PERCEIVED CONSENSUS, UNIQUENESS, AND TERROR MANAGEMENT - COMPENSATORYRESPONSES TO THREATS TO INCLUSION AND DISTINCTIVENESS FOLLOWING MORTALITY SALIENCE

An experiment assessed the proposition that competing motives for incl usion and individuation both function to control concerns about mortal ity. Combining ideas from terror management theory and optimal distinc tiveness theory, the authors hypothesized that mortality salience woul d increase the tendency of participants given feedback that they had s trong conformist tendencies to underestimate social consensus for thei r attitudes and the tendency of participants given feedback that they were deviant to exaggerate social consensus for their attitudes. Parti cipants were given either one or theother type of feedback, responded to open-ended questions about either their own death or their next imp ortant exam, completed a measure of social projection in which they in dicated their own attitudes, and then estimated the percentage of the general population that shared their opinions. Results on a social pro jection measure consisting of the partial correlation between own. and others' attitudes, controlling for social desirability, provided stro ng support for the hypotheses.