Scaring the Bejesus into People: The Role of Religious Belief in Managing Implicit and Explicit Anxiety

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Scaring the Bejesus into People
The Role of Religious Belief in
Managing Implicit and Explicit Anxiety
JAMIN HALBERSTADT
AND
JONATHAN JONG
H umans are anxious creatures. For a species at the top of the food chain,
we have delicate sensibilities, with over 500 documented phobias
(including aulophobia, the fear of fl utes). We may have cornered the
market on deadly force, yet we easily become anxious when left out of a ball
tossing game (see Zadro, Godwin & Gonsalkorale, this volume), and downright
terrifi ed at the prospect of singing in public. Consequently, much of our behav-
ioral, cognitive and emotional efforts go into avoiding and, in some heroic cases,
overcoming anxieties.
Yet there is one source of anxiety that no behavior modifi cation can avoid,
and no cognitive work can rationalize away: our own death. Unlike fl utes, our
demise is unavoidable and, naturally, upsetting, and coping with death’s inevi-
tability requires more than therapy: it requires a belief system optimistic and
robust enough to buttress us in the face of constant reminders that life is fragile
and fl eeting, and that there is no evidence that anything awaits us afterwards.
Religious belief, many philosophers (and some psychologists) have noted,
could provide just such a system. It is optimistic, in the sense that most reli-
gious belief systems include supernatural entities whose very existence docu-
ments the possibility of eternal life, and who in many cases have the power to
extend that privilege to mortals as well. And it is robust in the sense that, as has
long been noted by anthropologists, there is no known culture, past or present,
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
332
completely devoid of supernatural agent concepts, most commonly related to
life after death (souls, spirits, etc; Barrett, 2004; Boyer, 2001); indeed, ancestral
worship seems to date back at least 60,000 years (Rossano, 2006). Furthermore,
all attempts to argue or legislate religion away—from fi rst century BCE Epi-
cureans (e.g., Lucretius), to large-scale experiments with state atheism in the
Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Socialist Albania, to the current wave of “New
Atheists” (e.g., Dawkins, 2006; Hitchens, 2007)—have so far failed.
Indeed, the durability of religious belief is, upon inspection, something
of a psychological and evolutionary conundrum, since supernatural religious
agents, while providing a solution to the problem of death, are invariably
inconvenient and costly things in which to believe. The world over, the belief
in gods comes almost inevitably with self-denial and sacrifi ce, and often with
divinely-mandated participation in demanding pilgrimages and dysphoric
rituals (Whitehouse, 1996, 2004). Hindus’ pilgrimage to Prayag, Muslims’ to
Mecca, and Christians’ to Jerusalem, are examples of economically and medi-
cally risky endeavors; the Ganges river is infamously polluted with human and
industrial waste, and the banks of the Jordan with landmines. Additional reli-
gious requirements like tithing and proscriptions on sex make little sense from
an evolutionary perspective unless they are offset by proportionally greater
benefi ts, such as the relief of existential anxiety. Thus, while religion potentially
answers the question of how people manage their death anxiety, the manage-
ment of death anxiety may conversely answer the question of why people invest
so much effort in religious beliefs and rituals with little tangible reward.
The history of ideas is replete with theories of religion, many of which specu-
late about the causal role of existential anxiety. Hume (1757/2008) includes “the
terrors of death” among the phenomena that “men scrutinize, with a trembling
curiosity that leads them, still baffl ed, to see the fi rst obscure traces of divinity.”
Similarly, Feuerbach (1851/1967) argued that religious beliefs are projections
of psychological needs, particularly the need to assuage the otherwise crip-
pling fear of loneliness, meaninglessness, and death. Thus, he boldly concludes
his Lectures on the Essence of Religion with the claim that “the meaning
and purpose of God are immortality” (Feuerbach, 1851/1967, p. 276). More
(in)famously, Freud (1927/1961) supposed that religious beliefs were paradigmatic
examples of wish-fulfi llment, driven by “the oldest, strongest, and most urgent
wishes of mankind” (p. 38), the desire for a powerful father who can protect us
from the dangers of life and the fi nality of death. And so, gods “exorcise the ter-
rors of nature, [and] must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it
is shown in death.” More recently, anthropologists like Malinowski (1948) and
Becker (1971, 1973) have put even more acute emphasis on the function of reli-
gion as a strategy to assuage the fear of death. Malinowski’s (1948) ethnographic
work led him to conclude that “Of all sources of religion, the supreme and
fi nal crisis of life—death—is of the greatest importance,” while Becker (1973),
strongly infl uenced by the psychoanalytic and existential traditions, argued that
not just religion, but much of human culture, is motivated by a fear of death and
the concomitant desire for immortality.
