Eva Jonas

The Scrooge Effect: Evidence that Mortality Salience Increases Prosocial Attitudes and Behavior

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of mortality should intensify the desire to express culturally prescribed prosocial attitudes and engage in culturally prescribed prosocial behaviors. Two studies supported these hypotheses. In Study 1, people were interviewed in close proximity to a funeral home or several blocks away and were asked to indicate their attitudes toward two charities they deemed important. Those who were interviewed in front of the funeral home reported more favorability toward these charities than those who were interviewed several blocks away. In Study 2, the authors found that following mortality salience, people gave more money to a charity supporting an American cause than people who had been exposed to an aversive control topic. However, mortality salience had no effect on the amount of money given to a foreign cause. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Terror management and religion: evidence that intrinsic religiousness mitigates worldview defense following mortality salience

Terror management theory suggests that people cope with awareness of death by investing in some kind of literal or symbolic immortality. Given the centrality of death transcendence beliefs in most religions, the authors hypothesized that religious beliefs play a protective role in managing terror of death. The authors report three studies suggesting that affirming intrinsic religiousness reduces both death-thought accessibility following mortality salience and the use of terror management defenses with regard to a secular belief system. Study 1 showed that after a naturally occurring reminder of mortality, people who scored high on intrinsic religiousness did not react with worldview defense, whereas people low on intrinsic religiousness did. Study 2 specified that intrinsic religious belief mitigated worldview defense only if participants had the opportunity to affirm their religious beliefs. Study 3 illustrated that affirmation of religious belief decreased death-thought accessibility following mortality salience only for those participants who scored high on the intrinsic religiousness scale. Taken as a whole, these results suggest that only those people who are intrinsically vested in their religion derive terror management benefits from religious beliefs.

Psychological Motives and Political Orientation - The Left, the Right, and the Rigid: Comment on Jost et al. (2003)

Presenting an impressive model based on a large body of evidence, J. T. Jost, J. Glaser, A.W. Kruglanski, and F. J. Sulloway (2003) proposed that political conservatism uniquely serves epistemic, existential, and ideological needs driven by fears and uncertainties. The authors offer an alternative view based on conceptual considerations, historical events, features of communist ideology and practice, and additional social science research not reviewed by Jost et al. (2003). First, the authors take issue with Jost et al.s (2003) description of the two core components of political conservatism. Second, they propose that the motives in the model are equally well served by rigid adherence to any extreme ideology regardless of whether it is right wing or left wing.

Psychological Defense in Anticipation of Anxiety Eliminating the Potential for Anxiety Eliminates the Effect of Mortality Salience on Worldview Defense

A large body of research has shown that when people are reminded of their mortality, their defense of their cultural worldview intensifies. Although some psychological defenses seem to be instigated by negative affective responses to threat, mortality salience does not appear to arouse such affect. Terror management theory posits that the potential to experience anxiety, rather than the actual experience of anxiety, underlies these effects of mortality salience. If this is correct, then mortality-salience effects should be reduced when participants believe they are not capable of reacting to the reminder of mortality with anxiety. In a test of this hypothesis, participants consumed a placebo purported to either block anxiety or enhance memory. Then we manipulated mortality salience, and participants evaluated pro- and anti-American essays as a measure of worldview defense. Although mortality salience intensified worldview defense in the memory-enhancer condition, this effect was completely eliminated in the anxiety-blocker condition. The results suggest that some psychological defenses serve to avert the experience of anxiety rather than to ameliorate actually experienced anxiety.

Giving Advice or Making Decisions in Someone Else’s Place: The Influence of Impression, Defense, and Accuracy Motivation on the Search for New Information

When making decisions, people have been found predominantly to seek information supporting their preferred choice and to neglect conflicting information. In this article, the authors investigate to what extent different types of advisors, who recommend a choice to someone or make a decision on behalf of someone, show the same confirmatory information search. In Experiment 1, the authors presented participants, in the role of advisors, with a client’s decision problem and found that when making a recommendation, advisors conducted a more balanced information search than participants who were making a decision for themselves. However, advisors who had to make a decision on behalf of their clients revealed an increased preference for information supporting their position. Experiment 2 suggested that this confirmatory information search was caused by impression motivation: The advisors bolstered their decision to justify it to the client. The results are discussed within the multiple motive framework of the heuristic systematic model.

