Existential Psychology

Question 1

What is terror, according to the Terror Management Theory (TMT)?

Answer 1

Terror: Existential fear of our own mortality
Anxiety that results from awareness of the inevitability of our death in a highly intelligent, self-conscious animal that is instinctively programmed for self-preservation
Awareness that we can’t escape our death forever –> futile efforts to get rid of thought.

Question 2

According to TMT, what is one way we we cope with terror?

Answer 2

Proximal thoughts: Defence in the face of conscious, immediate threat

• Deny vulnerability: avoidance of the idea of death e.g. Knowing smoking is very bad, but saying that you won’t die from smoking
• Distract self: Avoid, via thinking of other things

Question 3

According to TMT, what is another way we cope with terror?

Answer 3

Distal thoughts: Protecting us with thinking just below the consciousness

• Worldview defence: Culture and defending culture. Ameliorates concern of death through making man seem important and vital in the universe
• Self-esteem: Boot self-worth, especially about your place in your culture

Question 4

According to TMT, what are similarities between you and a cucumber?

Answer 4

You will both die.

However, the cucumber is in a better position, because it is unaware of its demise.

Question 5

How does culture relieve mortality salience?

Answer 5

Culture changes man’s perception, from a trembling animal to something important, vital to the universe - “immortal”

• Religion may actually promise immortality
• Making a lasting work/contribution to earth: Somewhat immortal, idea of “living beyond this body”

Question 6

What is the main gist of TMT?

Answer 6

Culture is threatened –> Remember that we are mortal –> align self with cultural values and defend it –> lessens mortality anxiety
(Please verify)

Question 7

What is the classic way of measuring mortality salience, and what did Rosenblatt et al. (1989) find when they used this prime?

Answer 7

Prostitution! Violates most cultural values.

Experiment:
1. Judges read short case of prostitute
2. Did mortality salience questionnaire (prime) or not
3. Asked to assign amount of bail money to release prostitute. (higher sum = more punitive)
FOUND: M-S condition assigned ~9x more bond than control.
- Small manip had huge effect on court outcome
- Same effect found in students

Question 8

What did Greenberg et al’s (1990) TMT experiment on Pro/Anti Americans find about the effect of mortality salience on one’s evaluation?

Answer 8

1. Subjects read a 1-page interview where interviewee evaluated the US political system
   Pro-America: “Democratic, great country, free”
   Anti-America: “Violence is the only way to democrat”
2. Subjects asked how much they endorsed/liked interviewee
   FOUND:
   Pro-America: MS endorsed > control
   Anti-America: MS endorsed different evaluation of someone

Question 9

How does mortality salience affect ones’ attitudes towards materialism? Reference Dar-Nimrod’s (2012) study on videos and commercials, as well as how they ensured they made the right attribution.

Answer 9

Pursuing materialism protects people from existential anxieties.
MS increases peoples’ alignment with culture.

Can featuring death on TV increase desire for materialistic goods?
Between subjects design:
Movie 1 -> Ad 1 -> Movie 2 -> Ad 2 (counterbalanced)
2 movies shown: “6 feet under” (MS prime) or “West Wing” (control)
2 lots of advertisements and rating of products in ads

FOUND: Products after MS video were evaluated more positively than control.
Death element –> Increased desirability of product.
Replication to see that this effect was due to MS priming:
End of experiment, completed word completion task: coff_ _ - either coffin or coffee
- Completion with “coffin” - sig predictor of high eval of product after MS video.
Supports TMT theory.

Question 10

What is the Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM)? What does “meaning” entail in this context?

Answer 10

• People have a need for meaning.
  Meaning = Mental representations of expected relations that organises ones’ perceptions of the world
• We are meaning-makers: We naturally try to find meaning in everything, even when there is no meaning.
• When these meanings are violated, it causes anxiety.

Question 11

What does Bruner and Postman’s (1949) experiment demonstrate about how people react in face of threats?

Answer 11

1. Showed participants incongruent cards (e.g. red spade, black heart, etc.)
2. Asked to name the cards
   FOUND: This violation of expected relation –> implosion, even when participants were not aware of this incongruence. - “Threat reaction”
   Threat does not have to be significant to violate expectations

Question 12

MMM in a nutshell

Answer 12

Threat (expectation violation) –> Aware we had expectations –> Feel violated –> Implode/Threat reaction

Question 13

What can be some threats to meaning?

Answer 13

We expect events to happen for a reason (e.g. bad things happen to bad people)
We expect we have control over our own actions

Violation of expected relations –> 5A’s of MMM

Question 14

What are the 5A’s of MMM?

Answer 14

Assimilation
Accommodation
Affirmation
Assembly
Abstraction

Question 15

What do we do when we assimilate in response to a threat?

Answer 15

We merge the new situation with our old belief

e.g. Syrian child dies because mother is bad

Question 16

What do we do when we accommodate in response to a threat?

Answer 16

We keep the old belief, but we merge the specific situation as an exception
e.g. some bad things happen to good people

Question 17

What do we do when we affirm in response to a threat?

Answer 17

“Fluid compensation”: We compensate for threat by affirming view, using a positive interpretation of the negative event
E.g. System threatened –> System justification –> Sustained need for meaning –> God liked child the best, God is great

Question 18

What do we do when we assemble in response to a threat?

Answer 18

We construct a whole new meaning framework where one did not exist before, to deal with upheaval and radical challenges to our schemata. This new creation (that can come in a form of an art work or prose) allows a new schema, a powerful one, to emerge and play a palliative role for our sense of meaning threats.
e.g. Hence the spike in artistic creativity in times of war and trouble

Question 19

What do we do when we abstract in response to a threat?

Answer 19

We look for familiarity in our environment (often finding patterns in noise), so that this familiarity reduces the threat introduced by the challenge of an existing schema.

Question 20

What does Proulx and Heine’s (2008) study on transmorgifying experimenters demonstrate about the effect of meaning threats on our defensive responses? Refer also to the second attributional part of their study.

Answer 20

Transmorgifying experimenters: Changed experimenters halfway through the experiment (most people don’t notice)
- How do people react? DV = bond for prostitute (higher = more punitive
FOUND:
Exp 1a: MS = Transmorg experimenter&raquo_space; Control
- Change of experimenter not sig weaker than MS in threat.
- People do not need to be aware of threat to respond to it.
Exp 1b: Change in experimenter&raquo_space; control. Still causes threat response

Exp 2: Told half of participants that they may be feeling uneasy because of flickering light - misattribution.
FOUND: Control = Misattrib

Question 21

How does Proulx and Heine (2009)’s study on abstraction and artificial grammar support MMM?

Answer 21

1. Participants described themselves as shy/outgoing
2. Proposed argument that you have 2 different selves inhabiting the same body - threat manip (disjointed unity)
3. Read either Country dentist (absurdist) vs Normal narrative
4. Did artificial grammar task: Implicit learning of grammar before awareness of rules. - Finding signals in noise
   - Abstraction in MMM: predicts that, after meaning threat, you would perform better in this task, because you would try to find signals in noise
   FOUND: Meaning threat found more meaning in noise&raquo_space; Control
   Better abstraction after meaning threat –> support MMM