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 333
In modern psychology the best example of this line of thought is Terror Man-
agement Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Vail et al.,
2010). TMT, drawing heavily on Becker’s (1973) work, begins with the observa-
tion that human beings are, perhaps uniquely, aware of their mortality. This cog-
nizance of our inevitable deaths elicits crippling existential anxiety, which must
be dealt with if we are to function in the world. We are therefore motivated to
accept and embed ourselves in cultural worldviews that allow for immortal-
ity, either literally (via afterlife provisions) or symbolically (via memberships
in groups that are larger and more enduring than any particular member). In
this view, religious worldviews are particularly effective at relieving existential
anxiety by providing both literal and symbolic immortality; Greenberg et al. (in
press) have even recently argued that the relief of existential anxiety is in fact
the ultimate (i.e., evolutionary) function of religious belief. Certainly, at a proxi-
mate level of analysis, anxiety’s infl uence on belief is consistent with an exten-
sive literature on the regulatory functions of mood (see Forgas, this volume).
However, there are reasons to question whether religious belief is an evolved
(and presumably effective) mechanism for managing existential anxiety. An
obvious problem is that, when one examines the specifi cs of religious afterlife
beliefs, one fi nds them hardly comforting, and arguably more terrifying than
death itself. Not all religious belief systems come with afterlife beliefs (e.g.,
Baka Pygmies; Woodburn, 1982), and many that do posit gloomy graves or
horrifi c hells. Mythical worlds are populated by benevolent deities, but also
with malevolent ones who are often ambivalent or capricious in their dealings
with human beings (Lambert, Triandis, & Wolf, 1959). According to their own
religious texts, Homeric Greeks (cf. Iliad) all descended into a dreary Hades
regardless of merit, while ancient Mesopotamians were infamously cast into a
terrifying netherworld populated by monsters (cf. The Netherworld Vision of
an Assyrian Crown Prince) or a despairing one in which “dust is their food, clay
their bread” and “they see no light, they dwell in darkness . . . over the door and
the bolt, dust has settled” (cf. The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld; Dal-
ley, 1998, p. 155). Lucretius’ Epicurean analysis, perhaps the earliest explicit
attempt to provide a genealogy of religion, lays out the implications of such
visions of the afterlife:
Fear holds dominion over mortality
Only because, seeing in land and sky
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
Men think Divinities are working there.
—De Rerum Natura
In other words, Lucretius suggests that although religion is driven by an attempt
to make sense of the unpredictable perils of nature, the ensuing notion of angry
gods only exacerbates the anxiety (see also Colman, 2009).
Even in the more familiar Judeo-Christian traditions, with their emphasis
on divine omnibenevolence, the God portrayed in the Bible is anything but
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
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straightforwardly good (Dawkins, 2006; Matthews & Gibson, 2005; Penchansky,
1999), and the afterlife anything but straightforwardly positive, with eternal tor-
ment in Hell a subjectively real possibility for (literally) God-fearing Christians.
Some Calvinists, for example, experience “salvation anxiety” so entrenched that
many ex-fundamentalists still report experiencing intense fear of divine punish-
ment even after they have abandoned such beliefs (Hartz & Everett, 1989).
Even in Roman Catholic theology, it is possible that unrepented mortal sin can
cause a believer to lose his or her salvation; certainly the more common, venial,
variety of sin necessitates a period of purgatorial suffering before the believer
may enter Paradise (Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1854–1864). This
uncertainty regarding one’s post-mortem fate is refl ected in various religious
practices, such as the sacrament of reconciliation (i.e., the practice of confes-
sion), prayers for the dead, and indulgences (Catechism of the Catholic Church,
nos. 1422–1498). Thus, the horrifi c possibility of eternal post-mortem suffer-
ing, and the institutionalized doubt about who it will befall, ought to temper
the effectiveness of religiosity for relieving existential anxiety: in comparison
to some accounts of the afterlife, not existing at all is the less anxiety-inducing
outcome.
