Terror Management in the Courtroom: Exploring the Effects of Mortality Salience on Legal Decision Making.

Abstract

... When considering the powerful intimations of mortality an event like 9/11 could elicit, the legal ramifications can be quite disturbing. ... TMT research has explicated some of the cognitive and psychodynamic processes through which conscious and unconscious awareness of death impacts human social behavior (see Arndt, Cook, & Routledge, 2004; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999 for reviews). ... Thus, on the surface, one would expect more punitive reactions to hate crime offenders when mortality is salient and people hear of a specific instance of a hate crime. ... The direction of bias instigated by thoughts of death would then depend on the nature of the juror's worldview. ... Whether a juror responds in a particular trial by upholding a legal process or by being more punitive or lenient toward a defendant can be understood as a function of the centrality of that domain to the person's belief system. ... First, recall that terror management findings have been obtained in a variety of countries, with a variety of participant populations (including actual municipal court judges), and with a variety of ecologically valid techniques of activating thoughts of death (e.g., prosecutors' statements, proximity to a funeral home) and measuring their effects. ... An existentialist view on mortality salience effects: Personal hardiness, death-thought accessibility, and cultural worldview defense. ...