The Gift of Humanity: Terror Management and Explicit Humanness Perceptions

Abstract

Terror management theory (TMT) posits the human concept is one of value because it helps mitigate existential anxiety by denying our strictly animal, thus mortal, nature. Further, TMT argues one’s culture, a construct tied to humanness, also assists in death and creatureliness denial. Therefore, TMT appears to be an effective framework to understand why humanity has a tendency to deny the humanness of other cultures and why being denied humanness is detrimental. However, TMT has largely neglected intergroup humanness perceptions. Outside a handful of studies assessing implicit humanness, no TMT studies have examined the relationship between death-related thoughts and explicit humanness perceptions. The current studies aimed to fill this gap. Study 1 found mortality salience (MS) led White Americans to increase humanness perceptions for Americans but also, unexpectedly, for outgroups. This unexpected finding may have been due to a spillover effect as participants rated their ingroup alongside various outgroups. In Study 2, the ingroup and associated groups were removed from the measure and no MS effect was reported on group humanness, suggesting the results of Study 1 may have indeed been due to a spillover effect. Additionally, worldview compatibility (Study 1) and threat perceptions (Study 2) of the rated groups predicted more and less humanness, respectively, showing that evaluations of other cultures are associated with humanness perceptions. In Study 3, I found White Canadians who believed they were victims of dehumanization (vs. not) reported higher levels of death-thought accessibility. Overall, the current studies show a causal relationship between death-related thoughts and explicit humanness perceptions: priming thoughts of death increases the need to be perceived as human whereas denying one their humanity increases death-thought accessibility.