Jeff Greenberg and Spee Kosloff — Terror Management Theory: Implications for Understanding Prejudice, Stereotyping, Intergroup Conflict, and Political Attitudes

19 published claims from this book.

• Bicultural individuals shift worldviews contextually under death threat
• Charismatic leaders exploit threat to create scapegoats and bring evil into being.
• Culture cannot fully repress death terror, driving people to localize threats in fetishized evil.
• Death concerns strengthen appeals to kill culturally designated evil groups.
• Death reminders uniquely trigger worldview and relationship defense, unlike other aversive threats.
• Humans construct cultural identities to deny mortality.
• Humans deflect death anxiety onto cultural symbols, and defending those symbols produces real-world evil
• Intergroup prejudice and self-esteem serve the same underlying need to deny death.
• Mortality awareness collides with survival instincts to produce existential terror
• Mortality reminders make stereotype targets behave consistently with negative stereotypes of their group.
• Mortality salience can instigate real aggression against critics of one’s worldview.
• Mortality salience increases stereotypic thinking and preference for stereotype-confirming others.
• Mortality salience increases support for lethal violence against cultural enemies.
• Mortality salience shifts Whites’ racial-pride and discrimination judgments in favor of their own race.
• Outgroup difference threatens the death-buffering worldview, driving defensive prejudice
• People curb death anxiety by identifying evil with out-groups via scapegoating.
• Prejudice targets are caught between heritage and dominant worldviews, destabilizing meaning.
• Prejudiced targets cope via assimilation, resistance, or pluralism
• Worldview and self-esteem defense is bidirectional with death-thought accessibility.