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problem of death by clinging to their existing worldviews or shifting toward whatever ideology seems to best resolve ambiguity. Jost, Fitzsimons, and Kay (2004) took this question a step further by arguing that conservative ideology seems to be inherently more comforting than liberal ideology, because it provides more absolute answers and a clearer, more definitive structure for the world, and therefore, that people generally shift toward conservative ideologies when confronted with threat.

Indeed, starting with Adorno, Frenkel-Bruswick, Levinson, and Sanford’s (1950) pioneering work on the authoritarian personality, a long tradition has existed within the social sciences of viewing conservative ideology as especially comforting and rooted in a desire to reduce insecurity. The authors of SJT agree with this line of reasoning, arguing that conservatism is a “paradigm case” of a system-justifying ideology (Jost et al., 2004b, p. 270), and that under threat, people will tend to shift to a more “conservative” orientation regardless of their baseline political orientation. For example, Bonanno and Jost (2006) reported that predominantly liberal survivors of the 9/11 attacks in New York City reported a “conservative shift” 18 months after the attacks. This “shift” was measured using a single self-report item that asked 45 participants to indicate whether their political attitudes had become: (a) more conservative; (b) more liberal; or (c) neither since 9/11. Of these, 17 reported becoming more conservative, 6 more liberal, and 22 reported no change. Given this diversity of responses, it seems premature to interpret these findings as evidence for a unidirectional conservative shift in response to threat and important to ask why more than half of the participants did not show this pattern. Moreover, in the absence of a control group that was not exposed to the terrorist attacks, it is imprudent to attribute any shifts solely to the threat posed by the 9/11 attacks. Other factors (e.g., post 9/11 media coverage, the post 9/11 economic crisis, the search for bin Laden, etc.) could have precipitated this purported conservative shift. Or, perhaps it was not a conservative shift per se, but rather a shift toward the position that was receiving the most media coverage at the time. Jost and colleagues (2004b, pp. 275–276) also reported an experiment showing that reminders of death produced a shift toward conservative attitudes that was statistically independent of preexisting political orientation. However, the small number of participants in this study (36) made sensitive tests of this hypothesis impossible, and inspection of the data they report (Jost et al., 2004b, Fig. 17.3, p. 276) suggests that this shift may have been slightly stronger for conservatives and moderates, with what appears to be modest movement in that direction among liberals.

We agree that there likely are elements of conservative ideology that are particularly comforting, and for this reason, people may in some cases shift to-

ward more conservative positions when faced with existential threat. However, TMT does not view conservative shifts as a necessary or dominant response to threat. The logic of TMT implies that people will respond to threats to their existential security by moving toward whatever element of their worldview provides the quickest, most efficient, and most secure buffer against the potential for anxiety, given the constraints of the situation in which it is needed.

To date, research has documented mortality salience–induced shifts both in the direction of, and away from, one’s dominant preexisting worldview. For example, in studies conducted within a few years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Landau and colleagues (2004); Cohen, Ogilvie, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski (2005); and Gailliott and colleagues (2006) all demonstrated that reminders of death increased support for President Bush among Americans, regardless of their political orientation. This, of course, is consistent with Bonanno and Jost’s (2006) idea of a threat-induced conservative shift. However, in studies assessing support for aggressive military policies, Pyszczynski and colleagues (2006) found that mortality salience led to increased support for the use of extreme American military might to combat terrorism among political conservatives but not among political liberals. Hirschberger and Ein-Dor (2006) found that mortality salience increased agreement that the use of military force against the Palestinians was justified only among Israelis who held “right-wing” ideologies that denied the possibility of turning the Gaza Strip over to the Palestinians. Other studies have shown significant mortality salience–induced shifts in a conservative direction among conservatives but nonsignificant trends toward a liberal shift among liberals. For example, Weise, Pyszczynski, Rothschild, and Greenberg (2007) found that mortality salience increased the importance that political conservatives placed on conservative moral issues, such as gay marriage and abortion, but a nonsignificant trend toward increased importance ratings of liberal moral issues, such as education and affirmative action, among liberals. Other studies conducted in more liberal countries have shown significant mortality salience–induced shifts toward liberal positions among liberals but only marginal effects among conservatives. For example, Weise, Arcizewski, Verhilliac, Pysczynski, and Greenberg (2007) found that reminders of death led to a marginal shift toward more negative attitudes toward immigration among high-authoritarian Parisians but a significant shift toward more accepting attitudes toward immigration among low-authoritarians. These studies suggest that the effects of mortality salience on political ideology likely depend on cultural and historical context and cannot be reduced to a unidirectional shift to the right.

