PSYCH> Vol.7 No.7, July 2016

Author(s)

Hongfei Du¹, Immo Fritsche², Zenobia Talati^3,4, Emanuele Castano⁵, Eva Jonas^6*

¹Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, China.
²Institut für Psychologie, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
³School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia.
⁴Faculty of Health Sciences, School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University, Bentley, Australia.
⁵Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, USA.
⁶Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria.

Contemplating the inevitability of one’s own death can deeply affect a person’s subjective sense of control, eliciting symbolic responses to restore control through cultural worldview defense. Re-search supporting this perspective has shown that reminders of one’s own death (i.e., uncontrol-lable death) can increase worldview defense, whereas self-determined dying (i.e., controllable death) does not (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhänel, 2008). To date, all supportive evidence comes from the German culture and it remains unclear whether this effect can be replicated in non-German cultures. We conducted two studies to investigate the cross-cultural validity of this effect and rep-licated the effect in both a highly individualistic culture (i.e., the United States) and a highly collec-tivistic culture (i.e., China). The increased ingroup identification observed after reminders of un-controllable death supports the model of group-based control.

Lack of Control, Self-Determined Death, Mortality Salience, Group-Based Control

Du, H. , Fritsche, I. , Talati, Z. , Castano, E. and Jonas, E. (2016) The Possibility of Self-Determined Death Eliminates Mortality Salience Effects on Cultural Worldview Defense: Cross-Cultural Replications. Psychology, 7, 1004-1014. doi: 10.4236/psych.2016.77101.