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Anxiety and Intergroup Bias: Terror Management or Coalitional Psychology?

University of California, Los Angeles, cdn{at}ucla.edu

Robert Kurzban

University of California, Los Angeles

Daniel M. T. Fessler

University of California, Los Angeles

Lee A. Kirkpatrick

College of William and Mary

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.

Key Words: authoritarianism • evolutionary psychology • ideology • ingroup • interdependence • outgroup • self-esteem • terror management

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