These findings seem to suggest that, within a few years of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, American conservatives showed clear and predictable responses

in the direction of their preexisting worldviews, but liberals showed more variable and less clear responses. But very different patterns emerged in countries such as France, where conservative ideology is less popular. More recently, in a study conducted in the Spring of 2006, Weise and colleagues (2008) found that mortality salience led liberals to show significantly less support for aggressive military tactics by the United States in the Middle East, a position that is clearly in line with mainstream liberal ideology, but it led conservatives to show only a nonsignificant trend toward a position consistent with their ideology. Similarly, Rothschild, Abdollahi, and Pyszczynski (2007) found that mortality salience led low fundamentalists (who tend to be liberal) to significantly lower levels of support for the use of military might in the Middle East, but led to only a nonsignificant trend in the opposite direction for high fundamentalists. We suspect that differences in the information regarding the effectiveness, extremity, and morality of U.S. military policies available across the times of these studies likely account for these differences in whether conservatives or liberals are most prone to become more extreme in their ideology when threatened.

Charisma, Confi dence, and Resolve

Terror management theory researchers have also found that affection for a charismatic leader, one who expressed a great deal of confidence in his position and praised the values of the ingroup (rather than a task-oriented or relationship-oriented leader) increased after reminders of death (Cohen, Solomon, Maxfield, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2004). This finding appears to entail a shift toward a leader who provides security through nationalistic rhetoric about the superiority of one’s people. Although this could be interpreted as a conservative shift, because in the West (but not in China, Cuba, or the former Soviet Union) nationalistic rhetoric is more commonly associated with right-wing than left-wing ideology, this does not seem to be the case. Note that although Landau and colleagues (2004) and Cohen and co-workers (2005) found that mortality salience increased support for President Bush, self-reported political orientation was assessed after the mortality salience manipulation in both of these studies, and in neither was it affected by mortality salience.

Greenberg and colleagues (2007) recently provided evidence suggesting that Bush’s “charisma”—his self-confidence and emphasis on the greatness and superiority of the nation—rather than his conservative policies was responsible for the mortality salience–induced surge in his popularity. In this study, the researchers manipulated mortality salience among liberal and conservative American participants. They were then presented with hypothetical liberal and conservative candidates who projected either high or low levels

of charisma, operationalized as it had been by Cohen and colleagues (2004). The results revealed two effects of mortality salience. First, mortality salience increased support for the liberal candidate among liberals and increased the support for the conservative candidate among conservatives. Thus, rather than a conservative shift, mortality salience increased preference for the candidate who supported the individual’s preexisting political orientation. Second, this effect of preference for candidates supporting one’s own position was stronger for charismatic leaders than for those lacking charismatic qualities. These findings highlight the difficulties of drawing conclusions about the effects of political orientation based on studies of real political figures who project a variety of characteristics and positions. Studies of the effect of death reminders on support for hypothetical candidates (Cohen et al., 2005; Greenberg et al., 2007) suggest that people gravitate toward candidates who support their worldviews while projecting patriotic preference for the ingroup, confidence, and resolve. Although these charismatic tendencies may more often be associated with contemporary right-wing politics in the United States, and many other countries, the findings of Greenberg and colleagues (2007) show that this is not necessarily always the case.

Consistent with these findings, Thorisdottir, Jost, Liviatan, and Shrout (2007) found that, whereas in Western Europe, openness to experience was associated with preference for left-wing ideology and need for security was associated with right-wing ideology, in Eastern Europe, the opposite was found: openness to experience was associated with right-wing ideology and need for security was associated with left-wing ideology. This pattern of results suggests that, as Greenberg and Jonas (2003) argued, in cultures traditionally dominated by communism, left-wing ideology may be associated with rigidity and leaned upon for security.

