Death concerns strengthen appeals to kill culturally designated evil groups.

Evidence

These studies provide clear support for the idea that concerns with death increase the appeal of efforts to kill groups that one’s culture designates as sources of ultimate evil. By doing so, TMT research has helped psychologists better understand the motives that drive the age-old process of scapegoating, which has played a central role in intergroup conflict throughout recorded history. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory, 68

Categorization

• XREF: Ties scapegoating to the sacrifice question the reader is tracking — cultures naming an ‘ultimate evil’ group to kill parallels out-group blood sacrifice as identity stabilizer. — connects to: Humans deflect death anxiety onto cultural symbols, and defending those symbols produces real-world evil — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 25; Culture cannot fully repress death terror, driving people to localize threats in fetishized evil. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 54; People curb death anxiety by identifying evil with out-groups via scapegoating. — Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff, Terror Management Theory: Implications…, 55 (+7 more)
• QUESTION: Designating a group as a source of ‘ultimate evil’ is itself an identity with strong affirmative content (they are what we are not). Does any of this research speak to hate-groups defined purely by negation rather than positive content?

Broader Connections

• Mortality reminders make people endorse preemptive attacks on non-threatening countries #corroborates (0.90) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 538
• Death reminders inflame xenophobia unless compassionate religious values are primed #qualifies (0.86) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 550
• Perceived supernatural moral imperatives can compel groups to kill #expands (0.82) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 165
• Rhetorical conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and Middle Easterners legitimized mass execution. #exemplifies (0.78) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1175
• Modern mass slaughter is justified through racial threat rather than religious demonism #complicates (0.76) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1347
• Mass killing requires ideology to overcome taboos against killing #qualifies (0.74) — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 18