Memories of a Death Threat: Negative Consequences of Unconscious Thoughts About a Terrorist Attack on Attitudes Towards Alcohol

Abstract

Based on the terror management health model (TMHM), we examined the impact of terrorist attacks as reminders of death on implicit alcohol-related attitudes, including the moderating role of conscious death-related thoughts and alcohol-based self-esteem (ABS). With an online experiment ( N = 487), we analyzed how thoughts and memories about a recent terrorist attack unconsciously (with a delay task) and consciously (without a delay task) affected implicit alcohol-related attitudes. We found that such thoughts increased the death-thought accessibility. While no main effect of the salience of the terrorist attack on alcohol-related attitudes existed, respondents with low ABS had more positive attitudes, when unconsciously thinking about the attack as compared to the control group. Respondents with high ABS in the delay task had lower alcohol-IAT scores. Overall, this study provides evidence that thoughts about terrorism that can be provoked through media affect alcohol-related attitudes. Such attitudes may cause negative health consequences through health-related decisions.

Health consequences of a death threat: How terrorist attacks impact drinking

“…This attack, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility (Samaan & Jacobs, 2020), took 13 1 lives and injured dozens more at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. The attack was widely discussed and led to several security measures in its aftermath (BBC News, 2021; see also for more details Pradel & Sattler, 2022;Samaan & Jacobs, 2020). In addition to the tragic loss of life, the terrorist event represents an attack on a specific part of Germany's culture.…”

“…Offering alcohol in public might have caused some pressure to choose the nonalcoholic beverage (regardless, 31.1% of the respondents chose alcohol), thus generally lowering the chance of the effects of the terrorism salience treatment from becoming stronger. The beverage choice in this study might, therefore, be more conscious and controllable than in studies on implicit attitudes (Pradel & Sattler, 2022) or where the alcoholic drinks might be embedded in a more natural research context (e.g., Wisman et al study (2015) at a nightclub). Still, both the terrorism salience and the dental pain group should be affected the same due to randomization.…”

“…Thus, mortality stimuli related to terrorist attacks, military events, or subliminal stimuli (like images) also function as death reminders and similarly evoke the need for worldview defense and behavior that are important to oneself (Das et al., 2009; Vail et al., 2012). In particular, being reminded of a previous salient terrorist attack, such as the September 11, 2001 attacks (Vail et al., 2012), and attacks on a comparatively smaller scale, such as the Berlin Christmas Market attack in Germany (Pradel & Sattler, 2022) or the murder of Theo van Gogh (Das et al., 2009), increased death‐thought accessibility of people in the targeted countries in line with TMT.…”

“…Previous research suggests that implicit attitudes toward alcohol (measured with an implicit association test) become more positive for individuals who had low alcohol‐based self‐esteem and were thinking unconsciously about a terrorist attack than implicit attitudes in individuals in a control group who were thinking unconsciously about another negative event (Pradel & Sattler, 2022). Having low alcohol‐based self‐esteem implies that alcohol is less important to one's self‐esteem than those with high alcohol‐based self‐esteem.…”

“…While the little existing research has investigated the link between thoughts of a terrorist attack using a TMT‐lens on implicit attitudes toward alcohol, the exact mechanism of actual drinking behavior still requires further investigation (Pradel & Sattler, 2022). Particularly, implicit attitudes measured with an implicit association test could also portray cultural knowledge, like alcohol as something “bad” rather than portray attitudes (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001; Pradel & Sattler, 2022). Therefore, it is necessary to further discover how thoughts about a terrorist attack manifest into actual drinking tendencies.…”