American Roulette: The Effect of Reminders of Death on Support for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential Election

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to assess the effect of a subtle reminder of death on voting intentions for the 2004 U.S. presidential election. On the basis of terror management theory and previous research, we hypothesized that a mortality salience induction would increase support for President George W. Bush and decrease support for Senator John Kerry. In late September 2004, following a mortality salience or control induction, registered voters were asked which candidate they intended to vote for. In accord with predictions, Senator John Kerry received substantially more votes than George Bush in the control condition, but Bush was favored over Kerry following a reminder of death, suggesting that President Bush's re‐election may have been facilitated by nonconscious concerns about mortality in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

Conservative Shift Among High-Exposure Survivors of the September 11th Terrorist Attacks

“…For instance, Landau et al (2004) found that subliminal and supraliminal 9/11 and mortality salience primes led college students to show increased support for conservative President George W. Bush and his counterterrorism policies and decreased support for liberal challenger John Kerry. These effects were replicated by Cohen, Ogilvie, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski (2005) immediately prior to the Bush-Kerry election in 2004. Willer (2004) conducted time-series analyses and showed that President Bush's approval ratings increased each time his administration raised the terror alert levels between 2001 and 2004.…”

When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions

“…TMT research shows that reminders of death create existential anxiety that subjects manage by becoming more defensive of their cultural worldview and hostile toward outsiders. Previous studies have found that increasing the salience of subjects' mortality increased support for President Bush and for U.S. military interventions abroad among conservatives (Cohen et al 2005;Landau et al 2004;Pyszczynski et al 2006) and created increased aggressiveness toward people with differing political views (McGregor et al 1998), but the effect of mortality salience on both support for misperceptions about Iraq and the correction of them has not been tested. We therefore employed a mortality salience manipulation to see if it increased WMD misperceptions or reduced the effectiveness of the correction treatment.…”

“Elective Affinities”: On the Psychological Bases of Left–Right Differences

“…Jost, Fitzsimons, and Kay (2004) found that regardless of party affiliation, people who were primed with death imagery endorsed more conservative opinions overall than did people who were primed with control images depicting pain. This finding was particularly important because it was the first to demonstrate that mortality threats increase support for conservative opinions as well as leaders, thereby ruling out the possibility that such effects are due solely to an increased preference for "charismatic leadership," which is one explanation that terror management theorists have suggested (e.g., Cohen et al, 2005). Thorisdottir and Jost (2009), too, conducted a series of experiments demonstrating how and why threat increases participants' affinity for politically conservative ideology (see also Nail et al, in press).…”

“…Bonanno and Jost (2006) conducted a longitudinal study of high-exposure survivors-people who were in or near the World Trade Center buildings on the morning of 9/11-and found that 38% reported becoming more politically conservative in the 18 months following the terrorist attacks, which was more than three times as many people who said that they had become more liberal during that same period. Terror management researchers, too, have shown in a litany of experimental studies that subliminal or supraliminal primes that remind people of death, terrorism, 9/11, and related stimuli (simply by flashing words on a computer screen or asking people to think or write about any of these topics) caused liberals as well as conservatives to increase their levels of support for President Bush and his agenda (e.g., Cohen, Ogilvie, Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2005;Landau et al, 2004).…”