1. Thinking of Safety Through a Different Lens
Bonnie Miller, Sara Lopez, Talia Liu, Shani Rainey, and Sandra Parsons PhD
Sponsored by: Rice University’s Department of Psychology
Background
Results
Results, cont.
Terror Management Theory (TMT) attempts to explain how people manage fear and terror relating to their own mortality through distractions of everyday life (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986).
The mortality salience hypothesis, derived from the TMT, states that as a result of the terror management, moral salience, or the accessibility of death-related thought, should increase cultural worldview and self-esteem.
A mixed factorial ANOVA revealed that there was a significant main effect of word valence, F(2,168) = 5.125, p = .007, η2 = 0.058, collapsing across priming condition.
Follow up tests using a Bonferroni correction showed that people remembered significantly more neutral words (M = ) than “safe” words (M = 1.975). The differences between “risk” words (M = 2.340) and “safe” words, and between “risk” words and neutral words, were not significant.
Predictions
Participants in the experimental condition, who are primed with a risky scenario, will remember more safe words and more neutral words than risky words.
Participants in the control condition, who read a neutral scenario, will not show a significant difference in the number of words recalled between word types.
(No significant differences across conditions)
Discussion
The results of this study indicate that word valence had some influence on the participants’ memory, but differences in word recall between subjects was not significantly affected by the priming condition, as it was predicted it would.
The overall results did not reflect the previously seen effects of mortality salience. This could be a result of not directly referencing death or individual mortality.
Method
Participants: 85 Rice University undergraduate students, between the ages of 18 and 22. Some participated as part of required classwork, others participated voluntarily.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, neutral or “risky” scenario.
After reading the scenario, participants viewed a series of 21 words (either “risky”, “safe”, or “neutral”), one by one for 2 seconds each.
Participants then rated the riskiness of the scenario they had previously read, and predicted the gender of the scenario subject.
The filler task was followed by the free recall phase, where participants had 2 minutes to type as many words as they could remember.
The survey ended after participants answered demographic questions regarding their age and gender.
We corrected for false alarms by subtracting the number of false alarms from the number of words remembered in each word valence category
There was no significant main effect of priming condition, F(1,82) = 0.460, p = .5, η2 = .006, collapsing across word valence; people in the risky scenario priming condition (M = 2.175) did not remember a significantly different amount of words per category compared to those in the control condition (M =2.304).
Future Work
Future studies should investigate the effect of risky words on memory at larger universities to determine if these findings extend to other campuses.
The interaction of word valence and priming condition was not statistically significant, F(2,168) = 2.439, p = .090, η2 = .028; the effect of word valence did not depend on priming condition.
References
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. & Solomon, S. (1986). "The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory". In R.F. Baumeister (ed.), Public Self and Private Self (pp ). Springer-Verlag (New York).