PsychologicalMANIPULATIVE

Mortality Salience

What it is

Reminders of death are placed near a request — for a vote, a donation, a purchase, a conversion — on the theory that people who have just been reminded of their mortality cling harder to their worldview, punish outsiders, and favour strong leaders and the familiar.

How it works

Terror management theory, proposed by Greenberg, Pyszczynski and Solomon in 1986, holds that awareness of death is managed by clinging to a cultural worldview and to self-esteem, so that reminders of death should make people defend their worldview harder: punish transgressors, reward loyalists, prefer charismatic leaders. Rosenblatt and colleagues reported in 1989 that municipal judges asked to write about their own death set bail for a prostitute at roughly nine times the amount set by control judges; Greenberg and colleagues found in 1990 that death reminders increased favouritism toward those who praised the participant's country; Landau and colleagues found in 2004 that reminders of death or of 9/11 raised support for George W. Bush among students who otherwise preferred Kerry. A 2010 meta-analysis of 164 papers reported a large effect. The replication record is now the most important fact about this technique. Many Labs 4, published by Klein and colleagues in 2022, ran the worldview-defence paradigm across 21 sites and more than two thousand participants, with and without the original authors' involvement, and found no effect. The lever may exist at small size in some conditions, but a persuader deploying death reminders is using a tool whose measured force is far weaker than its reputation, and that the technique remains popular says more about persuaders' beliefs than about audiences.

Real-world examples

  • •Lyndon Johnson's 1964 “Daisy” advertisement cut from a small girl counting petals to a nuclear countdown and detonation; it aired once and reframed the election as a question of survival.
  • •George W. Bush's 2004 “Wolves” advertisement showed a pack gathering in a forest over the line that weakness attracts those waiting to do America harm, and the 2004 Republican convention foregrounded 9/11 imagery; Landau and colleagues' study of that year is the laboratory twin of the campaign.
  • •Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary advertisement showed children asleep and a phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m., asking who voters wanted to answer it — a threat reminder deployed inside the Democratic primary against Barack Obama.
  • •Pre-need funeral plans and life-insurance products are sold through scripts that open with the family's situation after the buyer's death, and revivalist preaching has long used “you could die tonight” to precede the altar call.

Ethical guidelines

  • ●Do not introduce death reminders into a decision they are irrelevant to; if a product, policy or candidate is worth choosing, it should survive the choice being made in a calm state.
  • ●Communicating a genuine mortal risk — smoking, drink-driving, an evacuation order — is a different act: state the risk accurately, pair it with an effective and specific action, and stop once the action is taken. See the appeal-to-fear entry for the efficacy conditions.
  • ●Do not use existential threat to make a leader, a war, or an outgroup easier to accept; that is the exact use the theory predicts and the use with the ugliest history.
  • ●Be honest about the evidence: a campaign built on death reminders is built on an effect that failed a large multi-site replication.

How to defend against it

  • ►Notice the reminder. Imagery of graves, funerals, terror, disease and countdowns placed near a request is a tell; name it — “this is a death cue attached to a pitch” — and the Persuasion Knowledge Model predicts that naming it blunts it.
  • ►Separate the threat from the ask: if the danger is real, what specific action reduces it, by how much, and does the thing being sold actually do that? Fear that arrives without an efficacious action is being used, not communicated.
  • ►Apply the 24-hour rule to any decision made in the wake of a death reminder — a diagnosis, a funeral, an attack in the news — before signing, donating, or voting on the strength of it.
  • ►Ask whether you would want the same leader, policy or product if you felt safe. If the answer is no, the appeal is running on the reminder rather than on the merits.

References

  1. Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public Self and Private Self (pp. 189-212). Springer
    The original statement of terror management theory.
  2. Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Lyon, D. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(4), 681-690
    The municipal-judges bail study, the first mortality-salience experiment.
  3. Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Rosenblatt, A., Veeder, M., Kirkland, S., & Lyon, D. (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 308-318
    Death reminders increased favouritism toward those who praised the participant's worldview and hostility toward critics.
  4. Landau, M. J., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Cohen, F., Pyszczynski, T., Arndt, J., Miller, C. H., Ogilvie, D. M., & Cook, A. (2004). Deliver us from evil: The effects of mortality salience and reminders of 9/11 on support for President George W. Bush. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(9), 1136-1150
    Death and 9/11 reminders raised support for Bush among participants who otherwise preferred Kerry.
  5. Burke, B. L., Martens, A., & Faucher, E. H. (2010). Two decades of terror management theory: A meta-analysis of mortality salience research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 155-195
    The pre-replication-crisis meta-analysis reporting a large effect across 164 papers.
  6. Klein, R. A., Cook, C. L., Ebersole, C. R., Vitiello, C., Nosek, B. A., et al. (2022). Many Labs 4: Failure to replicate mortality salience effect with and without original author involvement. Collabra: Psychology, 8(1), 35271
    The multi-site preregistered replication across 21 labs that found no mortality-salience effect on worldview defence.
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