Culturally Divergent Responses to Mortality Salience

Abstract

Two experiments compared the effects of death thoughts, or mortality salience, on European and Asian Americans. Research on terror management theory has demonstrated that in Western cultural groups, individuals typically employ self-protective strategies in the face of death-related thoughts. Given fundamental East-West differences in self-construal (i.e., the independent vs. interdependent self), we predicted that members of Eastern cultural groups would affirm other people, rather than defend and affirm the self, after encountering conditions of mortality salience. We primed European Americans and Asian Americans with either a death or a control prime and examined the effect of this manipulation on attitudes about a person who violates cultural norms (Study 1) and on attributions about the plight of an innocent victim (Study 2). Mortality salience promoted culturally divergent responses, leading European Americans to defend the self and Asian Americans to defend other people.

Enjoying life in the face of death: East–West differences in responses to mortality salience.

“…Second, the present research contributes to TMT's longstanding tenet that while the existence of mechanisms to cope with death are universal, the precise strategies taken to resolve the problem of mortality vary across individuals (e.g., Mikulincer & Florian, 2000;Niemiec et al, 2010), context (e.g.. Cox et al, 2008;Jonas & Fischer, 2006;Harmon-Jones et al, 1997;Routledge et al, 2008;Rutjens et al, 2009;Schmeichel & Martens, 2005;Zhou et al, 2009), and culture (e.g., Ma-Kellams & Blascovich, 2011;Wakimoto, 2006;Yen & Cheng, 2010). Across studies, we demonstrated that striving to enjoy life is a culture-specific response to MS adopted by Easterners but not Westerners.…”

Tolerating dissimilar other when primed with death: neural evidence of self-control engaged by interdependent people in Japan

“…We predicted a large effect size for interaction effect based on previous study (Ma-Kellams and Blascovich, 2011; study 1, f  = 52, study 2, f  = 40). The optimal total sample size to detect an expected large effect size of f 2  =   0.35 (a large effect size) with a power = 0.8 and α  = 0.05 was calculated a priori with the statistical software G-Power (Faul et al , 2009).…”

“…Consistent with this notion, Jonas et al (2008) have demonstrated that MS can generate some contrasted behavioral reactions, depending on the situational norm: for example, either pro-social (pro-peace or benevolent) behaviors or pro-self (pro-violence, conservative) behaviors could follow a MS induction. Similarly, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich (2011) have shown that in contrast to European-Americans who evaluate the worldview-threatening others (prostitutes in Study 1 and victim of a car accident in Study 2) more negatively in the MS condition, Asian-Americans evaluate the same targets more positively. These divergent reactions of the Asian- and European-Americans to MS have been attributed to their contrasted self-construals (SC)―interdependent SC that promotes social harmony, and independent SC that promotes self-affirmation, respectively (Markus and Kitayama, 1991).…”

“…As MS increases the psychological need for cultural worldviews, Asian-Americans, who have an interdependent SC, would harmonize with dissimilar others to protect their interdependent worldviews. As ethnic difference in SC was only assumed by Ma-Kellams and Blascovich (2011), we aimed to replicate their results by directly measuring SC in our research.…”

“…Finally, Ma-Kellams and Blascovich (2011) reported that Asian-Americans were less tolerant of dissimilar other than were European-Americans in the absence of MS threat. We also anticipated that highly interdependent people in Japan would show less tolerance than low interdependent people in the absence of death-related stimuli.…”