Individualism and authoritarianism shape attitudes toward physician-assisted suicide

We investigated the relation between value orientations and attitudes towar d physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in 267 United States college students. W e predicted that individualistic values, especially those having to do with control and self-determination, would lead to favorable attitudes toward P AS, and authoritarianism would lead to a rejection of PAS. A positive assoc iation between individualism and approval of PAS emerged which was moderate d by attitude importance: People who did not endorse individualistic values did not have favorable opinions of PAS, regardless of how important the is sue was to them. However, for individualists, PAS attitudes and attitude im portance were positively related. Independent of individualism, authoritari anism was negatively related to PAS attitudes. Primarily for low authoritar ianism, we found a correlation between attitude and attitude importance. Th e discussion focuses on the value-expressive function of death-related atti tudes.