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Terrorism Salience increases System Justification: Experimental Evidence

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Abstract

The issue of international terrorism has figured frequently in recent political debates and media coverage. In the present paper, we explore the question of how the salience of the concept of international terrorism affects the system-justifying tendencies of public opinion. On the basis of Terror Management Theory and System Justification Theory it was hypothesized that terrorism salience would lead to increased system justification. Four experiments with student and non-student adult samples support the hypothesis, yielding a medium-sized average effect of d = 0.47. Across variations in the intensity of focal death-related thoughts, the effect was not subject to boundary conditions typical of mortality salience effects. Social and political psychological implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The original material in German language is available from the first author.

  2. All effect sizes d reported in this paper refer to the bias-corrected standardized mean difference (Hedges and Olkin, 1985) with positive values indicating more system justification in the experimental group compared with a control group. In describing effect sizes, we use the nomenclature of Cohen (1992) who suggested that a medium effect (d = 0.5) would be “visible to the naked eye of a careful observer” (p. 156).

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Acknowledgments

This research was conducted while the first author was a PhD student at the Graduiertenkolleg [Research Training Group] “Group Focused Enmity” supported by the DFG (GRK 884/1–04). We are thankful to Oliver Christ, Edward Dunlap, Immo Fritsche, John T. Jost, Jost Stellmacher, Ulrich Wagner, and our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. Thanks are extended to Eva Jonas for providing us with a template of a measure of death-thought accessibility, and to Manuel Drews, Mareike Glockmann, Pamela Holtus, Annika M. Kohl and Kristina B. Rohde for their help with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, J.W. Goethe University, Kettenhofweg 128, 60054, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Johannes Ullrich

  2. Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany

    J. Christopher Cohrs

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  1. Johannes Ullrich
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  2. J. Christopher Cohrs
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Correspondence to Johannes Ullrich.

Appendix

Appendix

Items of the German version of Kay and Jost’s (2003) system justification scale

   
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Ullrich, J., Cohrs, J.C. Terrorism Salience increases System Justification: Experimental Evidence. Soc Just Res 20, 117–139 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0035-y

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