A recent study published in Psychological Reports examined how individuals’ ideological rigidity and political conservatism influence their reactions to people with differing beliefs and their fears about death. The study found that people who hold rigid ideological beliefs tend to have more negative reactions toward others with different viewpoints, while political conservatism was associated with less death anxiety. However, the researchers did not find consistent evidence that ideological rigidity is linked to death anxiety.
The researchers aimed to explore a question central to Terror Management Theory (TMT). This psychological theory suggests that humans, aware of their inevitable mortality, adopt cultural belief systems to alleviate fears about death. These beliefs, whether religious or secular, give people a sense of purpose and hope for some form of immortality, either through an afterlife or through leaving a legacy.
However, these belief systems also require validation from others. When individuals encounter people with different worldviews, it threatens the validity of their own beliefs, often leading to negative reactions, including hostility and aggression. Terror Management Theory posits that the more rigid a person’s belief system, the more it protects them from death anxiety. However, this rigidity could make them less tolerant of others with differing opinions.
The researchers also wanted to test an additional hypothesis regarding political conservatism. There is debate over whether conservative ideologies, with their emphasis on tradition and order, are more effective at reducing death anxiety. Some previous research suggested that political conservatives may experience more fear of death due to their focus on threats and danger. Others, however, argue that conservatism offers more certainty and stability, potentially reducing existential fears.
The researchers recruited participants from two groups: students from a small state university in the southeastern United States and a sample of people from an online platform called Prolific. In total, the student sample consisted of 134 participants, mostly aged between 18 and 22, while the online sample included 199 participants aged 19 to 79.
Participants completed several questionnaires designed to measure different aspects of their personality, beliefs, and attitudes. The researchers assessed the participants’ political conservatism, dogmatism (or their tendency to hold rigid beliefs), and personal need for structure, which reflects a preference for clear rules and routines. They also measured participants’ reactions to people with different beliefs and their levels of death anxiety. To capture death anxiety, participants answered questions related to fears about death, such as fears of being forgotten or the loss of life’s pleasures. They also assessed specific fears about punishment in the afterlife.
Participants were asked to rate their agreement with statements on a variety of topics, including their beliefs about knowledge (whether they thought knowledge was fixed or open to change), their political views on social and economic issues, and their tolerance of people with different perspectives. The researchers then analyzed the data to determine how these factors related to each other.
As expected, the researchers found that ideological rigidity was linked to more negative reactions toward people with different beliefs. Participants who scored high in dogmatism or who believed that knowledge was certain and unchangeable tended to be less tolerant and more hostile toward those with differing viewpoints. This supports the idea that people with rigid worldviews are more likely to view differing beliefs as threats to their own.
In terms of death anxiety, the researchers found that political conservatism, particularly on social issues, was associated with less fear of death. This relationship was stronger in the online sample from Prolific than in the student sample. This finding aligns with the idea that conservative worldviews, which often provide a sense of order and stability, may help individuals cope with fears about mortality.
“One possibility is that conservative worldviews offer greater hope of immortality and therefore better ameliorate concerns that death will mean the extinction of the self,” the researchers wrote. “In American politics, religiosity is typically associated with conservative stances on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. Consequently, the negative relation between social conservatism and death anxiety observed in the current study might be an artifact of religiosity, as religious people would tend to hold conservative positions on social issues and have less fears of extinction due to more confidence in literal immorality.”
However, the study did not find consistent evidence that ideological rigidity, as measured by dogmatism or a personal need for structure, were associated with reduced death anxiety. In fact, in the student sample, a higher need for structure was associated with more death anxiety, suggesting that the desire for order might not always offer protection from existential fears.
“It seems possible that a highly structured worldview might only offer protection from death concerns in circumstances where one encounters events and perspectives that are consistent with their established expectations and beliefs,” the researchers explained. “When people high in a desire for structure encounter experiences that do not conform to their expectations or when they are exposed to opinions and perspectives that undermine beliefs, their terror management systems may be disrupted.”
An additional, unexpected finding was that in the Prolific sample, political conservatism was associated with more fear of punishment in the afterlife. This suggests that while conservative ideologies might reduce fears about death as extinction, they could increase concerns about moral transgressions and divine punishment.
According to the researchers, “the failure to observe a consistent relationship between ideological rigidity and death anxiety in the present study suggests that increased dogmatism may not be the only type of cultural worldview defense capable of warding off existential concerns. Although the majority of work in TMT has focused on worldview defense in the forms of derogation and hostility towards outgroups, recent theoretical innovations have begun to explore more positive forms of terror management defenses, in which reminders of death can encourage pro-social values, enhance open-mindedness and tolerance, and promote intrinsic values and growth orientation (Horner et al., 2023). Additional research is needed to further elucidate the moderating circumstances in which more positive or negative defenses are elicited and to establish their relative anxiety buffering properties.”
The study, “Ideological Rigidity and Political Conservatism in Relation to Death Anxiety and Reactions to Those With Different Beliefs,” was authored by Jonathan F. Bassett, Emily Ineson, Dasia Rhodes, Kristin Thomas, and Jeremiah Rosenbrook.