Perceived collective continuity and ingroup identification as defence against death awareness
By F. Sani, Marina Herrera, M. Bowe. 2009
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Perhaps unique among the animal species, humans are aware that they will ultimately die. Terror management theory (TMT) posits that investing in a social group helps people to manage paralysing anxiety stemming from death awareness. In line with this proposition, research to date has shown that when reminded of their own mortality, people increase their identification with a relevant group and defend its beliefs, values, and practices. In the reported study, we demonstrate that a mortality salience induction enhances people’s perceptions of group temporal endurance—or perceived collective continuity (PCC), as we define it. Enhanced PCC leads, in turn, to enhanced group identification. This is in line with the TMT assumption that death awareness leads people to invest in a social group because this constitutes a temporally enduring meaning-system that imbues life with meaning, order, and permanence, and promises death transcendence to those who meet the prescribed standards of value.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed6b8eaf5f2455026f9f8f161f0b002571c0d19f
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In Clinical Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- The presence of the past: Identity continuity and group dynamics (2015, background): “It has been proposed that collective self-continuity also serves such a buffering function (Sani et al., 2009).”
- Collective future thought: Concept, function, and implications for collective memory studies (2016, unknown): “This work, particularly that focused on schisms, mergers, and existentiality (Sani et al., 2009), implies that a sense of collective future plays a key role in upholding the integrity of the group and the well-being experienced by the individual who perceives themselves to be a part of that group.”