Dmitrij Agroskin and Eva Jonas — Controlling death by defending ingroups: Mediational insights into terror management and control restoration

21 published claims from this book.

• Boredom salience serves as a comparison condition to isolate control restoration from meaning maintenance.
• Control deprivation triggers compensatory superstitious and conspiratorial thinking.
• Control loss, uncertainty, and meaninglessness are conceptually distinct threats.
• Control motivation but not implicit death cognition drives threat-based ingroup defense.
• Death reminders evoke ingroup defense through a shared loss-of-control mechanism
• Death-thought accessibility does not mediate ingroup defense, while control motivation does.
• Death-thought accessibility does not mediate mortality salience effects on ingroup defense.
• Empirical support for death-thought accessibility mediating terror-management effects on ingroup defense remains unsettled.
• High self-esteem buffers against the need for external control.
• Illusory pattern perception drives both death and control threats toward ingroup defense
• Illusory pattern perception signals control motivation rather than control restoration.
• Ingroup defense functions as a compensatory control mechanism when personal control is lost.
• Ingroup defenses like prejudice function primarily to restore an orderly worldview.
• Mortality salience effects are not confounded with negative mood, which prior TMT research predicts.
• Mortality salience effects grow over time while uncertainty and meaninglessness effects decay.
• Mortality salience effects require sufficient delay before defense measurement.
• Mortality salience triggers ingroup defense through control deprivation
• Personal and external control are interchangeable ways of warding off perceived randomness.
• Poem-based threat inductions risk confounds from unequal content
• Systematic mediational comparison in threat-compensation research was first undertaken here.
• Winter serves as an aversive control condition comparable to dental pain in terror-management research.