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Terror Management and Trait Empathy: Evidence that Mortality Salience Promotes Reactions of Forgiveness among People with High (vs. low) Trait Empathy

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Abstract

Terror management research has typically found that people respond harshly toward offending others when reminded of their mortality. In the current research we examined whether mortality salience would increase attitudes of forgiveness toward such individuals, especially among those with high trait empathy. Consistent with prior research, Study 1 showed that mortality salience increased forgiveness of a violent hockey player, but only if this person was a member of the ingroup. Study 2 showed that mortality (vs. dental pain) salience led persons high in trait empathy to forgive the same violent hockey player regardless of his group membership. Implications for increasing forgiveness and prosocial behavior in intergroup contexts are briefly discussed.

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Notes

  1. The reason we chose this type of incident is because most avid hockey fans, which comprised our sample of participants, would regard this type of hockey foul as intentional. The player committing this type of foul must extend his leg in a “tripping-like fashion.” The player committing the act can brace himself, but the other player usually cannot, because it is unexpected. As such, this act is generally seen as an act of instrumental aggression (e.g., see Wohl & Reeder, 2004).

  2. The means for the empathy × target affiliation interaction were as follows: Low empathy/ingroup  =  6.16, low empathy/outgroup  =  3.64, high empathy/ingroup  =  6.28, high empathy/outgroup  =  5.86.

  3. Given that males scored slightly higher than females on Oiler fan affiliation (Ms  =  23.04 and 20.92, respectively) and that females scored higher on empathy than males, we included gender as a factor in our analysis and found that the 3-way interaction of mortality salience × target affiliation × empathy remained significant, F(1,110) = 5.08, p < .025. Moreover, gender did not interact with any other variables (all ps > 1). We also performed separate 3-way ANOVAs for males and females. These analyses were only marginally significant because of reduced statistical power (both ps < .12). However, the pattern of means was in the same predicted direction for both males and females.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a SSHRC Standard Research Grant #G124130386.

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Correspondence to Jeff Schimel.

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Schimel, J., Wohl, M.J.A. & Williams, T. Terror Management and Trait Empathy: Evidence that Mortality Salience Promotes Reactions of Forgiveness among People with High (vs. low) Trait Empathy. Motiv Emot 30, 214–224 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-006-9040-y

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