The Appeal of Simplicity and Structure

None of this is to deny the possibility that conservative ideology, particularly in Western democracies, may at times provide more comfort and protection than liberal positions. Consistent with Jost and colleagues’ (2004b) suggestions that conservativism is appealing because of the structure it provides, research has shown that death reminders increase preference for well-structured information, early closure on information processing, and scenarios that imply justice (Hirschberger et al., 2006; Landau et al., 2004), and they decrease liking for unstructured information and abstract art, unless a meaningful label is provided for it (Landau et al., 2006). However, in most of these studies, death reminders only led to a preference for simple structure among participants dispositionally high in personal need for structure. We agree that the structure, certainty, simplicity, and support for tradition provided by right-wing

ideology are all reasons that people may sometimes turn in that direction when threatened. It is important to realize, however, that many other factors determine where people will turn when facing elevated threat, and that increased preference for a conservative candidate or position could reflect aspects other than the political ideology of that candidate or position.

SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION OR RIGHT-WING SHIFT?

We also question the link between a shift toward right-wing ideology and a motive to justify the existing system. The idea of a universal conservative shift in response to threat is logically inconsistent with the notion of a motive to justify the existing system. Consider the following mental exercise. Imagine for a moment an existing, stable, and legitimate cultural system that fully embraced liberal values such as tolerance, equality, sharing of resources, peace, and justice for all people. We realize that many past and current social systems that outwardly proclaimed liberal or leftwing values, such as the former Soviet Union or Red China, actually promoted low levels of equality and tolerance, and that there may be forces that push social systems toward inequality and intolerance, but this in no way means that a liberal status quo is an impossibility. Socialist democracies in many European countries, especially those in Scandinavia, are better examples of government systems that embrace such liberal ideals. We suspect that liberal egalitarian systems may be even more common and feasible in smaller social organizations, such as traditional societies, agricultural communities, and perhaps smaller countries. The logic of SJT implies that when people living within such systems face threatening situations, they would work to justify the existing system. But, this systemjustifying behavior would entail endorsing the dominant liberal system or worldview.

We agree that liberal systems are not all that common in today’s world. But even shifts to the right in conservative social environments are not necessarily shifts toward the status quo. Support in recent years for the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques, wiretapping without court supervision, disregard for the long-held principles of the Geneva Convention, suspension of the right of habeas corpus, dismantling of environmental regulations, and many other recent right-wing policies were distinct departures from the status quo, although it is true that many of these were designed to maintain American hegemony. Right-wing politicians often campaign as reformers who want to increase the role of religion in government, change tax laws, and repeal restrictions on business and commerce. More extreme examples of right-wing deviation from long-held status quos

can be found in the Nazi and Fascist movements that swept Europe in the 1930s and 1940s—surely the systematic extermination of European Jews was a major shift away from the system that existed in Central Europe prior to the Third Reich, yet many scholars have interpreted it as a response to the threat, humiliation, and uncertainty that the German people faced at that point in history (e.g., Fromm, 1941).

Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003a, 2003b) argued that many of these right-wing causes were motivated by the desire to return to an earlier (perhaps imagined) historical status quo. Perhaps it is not the liberal or conservative content of the worldview that provides the buffer against anxiety, but simply the stability and rigidity inherent in any existing system that provides protection. It is possible that the mere concrete, consensually validated presence of any system will stave off uncertainty and existential anxiety. Greenberg and Jonas (2003) argued and cited empirical support for the idea that the same individual differences associated with the adoption of conservative ideology in America lead to support of such left-wing ideologies as communism or socialism in other countries. We view this as a viable possibility that is consistent with the logic of SJT. The individual relies on and justifies the system prevalent in the individual’s culture, whether that system is right-wing or left-wing in its ideology.

Although we agree it is plausible that increased allegiance to one’s existing worldview or one’s interpretation of the existing external system might reflect a motive to justify that system or worldview, a shift in this direction cannot be taken, in and of itself, as evidence for the operation of a systemjustifying motive. There are many reasons a person might shift support toward either a particular political position or leader or toward or away from an existing external system or dominant aspect of his individualized worldview. Such shifts might reflect conformity motives related to fitting in with one’s reference group (normative social influence) or believing that the majority position must be right because of the broad support it receives (informational social influence); both of these types of shifts might be more likely to occur under conditions of threat. Ideological shifts might also reflect reasoned responses to persuasive arguments put forward by those in power, perhaps biased by the greater access to media exposure, information, and credibility for one’s positions that power often provides. They might reflect being fooled by false claims put out by those in power (e.g., the Swift Boat Veterans campaign against presidential candidate John Kerry) or association of the dominant system with religious authority or approval by the deity (e.g., G. W. Bush’s claim that he was chosen by God to fight evil at this particular juncture in history; such claims of direct connections between

