Death Concerns and Other Adaptive Challenges: The Effects of Coalition-Relevant Challenges on Worldview Defense in the US and Costa Rica

Abstract

A relational approach to the psychology of coalitions suggests that certain stimuli that index adaptive problems for which marshaling coalitional support is a reliably adaptive response should elicit increased support of ingroup ideology. Studies from two cultures produced results consistent with this perspective. In Study 1, Costa Rican participants contemplating coalition-relevant scenarios (i.e. social isolation or the need to enlist the help of others in a cooperative task) increased support of ingroup ideology, but that participants contemplating a mortality-salient prime did not. Study 2 replicated these results in an American sample, and explored the moderating effects of individual variation in interdependence and chronic dangerous world beliefs on normative bias. These results suggest that the determining factor cross-culturally in the elicitation of worldview defense may not be mortality concerns per se, but rather the need for coalitional support.