Daniel M. Ogilvie

Deliver us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush

According to terror management theory, heightened concerns about mortality should intensify the appeal of charismatic leaders. To assess this idea, we investigated how thoughts about death and the 9/11 terrorist attacks influence Americans’ attitudes toward current U.S. President George W. Bush. Study 1 found that reminding people of their own mortality (mortality salience) increased support for Bush and his counterterrorism policies. Study 2 demonstrated that subliminal exposure to 9/11-related stimuli brought death-related thoughts closer to consciousness. Study 3 showed that reminders of both mortality and 9/11 increased support for Bush. In Study 4, mortality salience led participants to become more favorable toward Bush and voting for him in the upcoming election but less favorable toward Presidential candidate John Kerry and voting for him. Discussion focused on the role of terror management processes in allegiance to charismatic leaders and political decision making.

A Comparison of Personal Project Motives in Three Age Groups

In 2 cross-sectional studies, adolescent, middle-age, and older adults were asked to describe their personal projects and give reasons for their involvement in them. These purposes were then coded into 4 motivational categories. The motive to acquire, the desire to obtain a future positive outcome, characterized the highest percentage of purposes in all 3 groups, accompanied by a stepwise decline in its prevalence in the middle-age and older groups. Keep, the motive to avoid losing an existing positive condition, was more characteristic of the older group than the 2 younger groups. The desire to cure an existing negative condition rose in the middle-age group in Study 1, but not in Study 2. The intention to prevent a negative outcome showed no significant trends.

Life satisfaction and identity structure in late middle-aged men and women.

A total of 32 retirement-age subjects (17 men and 15 women) provided information about their lives by rating each of their identities in terms of a list of self-generated features. They also rank-ordered their currently enacted identities in terms of time spent in each and completed a life-satisfaction questionnaire. The Identities X Features matrices were analyzed by algorithms that generated a hierarchical model of identity structure for each subject based on feature ratings. The hierarchical levels of identities were combined with time-spent rankings to obtain an index of personal style, a measure that reflected the unique organization of identities for each subject. Personal style indices were then correlated with life-satisfaction scores. Results confirmed the prediction that life satisfaction in this age group is a function of the amount of time spent in identities that give expression to multiple aspects of the self.

Self-With-Other Representations

There are two major divisions in psychology. One is occupied by descendants of 19th-century Leipzig and the other by descendants of 19th-century Vienna. Erdelyi, (1985) observed that this division has resulted in not one, but two, psychologies. He labeled one Apollonian and the other Dionysian. Apollonians (intellectual off-spring of Wundt in Leipzig) thrive in the laboratory where variables are fashioned to meet scientific standards. As this division is played out in personality psychology, the principal goal of Apollonians is to establish objective measures of behavior. Only things that can be observed, counted, or otherwise quantified fall within this province. Modern-day trait psychology falls mostly within this tradition. In contrast, Dionysians (intellectual descendants of Freud in Vienna) are “untrammeled by method” (Erdelyi, 1994, p. 670). Personality psychologists who resist being constricted by numbers and standard statistics argue that if one must postulate the operation of unconscious, unobservable, and nonrational mental processes in order to make headway in understanding the subjective worlds of individuals, so be it. Such inferences regarding psychodynamic forces operating behind the curtains of consciousness provide fuel for Apollonian outrage. They are premises for disparaging charges pertaining to illusive, chameleonlike sorts of data garnered as evidence for psychoanalytic models of the person. In their turn, Dionysians complain about the sparse, even trivial, content of findings that emanate from the positivistic labs of their counterparts.

Teach these souls to fly: Supernatural as human adaptation

omething extraordinary happened on the evolutionary path that gave rise to creatures capable of culture. The changes are so profound it is as if we humans were somehow domesticated. levels of violence are drastically lower than for the other great apes. We are born helpless, we require extended care, and we actively teach each other. We pay exquisite attention to each other’s wishes and emotional states. We not only cooperate in ways other great apes can--tic behaviors obviously harmful to fitness. even our bones are different from our ancestors in ways typical of a domesticated species (leach, 2003).domestication does not require planning. Self-interested behaviors are suffi-cient. Chasing away aggressive wolves allows friendly ones to gain an advantage by scavenging scraps. after only a thousand generations, this has transformed wolves into the prosocial, loyal, and helpful dogs we now love. Of course, humans were not domesticated by choices made by some other species. nonetheless, many human social characteristics would be easy to understand if we had somehow been domes-ticated. aspects of culture now select for prosociality and capacities for complex social cognition. But what happened before there was culture? What got the pro-cess going?We are understandably curious about what happened on our evolutionary path that made us capable of culture. The sequence likely involved so many interacting factors and recursive causal cycles that any description that satisfies our evolved minds will inevitably oversimplify the actual process. nonetheless, as illustrated by the chapters in this book, an enormous amount of thought and research has advanced our understanding of how selection shaped capacities for culture. Old arguments pitting evolution and culture as alternatives have been replaced by formulations that recognize both as essential to any full explanation of human