those in power and the deity have a long history throughout most of the world and may have been the original basis for political power). Although such claims may reflect system-justifying motives in those who make them, they do not necessarily reflect such motives in those who believe them—it seems more likely to us that buying into religious teachings regarding the divine rights of kings (and presidents) more likely reflects a desire for the literal immortality typically promised by those religious teachings. Shifts toward the status quo could also reflect elements of the dominant system’s policies that are believed to be particularly effective in resolving the threat at hand (e.g., many Americans believed that aggressive military action was the most effective way to prevent future terrorist attacks). It could reflect a basic prejudice or ethnocentrism that is associated with the system currently in power (e.g., anti-Muslim prejudice, fear of foreigners, general hostility toward outgroups). Although a shift toward support for the currently dominant ideological system might reflect a motive to see that system as right and just, such shifts do not necessarily imply the operation of a systemjustifying motive.

Ultimately, the question of what motivates shifts toward or away from a given ideology is an empirical one—and a very important one at that. It seems to us that proponents of SJT have interpreted evidence of shifts to the right as evidence for a particular motive underlying these shifts. Although evidence exists regarding the relationship between personality variables, threat, and socio-economic status and preference for conservative or rightwing ideologies (Jost, Napier, Thorisdottor, Gosling, Palfai, & Ostafin, 2007; Jost, Pelham, Sheldon, & Sullivan, 2003), these studies do not directly implicate a system-justifying motive in promoting such ideological preferences. Evidence also suggests that when people perceive benefits of the existing social structure to those less well off and costs to those more well off, they perceive the system as more just. For example, Kay and Jost (2003) found that when people were presented with information perpetuating the “poor but honest” or “poor but happy” stereotype, they rated the system as more just. Although these studies showed that people take information about such trade-offs into account when making judgments of whether a system is just, they do not imply a motivation to perceive systems as just. Indeed, to the extent that SJT posits that threats to the system motivate system-justifying behavior, one might have derived predictions opposite to the findings of this research: for example, that presenting information linking poverty to unhappiness would have been threatening to the idea of a just system and therefore motivated greater system-justifying beliefs. An important challenge for future SJT research will be to provide evidence that directly implicates a system-justifying motive in the appeal of conservative ideology.

WHICH ASPECTS OF WORLDVIEWS ARE RELIED

UPON FOR SECURITY?

From the perspective of TMT, people respond to existential threat by clinging to whatever aspect of their worldview is likely to be most effective in quickly defusing the threat. This implies that people will often gravitate toward worldviews from which they have been best able to derive security in the past. Thus, in most cases, an individual’s dominant worldview will be the one that is best able to provide security, and it is in that direction that people will shift when their need for protection is elevated. This is complicated, however, by the theory’s central propositions that worldviews provide protection by providing “meaning, stability, permanence, and some hope of transcending death.” Thus, cases may exist in which beliefs and values other than those dominant from one’s past are most able to provide these psychological entities, and in such situations, people might respond to increased needs for protection by shifting away from their preexisting worldviews toward new beliefs and values that meet these needs. This idea can help explain ideological shifts such as those experienced by persons who join cults, and cultures that experience radical shifts, such as the 20th century examples of Germany’s shift to Nazism, Italy’s shift to Fascism, and Russia’s and China’s shifts to and away from Communism. Although this is a direct deduction from the logic underlying TMT, it begs the question of what determines which of the diverse array of worldview elements will be relied on for protection in any given situation.

It is clear that an individual’s cultural worldview is not a single monolithic cognitive structure, but rather a set of related ideas, conceptions, and values that vary in terms of how much protection they provide, how accessible they are, and how well integrated they are with each other. Current thinking regarding the organization of knowledge structures, attitudes, and values generally assumes such loose multifaceted cognitive structures (cf., Kunda, 1999). Such a perspective implies that people hold a variety of beliefs and values, some of which are logically and emotionally consistent with each other, and some of which are not. Such an analysis raises interesting questions about the processes through which existential fear might influence the preference for some elements of one’s worldview over others.

