You're Hired! Mortality Salience Increases Americans’ Support for Donald Trump

Abstract

people are prone to embrace charismatic politicians in times of historical upheaval to mitigate existential terror. Consistent with this view, previous research has demonstrated that reminders of death (relative to an aversive control condition) increased support for a charismatic leader in a hypothetical gubernatorial election, and support for President Bush and his policies in Iraq prior to the 2004 presidential election. The present Study 1 hypothesized and found that a death reminder increased support for Donald Trump. Study 2 found that while Hillary Clinton was viewed more favorably than Donald Trump in an aversive control condition, Mr. Trump was viewed more favorably in response to a death reminder while impressions of Mrs. Clinton were unaffected. Study 3 demonstrated that asking people to think about immigrants moving into their neighborhood increased the accessibility of implicit death thoughts. These findings suggest that electoral outcomes and public policy can be affected when existential concerns are aroused.

It’s security, stupid! Voters’ perceptions of immigrants as a security risk predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election

“…Mturk offers diverse samples (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, ; Huff & Tingley, ), is a valid recruitment tool for political research (Clifford, Jewell, & Waggoner, ), and has been widely used for political research (e.g., Choma & Hanoch, , Hayward, Hornsey, Tropp, & Barlow, ), including research on support for Donald Trump specifically (Blankenship, Savas, Frederick, & Stewart, ; Choma & Hanoch, ; Conway III, Repke, & Houck, ). It provides far greater heterogeneity for testing political hypotheses regarding support for Donald Trump than student samples (e.g., Cohen, Solomon, & Kaplin, ) or other nonrepresentative sampling methods (Crowson & Brandes, ).…”

“…To measure support for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, participants responded to three items for each candidate: “How favorably do you view X,” “To what extent do you admire X,” and “To what extent do you have confidence in X as a leader.” Items were taken from the published literature on support for political candidates (Cohen, Solomon, & Kaplin, ; Landau et al, ). Items were rated on a scale from 1, “not at all” to 9, “very much.” Internal consistency reliability was high for the items reflecting Donald Trump ( α = 0.94) and Hillary Clinton ( α = 0.93).…”

Terror Management Theory and the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…From a TMT perspective, reminders of death motivate people to affirm their worldviews, and political ideology is a central element of worldviews for many people. Though some studies show that mortality salience leads to a shift toward more conservative attitudes regardless of political orientation ( Cohen et al, 2017 ; Landau et al, 2004 ), others show it leads to polarization, with conservatives endorsing more conservative attitudes and liberals endorsing more liberal ones ( Kosloff et al, 2016 ). A meta-analytic review of this literature concluded that there is evidence for both tendencies, with the evidence being somewhat stronger for polarization ( Burke et al, 2013 ).…”

Not Fake News: Toxic Consequences of the Trump Stress Effect

“…In the unconscious, it is the powerful parent figure who offers protection in the deep dark of night. In support of this theory, Cohen et al (2017) showed that thinking about terrorism, Muslims, and immigrants increased death thought accessibility. They then showed that death thought accessibility was associated with the terror management defense of cleaving to a charismatic strongman leader.…”