Death, Isolation, and Culture: Testing the Validities of Terror Management Theory and Coalitional Psychology

Two empirical studies attempted 1) to compare the validities of terror management theory and coalitional psychology, 2) to extend past research on cultural influences on cognition, and 3) to examine the effects of mortality and social isolation salience on cognition. Experiment 1 examined the effects of cultural (collectivism or individualism) priming and salience (mortality, social isolation, or neutral) priming on performance on a field-dependence task and a causal attribution task. The results revealed no significant effects for the field-dependence task but a significant cultural priming effect on the attribution task. Experiment 2 examined the effects of cultural priming and salience priming on mortality, social isolation, or fear-thought accessibility as measured through a word completion task. The only significant effect that emerged was one of salience priming in which the neutral salience condition showed a greater accessibility for social isolation words. The implications of these results for both past and future research are discussed. Death, Isolation, & Culture 5 Death, Isolation, and Culture: Testing the Validities of Terror Management Theory and Coalitional Psychology Culture undoubtedly plays a large role in our everyday lives, creating an environment in which art, relationships, science, etc. become part of our understanding of the world. Gleitman (1991) states it well when he describes culture as a force that becomes embodied within us—a force that allows us to recognize what is shared knowledge as well as what is acceptable and unacceptable to do, think, or believe in our society. Thus, culture is something within and around us that is affected by and influences us. As humans, we find ourselves strongly adhering to our culture’s beliefs, looking to its values in times of need, and opposing those who do not adhere to our own cultural ideals. In recent years, much cross-cultural work has been done in the field of psychology to examine the specific roles that culture plays and how cultures may have formed. In the psychological sense, culture can be viewed as a “coalescence of discrete behavioral norms and cognitions shared by individuals within some definable population that are distinct from those shared within other populations” (Lehman, Chiu, & Schaller, 2004, p. 690). While this provides the generally accepted definition for culture, beliefs about how and why these behavioral norms and cognitions originated tend to vary across different theories. One theory, Dynamic Social Impact Theory (Latané, 1996), suggests that culture arises largely from interpersonal communication. This theory concerns the social influence processes that govern a particular group of individuals. It emphasizes the idea that people socially influence one another and that this, along with communication, creates groups in which individuals living in close proximity mutually influence one another in their beliefs and Death, Isolation, & Culture 6 behaviors (Lehman et al., 2004). Depending on the number and closeness of individuals as well as their persuasive abilities, different groups will form and will display their own sets of norms. Latané’s theory is compelling because it provides an explanation for why certain beliefs and behaviors will form for some cultures while others will not succeed in other cultures. Latané has suggested that the ideas which get passed along and accepted are generally those that are prone to social influence; therefore, attitudes that are adaptable as well as popular will be more likely to establish themselves as beliefs, values, or norms of a specific group (Bourgeois, 2002). At the same time, however, we can see how and why certain beliefs that are not accepted by the majority may sometimes become a set of beliefs. Minority groups manage to survive despite holding minority viewpoints because the individuals who hold these similar views are able to cluster together to solidify and maintain their standing. Dynamic Social Impact Theory provides a provocative theory for the origins of culture but is limited in its explanation for why cultures may have formed in response to human psychological needs. From an epistemological standpoint, it provides no reference to evolutionary biology or human psychological processes (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). An accurate theory of cultural origin must account for changes in human biology—as expressed through human behavior and psychology—caused by the changing ancestral environment. It must also emphasize the specific psychological processes that have evolved because much of how human interaction manifests and is viewed is initiated by the minds of people (Tooby & Cosmides,