However, even if the mere possibility of a positive afterlife (when on offer)
were suffi cient to assuage existential anxiety, the existence of nonbelievers sug-
gests that it is not necessary. Although religious belief, as noted, is a durable
feature of human culture, so is atheism, and it is unclear that atheists are any
more anxious about their own death than any religious group. Furthermore,
because atheism is itself a worldview capable in principle of relieving existen-
tial anxiety, thoughts about the afterlife should challenge that worldview and
therefore create rather than relieve such anxiety. Indeed, previous empirical
research demonstrates that mortality salience (i.e., increased accessibility of
death-related cognitions) leads to the bolstering of ingroups and the deroga-
tion of outgroups, even when the groups in question are minimally-defi ned and
arbitrarily-assigned (Harmon-Jones et al., 1996; see also Burke, Martens, &
Faucher, 2010 for review). If so, then death anxiety should motivate religious
belief only among religious believers, in which case it provides little insight into
how religious believers came to hold their beliefs in the fi rst place. At the very
least, TMT’s account of religion as a uniquely powerful buffer against existential
anxiety is in tension with its account of worldview defense, and requires a means
of regulating these two mechanisms of anxiety reduction when they confl ict.
FEAR OF DEATH AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF:
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
Does religious belief assuage existential anxiety? If so, for whom, and why?
Although researchers have only recently begun to ask these questions experi-
mentally, the related question of whether religious people are less death-anxious
has enjoyed more scholarly attention. The results have been equivocal, though
weakly supportive of the claim that the religious people suffer less anxiety
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 335
about death. Spilka, Hood, and Gorsuch (1985), for example, found that, of
the 36 studies they reviewed, 24 showed that religious people were less anxious
about death, three showed that they were more anxious about death, and nine
showed mixed or inconclusive results. Donovan (1994), reviewing 137 studies
conducted between 1897 and 1992, found similar numbers: religious people
were less anxious in 57% of studies, more anxious in 9%, and results were incon-
clusive in 33%.
However, even this weak consensus is suspect due to several methodologi-
cal issues. As Hood, Hill, and Spilka (2009) observed, the vast majority of the
research in this area has been conducted with religious samples (e.g., Ameri-
can college students, who are predominantly religious); we therefore have rela-
tively little information about non-religious individuals, the very ones, as argued
above, who might be expected to demonstrate an increase in anxiety with stron-
ger religious belief (which challenges their prevailing worldview). Furthermore,
a closer look at the individual studies under review also reveals the diversity
in the measurements used, and the imprecision with which “religiosity”—a
multidimensional concept with a variety of affective, cognitive, and behavioral
components—is often operationalized. Death anxiety may well be correlated
with some aspects of religiosity, but not others, or with different aspects of reli-
giosity in different directions. For example, Harding et al. (2005) found that
both belief in God and an afterlife were negatively correlated with death anxi-
ety, whereas Dezutter, Luyckx, and Hutsebaut (2009) found that literal reli-
gious interpretation was positively correlated with death anxiety. Alvarado et al.
(1995) found no relation between death anxiety and absolute levels of religious
conviction, but a negative relation when they examined relative religious con-
viction (i.e., compared to other people’s conviction). Cohen et al. (2005) found
that fear of death was negatively related to intrinsic religiosity (i.e., internalized
religious belief and practice) but positively related to extrinsic religiosity (i.e.,
religious practice as a means to other ends).
In order to draw a more defi nitive conclusion about the relation between
religiosity and death anxiety, we focused our own research on just one aspect
of religiosity, the belief in supernatural agents, places and events (Boyer, 2011).
This approach not only put us in line with recent research on religious cognition
(e.g., Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2004; Bering, 2011; Boyer 2001; Pyysiä inen, 2009;
Tremlin, 2006; Whitehouse, 2004; Wilson, 2002), which considers belief to be a
core component of religiosity, but also permits the operationalization of religi-
osity in both explicit and implicit terms.
Unfortunately, and surprisingly, we found no straightforward, generalizable
measure of religious belief, but rather what Gorsuch (1984, p. 234) called a
“hodgepodge” of religiosity scales that confl ate religious beliefs, values, expe-
riences, and behaviors (see Hill & Hood, 1999, for review). Among the few
belief scales that did exist, most were tailored to specifi c (usually Christian, if
not specifi cally evangelical) audiences and therefore refer to very specifi c theo-
logical beliefs (e.g., Loving and Controlling God Scale, Benson & Spilka, 1973;
Christian Orthodoxy Scale, Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982; Love and Guilt
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
336
Oriented Dimensions of Christian Belief, McConahay & Hough, 1973). Given
this methodological gap, our fi rst task became the development and evaluation
of a measurement instrument for our variable of interest. Drawing on recent
anthropological and psychological research, we identifi ed a set of cross-culturally
recurring religious supernatural themes (e.g., an omnipotent being; a benign
afterlife; prophecies) and created questionnaire items to assess belief in each.