Connecting Terror Management and Dissonance Theory: Evidence that Mortality Salience Increases the Preference for Supporting Information after Decisions

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of mortality should intensify the desire to pursue cognitive consistency. The authors investigated this notion with regard to dissonance theory starting from the finding of research on “selective exposure to information” that after having made a decision, people prefer consonant over dissonant information. The authors found that following mortality salience, people indeed showed an increased preference for information that supported their decision compared to information conflicting with it. However, this only occurred with regard to a worldview-relevant decision case. For a fictitious decision scenario, mortality salience did not affect information seeking. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Effects of a flexible work-time design on employee- and company-related aims

This article addresses the effects of flexible work-time designs on employee- and company-related aims. Using objective and self-reported quantitative and qualitative data the current study examines the effects of a flexible work-time design that was introduced in a service company in Germany. Building on the learning hypothesis of the job demandsu200a–u200acontrol model, we predicted that a highly flexible work-time design that provides employees with high demands but at the same time also with a high degree of autonomy, and self-determination over their working time leads to positive effects on employees personal development and learning opportunities. The results supported this hypothesis. However, in addition to employee-related benefits the results also suggested benefits for the company, such as an increase in adherence to company goals. Moreover, the objective data showed a lower degree of absenteeism and higher work quality compared to the control group working with the traditional work-time design. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Gender conflict and worldview defence

Applying social identity and terror management theory assumptions to gender conflict we predicted that mortality salience (MS) would lead to an increase in pro-women attitudes in women and a decrease in these attitudes in men. After a MS versus control manipulation, 32 female and 24 male university students evaluated (fictitious) courses in psychology dealing with and supporting the promotion of women. In accordance with our prediction the results showed a significant interaction between sex and MS, indicating that men and women differed in their judgment only under MS but not in the control condition. Whereas men reacted with an increased negative evaluation of the pro-women courses following MS, women on the other hand showed an increased positive evaluation of the courses. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Searching for Information About Financial Decisions in Euro Versus DM

The introduction of the Euro in Germany took place even though it was considered far less attractive than the former national currency, the German Mark (DM). In this study, we investigated whether the introduction of the Euro has affected how people made a financial investment decision. We found that thinking about investment alternatives using the Euro led to a more negative attitude toward this currency compared to people who were making a financial decision using the DM. In addition, we showed that people searched for more information regarding advantages of the investment alternatives than disadvantages when making an investment decision with the Euro compared to the DM. The findings are discussed with regard to how people deal with the psychological conflict resulting from the preference for the DM alongside the acceptance of the Euro.

Motivkongruenz in sozialen Austausch- und Interdependenzprozessen im Karrieremanagement

Welche Karriereentwicklungsmasnahme ist die beste Wahl, um das Potenzial von Mitarbeitenden voll auszuschopfen bzw. in welche Mitarbeitende sollte mit welcher Masnahme investiert werden, um das Geld nachhaltig im Interesse des Unternehmens anzulegen? Um Antworten auf diese Fragen zu finden, vergleichen wir vier Karriereberatungsformate miteinander, die in der Arbeitswelt zur fachlichen und personlichen Entwicklung von Mitarbeitenden haufig Anwendung finden: Training, Coaching, Mentoring und Supervision. Zur Verknupfung von Theorie und Beratungspraxis nehmen wir diesen Vergleich mithilfe der sozialpsychologischen Austausch- und Interdependenztheorie vor. Diese betrachtet soziale Interaktionen aus einer Kosten-Nutzen-Perspektive und ist daher fur das Verstandnis von Beratungssituationen von grundlegender Bedeutung. Dabei wird jedoch schnell deutlich, dass Kosten und Nutzen nur vor dem Hintergrund der zugrunde liegenden Bedurfnisse der Interaktionspartner bewertet werden konnen. Auf dieser Grundlage entwickeln wir daher ein dynamisches motivationales Interaktionsmodell, das Loop2Loop-Modell, welches hilft, verschiedene Beratungsformate aus der Bedurfnisperspektive miteinander zu vergleichen. Diese Analyse wird durch die Integration von Situationsvariablen erganzt, die insbesondere die Abhangigkeiten und Interessensunterschiede in Beratungssituationen berucksichtigen. Anhand eines Fallbeispiels, das die Lesenden durch das Kapitel hinweg begleitet, wird praxisnah verdeutlicht, wie eine integrative Perspektive von Theorie und Beratungspraxis den Weg zu einer bedurfnisgerechten Karriereberatung ebnen kann.