significant effects on the field-dependency measure, but did find a significant main effect of culture prime on the attributional tendency measure. The inconsistency of the findings with prior research is discussed in light of methodological and theoretical limitations. Directions for future research are recommended.