Terrorism Mortality Salience Manipulation: A Causal Mediation Analysis

ABSTRACT Building upon past findings on terrorism and individual-level politically conservative self-identification, I evaluate the effect of terrorism mortality reminders on conservative self-placement with three survey experiments, using non-representative Facebook samples in Turkey (2018, 2020). The scant existing experimental findings outside the usual Northwestern European and North American environment make it difficult to assess how the context (e.g., the longevity and diversity of terrorism problems in a country) can explain the alignment between terrorism threats and conservatism. In non-Western areas such as Turkey, with various types of terrorism over time, the link between terrorism threat and conservatism may remain uniform. However, the fear of death in a terrorist attack elicited by the terrorism mortality salience would create psychological strain and make individuals suppress terrorism-related death-thoughts by moving away from conservatism, reminding them of the human body’s vulnerability to threats and igniting fearfulness. Using the Terror Management Theory perspective, this study explored the causal mechanism running from terrorism mortality reminder to terrorism mortality fear to conservative self-identification. In all three studies, conservatism decreased when the respondents felt fearful of terrorism mortality and the treated respondents became more conservative if the terrorism mortality fear was kept at its average value (as a covariate).