In case of death, cling to the ingroup

By Emanuele Castano. 2004

107 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An experiment investigated whether the enhanced importance of the ingroup as a consequence of the salience of death thoughts is a unconscious defense mechanism. Scottish participants were subliminally primed with either the word death or field. Subsequently, they were asked to classify a series of pictures as either English or Scottish, and to state whether a series of negative traits applied to the English or not. Results showed that participants primed with the word death were more likely to exclude targets that looked more like outgroup than ingroup members, than participants in the field (control) prime condition. The pattern observed on the categorization-latency also supported the claim that death-prime participants are more careful in classifying targets. Finally, death-prime participants also conveyed more negative, stereotypical judgments of the English in a trait attribution task. The implications of the results are discussed in relation to terror management theory and social identification phenomena. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cbcaf7135af68cefe29ac5ce585b8c0eb35f8fd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Mark Dechesne
2. E. Paluck
3. Rebecca Littman
4. Emanuele Castano

In Social Psychology

1. Mark Dechesne
2. E. Paluck
3. Rebecca Littman
4. Emanuele Castano
5. Raymond A. Mar
6. E. Koopman
7. Kevin Munger

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Mark Dechesne
2. E. Paluck
3. Rebecca Littman
4. Emanuele Castano
5. P. M. Aronow
6. Cyrus Samii
7. Kevin Munger

Citations in the corpus

• On defeating death: Group reification and social identification as immortality strategies (2005, methodology): “While at lower levels of ingroupness, death-prime participants classified more pictures as outgroup members than did control participants, the opposite trend was observed at higher levels of ingroupness (Castano, 2004b).”
• The Cycle of Violence: Understanding Individual Participation in Collective Violence (2015, background): “In a study using Scottish participants, Castano (2004) found that those primed with death”