TY - JOUR

T1 - Do salient social norms moderate mortality salience effects? A (challenging) meta-analysis of terror management studies

AU - Schindler, Simon

AU - Hilgard, Joseph

AU - Fritsche, Immo

AU - Burke, Brian

AU - Pfattheicher, Stefan

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

PY - 2023/5

Y1 - 2023/5

N2 - Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypothesized interaction between MS and norm salience revealed a small-to-medium effect of g = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [0.26, 0.41]. Bias-adjustment techniques suggested the presence of publication bias and/or the exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom and arrived at smaller effect size estimates for the hypothesized interaction, in several cases reducing the effect to nonsignificance (range g corrected = −0.36 to 0.15). To increase confidence in the idea that MS and norm salience interact to influence behavior, preregistered, high-powered experiments using validated norm salience manipulations are necessary. Concomitantly, more specific theorizing is needed to identify reliable boundary conditions of the effect.

AB - Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one’s cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypothesized interaction between MS and norm salience revealed a small-to-medium effect of g = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [0.26, 0.41]. Bias-adjustment techniques suggested the presence of publication bias and/or the exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom and arrived at smaller effect size estimates for the hypothesized interaction, in several cases reducing the effect to nonsignificance (range g corrected = −0.36 to 0.15). To increase confidence in the idea that MS and norm salience interact to influence behavior, preregistered, high-powered experiments using validated norm salience manipulations are necessary. Concomitantly, more specific theorizing is needed to identify reliable boundary conditions of the effect.

KW - Psychology

KW - meta-analysis

KW - mortality salience

KW - publication bias

KW - social norms

KW - terror management theory

UR - https://osf.io/mr4nb/

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135845618&partnerID=8YFLogxK

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/e7dd6c8d-6e57-3d5a-b6e0-c4b8b3aed0f2/

U2 - 10.1177/10888683221107267

DO - 10.1177/10888683221107267

M3 - Scientific review articles

C2 - 35950528

VL - 27

SP - 195

EP - 225

JO - Personality and Social Psychology Review

JF - Personality and Social Psychology Review

SN - 1088-8683

IS - 2

ER -