The influence of mortality salience on taboo trade-offs

Details

Supervisors

Corneille, Olivier

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques

Abstract

It is increasingly common in Western culture to put a price on everything, even on values and goods that were considered sacred for a long time. However, some exchanges between sacred values (e.g., life, justice) and secular values (e.g., money) remain taboo. These taboo exchanges or Taboo Trade-offs (TTOs) are generally viewed as cognitively difficult, and can often cause moral outrage. When people are confronted with a TTO (and must therefore choose between a sacred and a secular value) their decision can vary considerably according to a multitude of factors. According to terror management theory, when thoughts of death are highly accessible (i.e., when mortality is salient) people invest in their cultural worldviews to protect against death anxiety. Since TTOs go against cultural norms, and therefore threaten the anxiety-buffer effect of cultural worldviews, we hypothesize that the accessibility of ideas about death influences our choices regarding TTOs. In order to test this hypothesis, we presented 64 participants with two questions regarding either death (mortality salience group; N=31) or a neutral event unrelated to death, their usual evening meal (control group; N=33). After a distraction task, they were confronted with a TTO scenario where they were asked if they would (a) accept the trade-off, (b) be happy with the exchange, and (c) find the exchange strange or out of the ordinary. We expect that the participants in the mortality salience condition would be less happy and less accepting of the trade-off, and that they would find the exchange stranger. However, the data we collected did not provide evidence in favor of this hypothesis. We had also postulated that fear would play a moderating factor in this relationship, so we had participants complete a mood scale after the experimental condition, but found no evidence of significant difference between groups on the fear scale. We conclude by saying that more research should be conducted in order to clarify the relationship between thinking about death and people’s choices when confronted with TTOs, and to explore the possibility of a common framework underlying both phenomena.