Mike Friedman

Religious Fundamentalism and Terror Management

The study reported herein tested the following hypothesis: Religious fundamentalism can serve a protective function against existential anxiety, such that the need to engage in secular worldview defense when mortality is made salient is reduced for high fundamentalists. The results showed that high fundamentalists engaged in less worldview defense after thinking about their own death versus a control topic. Low fundamentalists, however, engaged in more worldview defense after thinking about their deaths versus a control topic. Exploratory analyses revealed that high fundamentalists writings about death had a more positive emotional tone and that reactions to the death salience manipulation moderated the impact of fundamentalism on worldview defense. Fundamentalists who saw their deaths in terms of peace and acceptance appeared most protected against terror management concerns.

Religious Fundamentalism and Responses to Mortality Salience: A Quantitative Text Analysis

Investigating an issue of critical importance for the psychology of religion and for terror management theory, this study examines the relationship between religious fundamentalism and beliefs about death as articulated during a mortality salience (MS) manipulation. Participants wrote about the emotions and events surrounding their own death (MS), or a control topic, and linguistic content in the essays was related to levels of self-reported fundamentalism of the essay authors. Higher levels of fundamentalism were associated with responses to MS that were less cognitively complex, contained more positive emotion, and were more future and socially oriented. There was virtually no relationship between fundamentalism and linguistic properties of writings about a control topic. The discussion centers on the influence of fundamentalist belief systems on attitudes toward death and suggests how the current results might aid future study of religious belief and of terror management.

Religious Fundamentalism and Terror Management: Differences by Interdependent and Independent Self-construal

Two studies tested the hypothesis that religious fundamentalism and self-construal are associated with systematic differences in death awareness. We hypothesized that, for individuals low in religious fundamentalism, who presumably experience less of an anxiety buffer based on worldview, interdependent self-construal (a sense of the self as encompassing connections to close others) should be associated with reduced baseline death awareness — because relational processes may have anxiety buffering functions. Results from both studies supported this notion, showing that chronic and primed interdependence were associated with reduced death-awareness for low fundamentalists. Among persons scoring high on religious fundamentalism levels of death awareness were unrelated to self-construal. These studies suggest that fundamentalism and self-conceptions interact to influence the terror-management process.

Brand Discrimination: An Implicit Measure of the Strength of Mental Brand Representations

While mental associations between a brand and its marketing elements are an important part of brand equity, previous research has yet to provide a sound methodology to measure the strength of these links. The following studies present the development and validation of an implicit measure to assess the strength of mental representations of brand elements in the mind of the consumer. The measure described in this paper, which we call the Brand Discrimination task, requires participants to identify whether images of brand elements (e.g. color, logo, packaging) belong to a target brand or not. Signal detection theory (SDT) is used to calculate a Brand Discrimination index which gives a measure of overall recognition accuracy for a brand’s elements in the context of its competitors. A series of five studies shows that the Brand Discrimination task can discriminate between strong and weak brands, increases when mental representations of brands are experimentally strengthened, is relatively stable across time, and can predict brand choice, independently and while controlling for other explicit and implicit brand evaluation measures. Together, these studies provide unique evidence for the importance of mental brand representations in marketing and consumer behavior, along with a research methodology to measure this important consumer-based brand attribute.

Developing a Scale to Measure Brand-Evoked Nostalgia in Belgium and the United States: An Abstract

Contemporary branding activities by a host of companies demonstrate a managerial interest in nostalgia as a practical marketing tool. Little attention, however, has been paid to measuring the complex and multiple dimensions of this construct. More academic research is surely warranted to develop and validate a generalizable measure of brand nostalgia to help companies gauge and track the nuanced components of nostalgia associated with their brands.

The Development of a Bi-Lingual Assessment Instrument to Measure Agentic and Communal Consumer Motives in English and French

Consumer behavior is driven, in part, by the degree to which goods and services appeal to underlying motives for agency and communion. The purpose of this research was to develop a brief individual differences measure of these motivations for use in behavioral research and theoretical and applied consumer psychology and marketing studies. We employed a bi-lingual scale development procedure to create the 10-item Agentic and Communal Consumer Motivation Inventory (ACCMI) in English and French. Two studies show that the ACCMI is language invariant, demonstrates convergent and discriminant validity with consumer, motivational, and interpersonal constructs, and predicts evaluations of products described in agentic and communal terms, respectively, in both languages. The general conclusion of this research is that agency and communion provide a useful framework for understanding and studying consumer buying motivations. Discussion focuses on the relevance of motivational factors for studying human behavior and the applied utility of the ACCMI.