Navarrete, C. D., Kurzban, R., Fessler, D. M. T., & Kirkpatrick,
L. A. (2003). Anxiety and intergroup bias: Terror management or coalitional
psychology. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Abstract
Contemplation of death increases support of ingroup ideologies, a result
explained by proponents of terror management theory (TMT) as an attempt
to buffer existential anxiety. While TMT claims that only death-salient
stimuli yield such effects, an evolutionary perspective suggests that increased
intergroup bias may occur in response to a wide variety of situations that,
in ancestral environments, posed adaptive problems for which marshaling
social support was a reliably adaptive response. Four experiments from
two cultures produced results consistent with this latter perspective but
contrary to TMT. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that, among UCLA undergraduates,
participants asked to contemplate aversive scenarios unrelated to death
displayed increased support of ingroup ideology. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated
elements of these results, exploring the moderating effects of self-esteem
and allocentrism on intergroup bias in two Costa Rican samples. These results
indicate that world-view defense effects occur even when death is not salient.
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