Anxiety and Intergroup Bias: Terror Management or Coalitional Psychology?

Contemplation of death increases support of ingroup ideologies, a result explained by proponents of terror management theory (TMT) as an attempt to buffer existential anxiety. While TMT claims that only death-salient stimuli yield such effects, an evolutionary perspective suggests that increased intergroup bias may occur in response to a wide variety of situations that, in ancestral environments, posed adaptive problems for which marshaling social support was a reliably adaptive response. Four experiments from two cultures produced results consistent with this latter perspective but contrary to TMT. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that, among UCLA undergraduates, participants asked to contemplate aversive scenarios unrelated to death displayed increased support of ingroup ideology. Studies 3 and 4 replicated elements of these results, exploring the moderating effects of self-esteem and collectivism on intergroup bias in two Costa Rican samples. These results indicate that worldview defense effects occur even when death is not salient.