The result was the 10-item Supernatural Belief Scale (SBS; Jong, Bluemke &
Halberstadt, in press). An exploratory factor analysis and two confi rmatory
factor analyses across three samples determined that the scale was essentially
unidimensional, and that the aggregate score reliably measured religious super-
natural belief, as well as predicted self-reported religious identity and behavior.
Armed with a reliable and valid measure of one core aspect of religiosity—
belief in supernatural agents, entities, and events—we then examined the sta-
tistical relationship between religious belief (via the SBS) and death anxiety (via
the Death Anxiety Questionnaire; Conte, Weiner, & Plutchik, 1982). In contrast
to the weak and variable associations reported in previous research, we have
repeatedly found a curvilinear relationship between religious belief and death
anxiety. In one representative study, depicted in Figure 19.1 , participants who
.00
1.00 2.00 3.00 4.00
Religiosity
5.00 6.00 7.00
.50
1.00
Fear of death
1.50
2.00 “Religious”
“Non religious”
Figure 19.1 Relationship between supernatural belief (SBS) scores and death anxiety
(DAQ), as a function of participants’ self-categorized religiosity.
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 337
expressed relatively strong belief in religious supernatural entities (hereafter
“believers”) and those who expressed relatively strong disbelief in such entities
(“nonbelievers”) expressed less fear of death than those with relatively neu-
tral or ambivalent beliefs. The same relationship was also found when partici-
pants were dichotomized in terms of their religious self-identifi cation: among
“Christian” participants, stronger belief was associated with less fear of death;
among nonreligious participants (including self-described agnostics), stronger
belief was associated with greater fear of death. Equally important, belief was
uniquely associated with death anxiety; neither linear nor quadratic relation-
ships were obtained for other measures of high-arousal negative affect, includ-
ing any dimension of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (Henry & Crawford,
2005) or relevant items on the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS;
Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). Thus, death anxiety appears to be a distinct
subtype of negative emotion, whose etiology and cognitive implications are not
necessarily the same as other negative affective states (Forgas, this volume).
These correlational data are consistent with the “worldview defense” account
of religious belief, in which individuals are buffered against death anxiety to the
extent they strongly hold their ingroup beliefs, and not by virtue of strong reli-
gious belief per se. Indeed, religious belief was only associated with decreased
anxiety among those who described themselves as religious; among nonreligious
individuals, greater belief was associated with greater anxiety, possibly because
such belief was at odds with their prevailing worldview.
Another interpretation, however, is that is the positive relation between reli-
giosity and fear of death refl ects not a challenge to nonreligious individuals’
worldviews, but rather their motivation to assuage that fear. Similarly, one might
argue that, on the “believing” half of Figure 19.1 , rather than strong belief
reducing death anxiety, it is low anxiety that drives or facilitates strong beliefs
(or that high anxiety calls one’s religious beliefs into question), supporting pre-
cisely the opposite conclusion. The interpretational ambiguity follows directly
from the causal ambiguity: it is not clear whether participants’ religious beliefs
are a cause or a product of their fear of death.
Therefore, to examine the causal relation of anxiety and religious belief, par-
ticularly among nonbelievers, we adopted TMT’s mortality salience paradigm,
in which participants are asked to think and write about the thoughts and feel-
ings they expect to experience at the moment of their death (or, in a control,
the thoughts and feelings they expect to experience while watching television).
After this priming task, they completed the SBS. Consistent with TMT’s world-
view defense hypothesis, but inconsistent with a unique role of religious belief,
we found an interaction between priming condition and participants’ prior
religious affi liation (see Figure 19.2 ): participants who described themselves
as “Christians” reported stronger beliefs on the SBS, whereas non-religious
participants reported stronger disbelief when primed with death, than in the
control condition (Jong, Halberstadt, and Bluemke, 2012, Study 1).
Clearly, at least in this study, a reminder of their mortality did not universally
motivate participants’ religious belief. Other researchers employing the same
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
338
paradigm or variations thereof have also found similar results, albeit with some
interesting differences. Norenzayan and Hansen (2006), for example, found
that mortality salience increased religious belief among religious individuals,
but had no effect on non-religious individuals. Vail, Arndt, and Abdollahi (2012)
also found that death-primed religious participants strengthened belief in their
gods and, additionally, reduced belief in other religion’s gods. From a different
theoretical perspective, System Justifi cation Theory would also predict greater
entrenchment in one’s own worldview following awareness of one’s mortality,
arguably the ultimate threat to the system (Napier, this volume).
