Do Salient Social Norms Moderate Mortality Salience Effects? A (Challenging) Meta-Analysis of Terror Management Studies

Abstract

Terror management theory postulates that mortality salience (MS) increases the motivation to defend one's cultural worldviews. How that motivation is expressed may depend on the social norm that is momentarily salient. Meta-analyses were conducted on studies that manipulated MS and social norm salience. Results based on 64 effect sizes for the hypothesized interaction between MS and norm salience revealed a small-to-medium effect of g = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [0.26, 0.41]. Bias-adjustment techniques suggested the presence of publication bias and/or the exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom and arrived at smaller effect size estimates for the hypothesized interaction, in several cases reducing the effect to nonsignificance (range g_corrected = -0.36 to 0.15). To increase confidence in the idea that MS and norm salience interact to influence behavior, preregistered, high-powered experiments using validated norm salience manipulations are necessary. Concomitantly, more specific theorizing is needed to identify reliable boundary conditions of the effect.

Keywords: meta-analysis; mortality salience; publication bias; social norms; terror management theory.

Figure 1.

Theoretical model of the tested interaction hypothesis between mortality salience and social norm salience. Note. It is assumed that mortality salience increases the need for cultural worldview validation and self-esteem. To fulfill these needs, it is hypothesized that subsequent reactions depend on the situational salience of social norms. It is further expected that norm priming has an effect on adherence to salient social norms independent from MS (see dashed arrow).

Figure 2.

PRISMA flow diagram showing selection of studies for the present meta-analysis.

Figure 3.

Funnel plot for the interaction effects between mortality salience and norm salience (m = 64). Note. Dependent effect sizes within three studies were averaged together for display purposes. Crosses represent unpublished data. The crude dashed line represents the average effect size. Shaded regions represent .10 > p_two-tailed > .05 (light gray) and .05 > p_two-tailed > .01 (dark gray).

Figure 4.

Results of a p-curve analysis on published test statistics of interaction effects between mortality salience and norm salience. Note. The observed p-curve includes 41 statistically significant (p < .05) results, of which 16 are p < .025. There were 18 additional results entered but excluded from p-curve because they were p > .05.