The possibility of self-determined death eliminates mortality salience effects on cultural worldview defense: cross-cultural replications

Contemplating the inevitability of one’s own death can deeply affect a person’s subjective sense of control, eliciting symbolic responses to restore control through cultural worldview defense. Re-search supporting this perspective has shown that reminders of one’s own death (i.e., uncontrol-lable death) can increase worldview defense, whereas self-determined dying (i.e., controllable death) does not (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhänel, 2008). To date, all supportive evidence comes from the German culture and it remains unclear whether this effect can be replicated in non-German cultures. We conducted two studies to investigate the cross-cultural validity of this effect and rep-licated the effect in both a highly individualistic culture (i.e., the United States) and a highly collec-tivistic culture (i.e., China). The increased ingroup identification observed after reminders of un-controllable death supports the model of group-based control.