Given the different ways in which group membership and religious belief are
operationalized in these paradigms, it is diffi cult to make sense of the similari-
ties and differences, but it is clear that, at the very least, reminders of one’s mor-
tality do not always motivate religious belief; indeed, they may even motivate
religious disbelief among non-religious individuals, consistent with a worldview
defense interpretation.
RELIGIOUS BELIEF AS AN
ANXIETY-MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Of course, even if thoughts of death change people’s beliefs, it does not mean the
change occurs for the purpose of reducing anxiety, much less that it is effective
in doing so. Although there is now extensive research on defensive responses
–4
–3
–2
–1
0
1
2
3
4
Religious Non-religious
SBS score
Control
Mortality salience
Figure 19.2 Religious supernatural beliefs as a function of self-identifi ed religiosity
and death priming condition.
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 339
to mortality salience, there has been surprisingly little research directly testing
whether those responses actually work. The several studies that have examined
the issue indirectly suggest, again, a complex situation. For example, Friedman
and Rholes (2008) found that participants who scored high on religious funda-
mentalism engaged in less secular worldview defense after death priming than
their counterparts who scored lower on religious fundamentalism (presumably
because the former, their anxiety relieved, had no need for worldview defense).
Similarly, Norenzayan et al. (2009) found that while non-religious participants
reliably engaged in nationalistic worldview defense after a mortality salience
induction, religious participants did not; interestingly, religious and non-religious
participants did not differ on either self-esteem level or chronic death thought
accessibility. Likewise, Dechesne et al. (2003) found that encouraging par-
ticipants to believe in an afterlife decreased self-esteem striving and defense
of values after a mortality salience induction. But, contrary to the worldview
defense hypothesis, Hefl ick and Goldenberg (2012) found that such encourage-
ment to believe in an afterlife mitigated the effects of mortality salience among
atheists; discouragement from afterlife belief (i.e., the bolstering of their anti-
religious worldviews) had no such positive effect.
If it seems odd that none of these studies measures anxiety per se, it is worth
noting that Terror Management theorists generally maintain—rather incon-
gruously given TMT’s grand narrative—that it is not consciously experienced
affect that drives worldview defense, but rather death thought accessibility
itself (e.g., Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999; though recall Norenza-
yan et al.’s. 2009 fi nding above). To the extent that conscious terror is involved
in the process, it is when death is fi rst made salient, at which point individuals
respond with “proximal defense” to head off the “ultimate fear of annihilation”
(Pyszczynski et al., 1999). Worldview defense, in contrast, is a “distal defense”
that is not invoked until thoughts of death leave consciousness (but are still
accessible).
Be that as it may, it appears to follow that, if religious belief evolved to man-
age our existential anxiety, then manipulating religious belief should have mea-
surable effects on it. To test this hypothesis we manipulated religious belief via
an indirect persuasive message. Participants, in the context of a “research evalu-
ation task,” were instructed to read and rate the quality of three abstracts of
published scientifi c studies. The fi rst and third were identical for all participants
and did not mention religiosity. The second, however, differed by experimental
condition (pro- versus anti-religion): participants read about a large survey, sup-
posedly published in Nature , which revealed that “scientists are getting more
religious [atheistic]” because they fi nd that “scientifi c [religious] explanations
are increasingly inadequate to the task of explaining natural phenomena.” Then,
participants were primed with death, after which they completed the Death
Anxiety Questionnaire described above, the PANAS as a state mood measure,
and the SBS, used in this case as a measure of chronic religious supernatural
belief. Contrary to the notion that religious belief is a uniquely powerful buffer
against death anxiety, pro-religious priming only decreased death anxiety among
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
340
religious participants (those above the median on the SBS), but increased death
anxiety among non-religious participants (see Figure 19.3 ). The same analysis
conducted on general mood, as measured by the PANAS, and on the anxiety-
related items on the PANAS, revealed no effects.
So far then, our experimental investigations spell bad news for the venerable
idea that death anxiety motivates, and is quelled by, religious belief. Instead,
increasing death-related thoughts bolstered individuals’ prior beliefs, be they
religious or anti-religious; furthermore, encouraging religious belief reduces
death anxiety only for those who already believed, while making non-religious
participants more anxious. The data are more consistent with TMT’s worldview
defense hypothesis, and with the notion that if participants are seeking immor-
tality, they are doing so symbolically, not literally via an openness to supernatu-
ral agents with the power to grant it.
