Jonathan Bassett received his PhD in social psychology from Georgia State University. He is professor and chair in the department of psychological science at Lander University, where his courses include Social Psychology and Death and Dying. He encountered Becker as a teenager and has always been interested in the role of death anxiety in our culture. Professor Bassett has conducted research focusing on the application of Terror Management Theory to our treatment of and attitudes towards undocumented immigrants.
What can Becker and Terror Management Theory (TMT) teach us about the impact that fear-based, “us vs. them” rhetoric has on attitudes toward immigrants?
The ideas of Ernest Becker and TMT are very applicable to understanding current trends in American attitudes towards immigration. They are especially helpful for understanding the proposed wall on the Mexican border, the more rigorous policies coming from US Immigration, the travel ban forbidding visas from being issued to people from predominantly Muslim countries, and the strong resistance to accepting refugees from war-ravaged countries in the Middle-east, most notably Syria.
For Becker, the main function of culture is to help people suppress the anxiety that comes from our unique human awareness that our existence is not only fragile, but finite. Culture mitigates that anxiety by symbolically raising human beings above the mere corporeal realm, offering them hope that the self can transcend the impermanence of the physical body in some way that will be longer lasting, enduring, and more meaningful. In his deathbed interview with Sam Keen, Becker says, “We each need someone to kick to give us a feeling of specialness, we want an enemy to degrade, someone we can humiliate, to raise us above the status of creatures.” At the time, he was thinking more about the events of the Holocaust and race relations in America, but that statement is very applicable to what’s going on now in terms of attitudes towards immigration. Today, the immigrant has become the person many people choose to kick in order to feel that sense of specialness that Becker was talking about.
One of the arguments you hear for restricting immigration is that immigrants take jobs away from Americans. I think this argument is about more than just competition over resources. Yes, jobs are a way of providing resources, but for many people they are also an important part of our identities. Additionally, concerns about losing jobs can tap into the terror management system because they threaten to rob people of a source of self-esteem and meaning, two components of the defensive buffer we use to keep death anxiety at bay.
Can you elaborate more on your research on attitudes towards undocumented immigrants?
In a study from 2011, we primed people to think either about death or about a neutral topic, and then asked participants in the study various questions regarding a theoretical immigrant from either Canada or Mexico. When worries about death had been activated in participants’ minds, they were much more negative in their reactions towards the immigrant from Mexico than from Canada.
My interpretation is that this is another example of cultural worldview defense. Existential threats make us want to reaffirm the aspects of our culture that help us feel a sense of immortality. The Mexican immigrant, more than the Canadian immigrant, would have been perceived as a threat to undermine the cultural values, given the perceived linguistic and cultural differences.
In another study, we measured a trait called social-dominance orientation. Social-dominance orientation is an acceptance of group-based inequalities as necessary and inevitable consequences of a competitive world. After death reminders, people who scored higher on social dominance expressed more antipathy and hostility towards illegal immigrants. But this was an effect that only came out after death reminders, and not in the control condition.
Multiple studies, including one that I conducted with my colleague, show that Americans who identify more strongly with a common humanity are more positive in their attitudes towards helping Syrian refugees, and more likely to support offering them asylum in America.
Are there circumstances in which mortality salience can lead to more positive responses towards immigrants?
Yes. The first thing to note is that cultural worldviews are complex and multi-faceted entities. TMT proposes that reminders of death will lead people to defend their worldviews but a worldview is not a monolithic entity- it’s not just one thing! How exactly people respond to reminders of death will depend on individual differences. And, reactions will also depend on the situational salience namely, which aspect of a belief system happens to be the most available, or on someone’s mind, at a given moment. There is a lot of research in political psychology right now regarding the power of focusing on what we share in common with other people, regardless of ethnic or religious or national differences. This concept has a lot of different names but one of the more frequently used is the concept of identification with all humanity.
Research shows that people who score higher on tests that measure how much a person feels identification with all humanity tend to feel more empathy and more obligation to help those who are from different countries. Multiple studies, including one that I conducted with my colleague, show that Americans who identify more strongly with a common humanity are more positive in their attitudes towards helping Syrian refugees, and more likely to support offering them asylum in America. This raises a potential avenue for important future research. Under circumstances when identification with all humanity is salient as an important aspect of one’s cultural worldview, reminders of death might actually lead people to be more accepting of those who are different than they otherwise would be.
What can we learn from your research that might help shed light on how to shift anti-immigrant sentiments?
First, we should try to have messages in media as well as from parents, religious and political leaders that highlight this notion of shared humanity, rather than the “us vs. them” kind of tribalism that is prevalent today. Secondly, and relatedly, we should strive to promote tolerance and compassion as cultural values, as important means of achieving value and worth in society. Finally, teaching people to derive self-esteem in ways that aren’t tied to their national or ethnic or religious identity may reduce the potential for out-group hostility.
It does seem like things are bad now, but there was not even a notion of shared humanity for the tens of thousands of years of human experience up until around 500 years ago. There does seem to be a pendulum swing back towards more tribalistic thinking, but I think if we look at it through the lens of long-scale change it’s a small step back in a long arc of progress.