Ebola as an Existential Threat? Experimentally-Primed Ebola Reminders Intensify National-Security Concerns among Extrinsically Religious Individuals:

One of religion's psychological functions is to buffer against existential anxieties. This function may be especially pronounced among extrinsically religious individuals, who tend to harness religion for its personal and social benefits (e.g., emotional security, strengthened ingroup ties). Hence, in 2 experimental priming studies conducted within weeks of the first confirmed case of Ebola in the U.S., we examined whether extrinsically religious persons were especially likely to experience Ebola reminders as an existential threat that intensified national-security concerns (e.g., supporting strict travel bans, border security, and immigration laws). In Experiment 1 (N = 368), extrinsic religiousness was more strongly associated with national-security concerns in the Ebola prime, relative to a control group. In Experiment 2 (N = 532), we added a mortality salience condition. Replicating Experiment 1, extrinsic religiousness was more strongly associated with national-security concerns in both the Ebola prime and mortality salience conditions, relative to a control group. Taken together, large-scale existential threats may be especially likely to intensify pro-ingroup/anti-out-group biases among extrinsically religious individuals. Implications for individual and community resilience are discussed. ********** In 2014, the highly fatal and infectious Ebola virus disease (commonly called "Ebola") swept across West Africa, causing an epidemic that ultimately resulted in over 28,500 confirmed cases and 11,000 deaths, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2014). On September 30, 2014, the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first imported case of Ebola virus in the U.S., and subsequently, for several weeks, the American media was dominated by warnings about a potential U.S. Ebola outbreak. With such widespread media coverage and the announcement of three additional confirmed cases, Americans grew increasingly panicked about the possibility of such an outbreak. The Ebola outbreak was perceived as a viable threat. Americans commonly reacted to Ebola fears by calling for stricter national security measures, such as tightening airport and border security. For instance, according to an October 14, 2014 Washington Post and ABC News poll, 91% of Americans supported stricter airport screening procedures and 67% of Americans supported restricting travel to and from Ebola-affected West African countries (Blake, 2014), despite health officials' warnings that such isolationist measures would likely make the epidemic even harder to fight (Langfield & Popken, 2014). By mid-October 2014, countless Americans felt vulnerable and concerned about their health or, even worse, their own life. Concern about a U.S. Ebola outbreak became rampant, serving as a reminder of mortality, despite every indication that the risk of Ebola spreading in the U.S. was remote. Ebola, Mortality Salience, and Worldview-Consistent Bolstering Ebola is a severe and highly fatal infectious disease--the case fatality rate ranged from 25% to 90%, with an average fatality rate of 50%. Unfortunately, there are no vaccines for the disease (World Health Organization, 2015). Thus, given the high likelihood of fatality and the lack of available vaccines, it is unsurprising the threat of Ebola might normatively serve as an existential threat, most notably a threat of mortality. According to Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986), people buffer against potential existential threats by investing in two related psychological structures: (a) a cultural worldview, which is a personalized explanatory framework consisting of a set of beliefs regarding the nature of reality (e.g., religion); and (b) self-esteem, which is achieved by living up to the standards of one's worldview and conveys the feeling that one is a valuable person of worth capable of making a lasting, significant difference (Soenke, Landau, & Greenberg, 2013). …