They’re Comin’ Ta Git Ya!

Fear of Death Wins Minds and Votes, Study Finds:

President Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the Sept. 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

Talking about death can raise people’s need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

[…]

For their first study, Solomon, Greenberg and colleagues asked students to think about either their own death or a neutral topic.

They then read the campaign statements of three hypothetical candidates for governor, each with a different leadership style. One was charismatic, said Solomon.

“That was a person who declared our country to be great and the people in it to be special,” Solomon, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

The others were task-oriented — focusing on the job to be done — or relationship-oriented — with a “let’s get it done together” style, Solomon said.

The students who thought about death were much more likely to choose the charismatic leader, they found. Only four out of about 100 chose that imaginary leader when thinking about exams, but 30 did after thinking about death.

Greenberg, Solomon and colleagues then decided to test the idea further and set up four separate studies at different universities.

“In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV,” Solomon said. “What we found was staggering.”

When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.

“They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq,” Solomon said.

Solomon, a social psychologist who specializes in terrorism, said it was very rare for a person’s opinions to differ so strongly depending on the situation.

Another study focused directly on Bush and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

The volunteers were aged from 18 into their 50s and described themselves as ranging from liberal to deeply conservative. No matter what a person’s political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush, Solomon said. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.

Interesting. Regardless of the scientific accuracy of the study, it seems clear that the Republicans will ramp up the fear factor. If nothing else fear tends to stifle change, which has it’s own fear factor — the unknown. People tend to stick with the familiar in times of stress.

Look for the presstarts to subtly take up the theme for them. Scary reports are all over the media here in southern California about some nutball who poisoned some baby food. He supposedly used Ricin. A bioweapon. Like the terrorists got from Saddam. What would we do if terrorists put Ricin in our diet cokes? It could happen. News at eleven.

We can’t run from this. Republicans are going to be flogging the “dangerous world” theme over and over again. I say we use that to our advantage. I firmly believe that Kerry can make the case that Bush doesn’t know what he’s doing on national security— he failed to act on 9/11 and he overeacted on Iraq. He is a failure. He’s made us less safe.

Thanks to the Donkey for the link.