The result, while consistent with TMT, is at odds with much religious and phil-
osophical thought, not to mention the implications of a good deal of empirical
research. For example, Vail et al. (2012, Study 3) found that, when primed with
death, agnostics abandon their doubt and move toward religious belief, suggest-
ing that religious beliefs are particular attractive when mortality is salient. Simi-
larly, Norenzayan and Hansen’s (2006, Experiment 4) found that death-primed
Christians became more willing to endorse even outgroup gods, suggesting that
mortality salience enables people to transcend worldview defense to become
more open to other religious possibilities in the face of death. Furthermore, the
research on the moderating effects of religious and afterlife beliefs on people’s
social and self-esteem responses to mortality salience suggests that such beliefs
provide resources that ward off the negative effects of death-related thoughts.
0
0.5
1
1.5
0
Believers Non-believers
Death anxiety
Atheist
Religious
Scientist are getting more
Figure 19.3 Death anxiety as a function of prior religious belief (SBS score, X-axis)
and religiosity priming.
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 341
How can God’s existence be both a threat and a comfort to nonreligious indi-
viduals facing death?
IMPLICIT BELIEF AND ANXIETY
One possibility is that, while the assertion that “God exists” confl icts with strongly
held propositional beliefs to which nonreligious individuals are committed, the
concept of God (and religious supernatural beliefs generally) is associated with
other, positive concepts. Just as one need not endorse negative attitudes toward
African Americans (for example) to be infl uenced by learned cultural associa-
tions with this group, it is conceivable that one might derive some benefi ts from
God without explicitly believing in Him.
Over the last two decades, the notion that our explicit attitudes are disso-
ciable from our implicit attitudes, and indeed, that some attitudes are held or
formed automatically and even unconsciously, has established itself as social
cognitive orthodoxy. The literature is now replete with dual-process models of
cognition, which variously distinguish between the implicit and explicit (e.g.,
Nosek, 2007), or the automatic and controlled (e.g., Bargh & Chartrand, 1999),
or the unconscious and conscious (e.g., Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006), or
the heuristic and systematic (e.g., Chen & Chaiken 1999), or the intuitive and
refl ective (e.g., Sperber, 1997). The conceptual and empirical relationships
among these different distinctions are yet to be fully understood, but it is clear
at least that human cognition and emotion are not limited to our conscious,
verbalizable experience. The distinction between explicit and implicit cogni-
tion has been applied to many domains in social psychology, and indeed forms
a core assumption of many theories of self-control, including those presented
in this volume (see chapters by Bargh & Huang; Carver & Johnson; Denson;
Schmeichel and Tang). Bargh and Huang (this volume) show how motivation
itself may be represented, activated, and fulfi lled unconsciously, allowing for
the very real possibility that individuals could mitigate death anxiety in ways of
which they are not aware.
Furthermore, recent research on religious cognition highlights just such a
decoupling of refl ective, propositional belief from unrefl ective, implicit beliefs.
Barrett and Keil (1996), for example, demonstrated that people often employ
theologically incorrect, overly-anthropomorphic assumptions that contradict
their explicitly stated religious beliefs, when processing narratives about God
in a recall task. There is also increasing evidence that participants who explic-
itly deny religious belief nevertheless behave like “implicit theists” (Uhlmann,
Poehlman, & Bargh, 2008, p. 71). For example, participants who denied belief
in the soul nevertheless declined to sell their souls to the experimenter, even
though the contract was explicitly marked as bogus (i.e., “not a legal or binding
contract, in any way”; Haidt, Björklund, & Murphy, 2000, p. 22). Bering (2002,
p. 274) also found that “extinctivists”—people who explicitly affi rmed belief
that “the self is wholly extinguished at death”—nevertheless implied that cer-
tain kinds of psychological functioning persisted after death, when answering a
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
342
series of questions about a character in a story who had died. While they had
little trouble denying the continuation of biological needs and psychobiologi-
cal experiences (e.g., hunger), even extinctivists often endorsed statements that
implied the post-mortem persistence of emotional (e.g., love for family mem-
ber), desire (e.g., to be alive), and knowledge (e.g., knowledge that they were
dead) states. Furthermore, they took signifi cantly longer to deny the persis-
tence of such psychological states than they did the persistence of biological and
psychobiological ones. In a related study, Heywood (2010) interviewed atheists
about major events in their lives, and found that they often saw intrinsic mean-
ing or purpose in signifi cant events, as though they occurred in order to teach
them something or to convey some important message. These results, Bering
(2010) argues, reveal that even trenchant non-believers (e.g., extinctivists, athe-
ists) are subject to implicit and incorrigible tendencies toward afterlife beliefs
and teleo-functional reasoning, which are important aspects of religious belief.
