Death, here is thy sting. Grave, here is thy victory.
According to terror management theory we need defenses against our awareness of our mortality. As a result, we try to reassure ourselves in various ways, through our behavior, affiliations, and cognitions. Terror management theorists say these defense mechanisms influence many apparently unrelated psychological and sociological phenomena- for example, religion and politics.
Of particular interest to this blog, terror management theory has been offered as an explanation of conservative politics. However, support for the hypothesis that managing fear of death explains conservative politics is hard to assess. There is evidence of strong publication bias in the area. Experiments are often too small for my taste. It is, I would say, a bit of a dicey proposition, and one we are unlikely to resolve here.
Out of curiosity, I opened Google Trends and punched in “death” as a topic, then did a state-by-state comparison for the US. Because of the politicization of death around the time of the coronavirus, and the special left-right valence that has been bestowed on the coronavirus, I didn’t want to include post-COVID data. I also wanted the data to be close in time to 2016. Google Trends is often underpowered, so I needed a relatively big range. I picked 2014 to 2018.
Here’s what I found, R=0.51
A big relationship, but what about confounders? My initial thought was that this relationship was most likely mediated as follows:
Age makes people think about death AND vote Trump, thus the relationship is a red herring.
Fortunately, we can rule out this confounder at least. At a state level, age isn’t correlated with total Trump vote. Indeed, it is very slightly anti-correlated.
Does that prove the relationship is causal? Certainly not, but it’s cute.
In general, I’ve been thinking a bit lately about what we might call political psychogeography- the ways in which the differential psychology of a region can explain its collective political behavior. For statistical reasons, the aggregation involved in looking at regions as a whole means the relationships are often large. My favorite example of this is the massive (-r=0.76) anti-correlation between average openness to experience in a county and the percentage voting for Trump in that county:
Not to pick on poor Trump too much but another interesting fact is that searches for erotic content correlate 0.65 with voting for Trump on the state level. Go figure.
But whether terror management theory is right or not, we all have, as Sufjan put it, a murdering ghost that we cannot ignore. At the moment I’m trying to see if I can find some better evidence for Terror management at a geographic level while exploring other psychogeographic variables and their influence on politics. Let me know if you have any ideas.
I've long thought "progressive vs conservative" speaks to the main difference between their worldviews. These seem to me fundamental (and equally valid) ways of seeing the world. Progressive views ensure society keeps moving forward, while conservative views prevent leaping off cliffs. But both need to be honest and authentic in their approach, a condition we rarely see anymore. Politics has become a team sport with fans rooting for their team regardless of its failures and weaknesses.
That all said, I read about a study that found a notable correlation between conservative views and the sense of disgust (a sort of anti-openness). Hard to quantify but rings true to me. A lot of conservative politics does seem to trace down to a sense of disgust about something, for instance, immigrants, the poor, other races and cultures.
I don't think conservatives fear death more, but their attitude might still fit within terror management theory: one strategy to avoid confronting thinking about death, and by proxy the existential risks of the world, is to insist that they don't exist: that the way things have been done in the past has served us in good stead so far, so why change. This attitude is, at various points in history, in favour of driving without seatbelts, polluting the environment, smoking, increasing car fumes, sending children down mines etc.