Is There a Fate Worse than Death? : A Comparison of Social Exclusion and Terror Management Theory : Employing Cultural Primes to Elicit Cultural Worldviews

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2006
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to explore the impact of individualistic and collectivistic priming on participants’ cultural worldviews under both mortality and social isolation salience. Participants were subjected to either individualistic or collectivistic cultural primes followed by one of three subprimes: death, social isolation, or neutral salience. Using an ambiguous word stem task designed to evaluate concept accessibility, Experiment 1 examined the cognitive relationship between death and social isolation. Results revealed no relationship between the subprimes and the accessibility of death and social isolation thoughts. Experiment 2 explored the extent to which participants assumed and defended their primed cultural identity on two culturally-sensitive, cognitive measures—the Embedded Figures Test and an attribution task—after mortality and social isolation subpriming. Although the cultural primes affected attributional style in the predicted direction (individualists were more dispositional and collectivists more situational), mortality and social isolation salient participants did not defend their primed cultural identity more than controls. Both experiments failed to provide support for either terror management or social exclusion theory. Implications and possible methodological concerns are explored.
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