Besides implicit attitudes and implicit beliefs, there is also increasing evi-
dence for implicit or unconscious emotions. There is, for example, clinical
evidence of dissociations between consciously-experienced feelings and psy-
chophysiological responses in anxiety disorders (Barlow, 1988; Rachman, 1990);
indeed, this unconscious anxiety is especially associated with particular pat-
terns of avoidance behavior, such as substance abuse (Kihlstrom et al., 2000).
Furthermore, combining Zajonc’s (e.g., 1980) work on affective priming and
Schwarz and Clore’s (1983) work on affect misattribution, Winkielman, Zajonc,
and Schwarz (1997) provided evidence that affective priming (via happy and
angry faces) could alter subsequent judgments about the valence of Chinese
ideographs without detectable changes in consciously-experienced affect. Simi-
larly, Winkielman, Berridge, and Wilbarger (2005) exposed thirsty participants
to subliminal affective primes, and measured the amount of a novel beverage
they drank as well as their evaluations of the beverage. In this case, the uncon-
scious primes affected participants’ attitudes and behavior without affecting
consciously-experienced affect; participants primed with happy faces were
more willing to drink the beverage and to evaluate it positively.
The research on implicit social cognition, implicit theism, and unconscious
emotion opens up the intriguing possibility that there may be a dissociation
between explicit and implicit religious beliefs in the face of death, as well as a
dissociation between effects of religious belief on conscious and unconscious
death anxiety. As a preliminary test of this idea, we fi rst ran a correlational study
to examine whether religious beliefs were associated with explicit and implicit
death anxiety in different ways. Participants in this study completed the SBS
before completing a single-target implicit association test (Wigboldus, Holland, &
van Knippenberg, 2006), in which “death” and its synonyms were paired either
with words associated with anxiety or (in a different block) with words associ-
ated with calmness. Difference in response times between these two blocks
refl ected implicit death anxiety. Participants also completed the explicit Death
Anxiety Questionnaire used previously. Consistent with previous fi ndings on
the dissociation between explicit and implicit cognition and emotion, we found
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 343
that while the relationship between religious belief and explicit death anxiety
was curvilinear as before, the relationship between religious belief and implicit
death anxiety was linear: stronger religious belief was associated with lower
implicit death anxiety.
Given the interpretational ambiguity noted above, we replicated this initial
result experimentally. This time, rather than relying on an indirect persuasive
message, we took advantage of the affect-as-information effect (Clore, Gasper &
Garvin, 2001). In the pro-religion condition, participants were asked to list
twelve reasons that “God does not exist” (a task fewer than 1% of pretest par-
ticipants accomplish spontaneously), noting that “most atheists fi nd it easy to list
12 reasons,” but adding that participants should stop if they themselves cannot
think of that many. In the anti-religion condition, participants listed 12 reasons
why “God exists,” again adding that most religious people can do so, but that
participants need not if they are unable. The expectation (validated in a pretest)
was that participants would either fail or fi nd it very diffi cult to list 12 reasons
for either proposition, and consequently attribute this diffi culty to their own
attitudes. That is, the diffi culty of the “God does not exist” task would lead to
increased religious belief, whereas the diffi culty of the “God exists” task would
lead to decreased religious belief. Following the manipulation, all participants
completed both implicit and explicit measures of death anxiety. In stark contrast
to our previous study on self-reported (i.e., explicit) death anxiety, we found that
participants who listed—with diffi culty—reasons why God does not exist (and
therefore inferred greater religiosity) demonstrated less implicit death anxiety
than those trying to list why God exists (who inferred lower religiosity), regard-
less of their explicit religious beliefs (measured on the SBS; see Figure 19.4 ).
Participants’ explicit fear of death did not change.
These fi ndings, in turn, raised the question of the effect of mortality salience
on implicit religious beliefs. If religious beliefs mitigate implicit death anxiety,
we reasoned, perhaps mortality salience might motivate implicit religious belief
while also motivating explicit worldview defense. To address this possibility, we
ran two studies, employing two different implicit measures of religious belief.
In the fi rst study, religious and non-religious participants (self-categorized)
either completed the death or control thought listing task, followed by a super-
natural belief single-target implicit association test In this case, participants
responded to target words that referred to supernatural entities (from the SBS)
on the same key as synonyms of “real” or (in a different block) synonyms of
“imaginary,” with the difference in response times a measure of the implicit
association between supernatural entities and existence. Consistent with our
hypothesis, and in contrast with our previous experiment on explicit religious
belief, mortality salience increased implicit religious belief—the cognitive asso-
ciation between supernatural concepts and existential attributes—regardless of
participants’ self-reported religious identities (Jong, Halberstadt & Bluemke,
2012, Study 2; see Figure 19.5 ).