According to the TMT analysis, the guiding principle predicting which worldview elements people will rely on when the need for protection arises is that they will gravitate toward those elements of their anxiety buffers that will provide the most protection at the time. Because TMT posits a tri-partite system of interacting sources of security—one’s worldview, self-esteem, and interpersonal attachments—there may be situations in which the pursuit of

one source of security conflicts with another, and the person may have to forsake one to maintain another. The existing literature suggests that people will turn to those aspects of their anxiety buffering system that are especially accessible, that have particular advantages in providing security, and to which they have longstanding, chronic commitment.

Accessibility of Worldview Elements

One of the most consistent findings to emerge out of the social cognitive research of the last two decades is that people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are strongly affected by the accessibility of beliefs, values, and external influences. A large body of research has documented priming effects, whereby recently activated information exerts a disproportionate effect on subsequent behavior (for reviews, see Bargh, 2006; Kunda, 1999). Terror management theory research has also shown that both situationally induced and chronically accessible worldview elements exert especially powerful effects on how people respond to mortality salience. In the first study demonstrating this effect, Greenberg and colleagues (1993) found that, although political conservatives respond to death reminders with increased attraction to fellow conservatives and decreased attraction to liberals, political liberals showed the opposite pattern, becoming more accepting of those with worldviews different from their own and less enamored with those who share their ideology. The authors considered the possibility that this finding reflected a threatinduced shift toward increased affinity for conservative values. However, they argued that a more likely interpretation was that these findings reflected the greater importance that liberals place on the value of tolerance, the chronic accessibility of this value for liberals, and the tendency of mortality salience to encourage behavior in line with important and accessible standards. A follow-up study supported this reasoning by showing that priming the value of tolerance completely eliminated the effect of mortality salience on ingroup bias, regardless of political orientation. Walsh and Smith (2007) conceptually replicated this finding, demonstrating that gender role primes direct the effects that mortality salience has on women’s gender-relevant behavior.

Recent studies have provided further evidence of the effect of the accessibility of values in determining ideological responses to mortality salience by showing that situational primes can determine whether reminders of death lead to increased or decreased support for violent solutions to pressing international conflicts (which are espoused by conservative leaders in all of the countries studied). Hirschberger, Pyszczynski, and Ein-Dor (2007) found that the effect of mortality salience on Israelis’ support for a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran to disable its nuclear program depended on rhetoric from Iranian leaders to which they had recently been exposed. When exposed to

fierce anti-Israeli rhetoric, mortality salience increased support for such attacks, but when exposed to conciliatory statements that signaled hope that all nations could share the Middle East, mortality salience decreased support for such attacks. Research by Rothschild, Abdollahi, and Pyszczynski (2007) demonstrated similar effects of priming compassionate religious values. In two studies conducted in the United States, they showed that although religious fundamentalism (a politically conservative tendency) is positively associated with support for extreme military interventions in the Middle East, reminders of death reversed this tendency when coupled with exposure to compassionate quotes from Jesus taken from the Christian Bible. This finding was replicated in Iran in a study that showed that reminders of death led to increased hostility toward the United States and Western World, but that priming people with compassionate teachings from the Koran reversed this effect such that mortality salience led to more pro-Western attitudes. Motyl and colleagues (2007) showed in two studies that although mortality salience increased implicit anti-Arab prejudice and anti-immigration attitudes, these effects were eliminated when participants were primed with a sense of “common humanity,” by exposing them to pictures of families from diverse cultures or recollections of cherished childhood experiences from people from diverse cultures. Weise and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that, unlike previous findings that mortality salience increases support for President Bush, among persons with high levels of dispositional attachment security, mortality salience actually decreased support for Bush. A followup study demonstrated that priming memories of interactions with caring attachment figures reversed the effect of mortality salience, so that it led to decreased support for extreme military measures among Americans. These studies document the important role that the accessibility of specific worldview elements has in determining how people respond to threat. Rather than reflecting a univocal shift to the right, mortality salience appears to lead to behavior that lives up to salient standards of value, even in persons who typically do shift toward right-wing positions when reminded of death in the absence of other salient standards (e.g., American fundamentalists in the research of Weise et al., 2008).

Content of Worldview Elements: Self-Defi nition, Structure, Certainty, Consistency, and Literal Immortality

It is also likely that some worldview contents provide more security than others. Terror management theory implies that, in most cases, the dominant, self-identifying aspects of a person’s worldview would provide more security than other less dominant elements. This is in part because people are likely to define themselves by and find most appealing those worldview