In a second study, we designed and employed a property verifi cation task for
religious belief in which participants simply categorized supernatural entities
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Figure 19.5 Implicit religiosity (ST-IAT score) as a function of religious identity and
priming condition.
–80
–60
–40
–20
0
20
40
60
Religious
Participant’s pre-existing belief
Non-religious
Implicit religiosity
Control
Mortality salience
Anti-God
Pro-God
0
50
100
150
200
250
300
Believers Non-believers
Implicit death anxiety
Figure 19.4 Implicit fear of death (ST-IAT score) as a function of the priming of God’s
existence and preexisting supernatural religious belief.
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RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND MANAGING ANXIETY 345
as being “real” or “imaginary” (Jong, Halberstadt, & Bluemke, 2012, Study 3).
This task provides two measures: fi rst, the rate of classifi cation, and second, the
speed of classifi cation. As expected, classifi cation rates were highly correlated
with self-reported religious belief, as measured via the SBS, regardless of exper-
imental condition: participants who scored high on the SBS also categorized
more supernatural entities as real, r = .86, p < .001. On the other hand, clas-
sifi cation latencies depended on experimental condition. In the control condi-
tion, these latencies were quadratically related to SBS scores: participants who
reported strong religious belief or strong religious disbelief scores classifi ed
supernatural entities most quickly, whereas more ambivalent participants were
slower to respond, β = .49, t = –4.14, p < .001. However, after writing about
their own death, believers classifi ed more quickly, while nonbelievers classifi ed
more slowly (relative to controls), a cubic function indicating strengthened reli-
gious belief and weakened religious disbelief among believers and nonbelievers
respectively (see Figure 19.6 ). Note that this pattern is inconsistent with the
worldview defense hypothesis, which predicts that mortality salience leads to
.00
13 5 7 9
Religious supernatural belief
1000.00
2000.00
Classification time (ms)
3000.00
4000.00
Control
Priming
Death
Control
Death
Figure 19.6 Time to classify religious concepts as “real” as a function of prior religious
supernatural belief and priming condition.
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J. HALBERSTADT AND J. JONG
346
the bolstering of one’s prior beliefs, whether religious or not, and therefore that
both religious and non-religious participants would both classify supernatural
entities more quickly, in worldview-consistent ways.
Taken together with the previous studies on explicit religious belief and death
anxiety, the fi ndings presented here reveal religious belief to be a uniquely pow-
erful buffer of existential anxiety. The dissociation between explicit and implicit
religious belief enables people to simultaneously pursue symbolic immortality
by engaging in explicit religious (or anti-religious) worldview defense while also
pursuing literal immortality via implicit religious belief. Religious belief there-
fore provides a double-barreled strategy against death anxiety.
CONCLUSION
The research surveyed here suggests that religious beliefs regulate death anxiety
in two ways. At an implicit level, religious beliefs reduce death anxiety; religious
believers and nonbelievers alike are implicitly attracted to religious belief when
they are reminded of death. Whether this common response refl ects an evolution-
ary, now largely unconscious motivation to avoid existentially threatening stimuli
(Bargh & Huang, this volume), more general processing changes associated with
negative emotion (Forgas, this volume), or “colder” cognitive associations (e.g.,
spreading activation from “death” to “God”), remains to be seen. However, reli-
gious belief also serves a worldview defense function at the explicit level, perhaps
via executive functions activated in the face of distress (Inzlicht & Legault, this
volume). Together, these two complementary routes to anxiety reduction may
help explain the robustness of religious belief in the face of minimal evidence.
If, as William James (1902/1952, p. 138) put it, our mortality is “the worm at
the core of all our usual springs of delight,” then we are likely motivated to keep
mortality at bay, and always have been. The desire for a technological solution to
ageing and death runs throughout human history from pre-scientifi c quests for
magical potions to more recent forays into cryonics and regenerative medicine,
to aspirations toward so-called “digital immortality” (Cave, 2012; Gray, 2011;
Weiner, 2010). However, regardless of their actual effi cacy, such attempts are
unconvincing, more likely to attract derision than devotion (Gray, 2011; Weiner,
2010). In contrast, billions of people—the vast majority of us—seem to have
little trouble believing that we will, in some way, survive our deaths without any
medical intervention. Instead, we will do so by the immortality of our souls or
the grace of our gods. Regardless of the truth of our religious beliefs, they seem
to be, through the mechanisms studied in this chapter, effective psychological
technologies against our fears of annihilation.
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