The Effect Of Mortality Salience On Analytical Reasoning And Decision-making

Despite the negative effect of death is huge,the individual rarely think about the death problems or unable to perceive the fear of death.According to the explanation of Terror Management Theory is that the effectiveness of various cognitive mechanisms make us don’t worry about death daily.So we would remind individuals to think about mortality salience,through this experimentally manipulation individuals would experience to the anxiety and fear of death.While the human species enjoys uniquely developed capacities for analytical reasoning and rational decision-making,the effectiveness of cognitive mechanisms may be destroyed under the context of the mortality salience,would make people’s behavior be biased.In addition,the religious belief would affect mortality salience or not is unsure.So we aim to explore that thoughts of death would consume resources and directly impair their performance on reasoning and decision-making that require analytic thought.Then,we would also explore whether a mortality salience effect on that the process of the mortality damage analytical thought,that is to say religion as a cultural worldview,play a role of worldview defense.In order to explore the effect of mortality salience on analytical reasoning and decision-making by designed three experiments,our research adopt the belief-bias paradigm to measure analytical thought,and induced thoughts of death by mortality salience,The participants are college students and adults of religious belief.Experiment one explore the mortality salience have an effect on the analytical reasoning,the result shows that mortality salience impair the analytical thought,on the conflict question,the reasoning accuracy of the mortality salience group is significantly lower than pain and baseline group.Experiment two explore the mortality salience have an effect on the analytical decision-making,the result shows that the mortality salience impair the analytical thought,on the conflict question,the decision-making accuracy and response of the mortality salience group is significantly lower than pain and baseline group.Experiment three explore the religious beliefs have an effect on the mortality salience,the result shows that religious beliefs can buffer the negative effect of death,under the mortality salience background,the reasoning and decision-making accuracy the religious beliefs group is significantly lower than the non-religious beliefs group.According to our findings,we concluded that:First,when students solving the belief-bias task of reasoning field,the mortality salience like cognitive load,which will damage the performance of analytical reasoning,making individuals can’t carry on rational thinking effectively.Second,when students solving the belief-bias task of decision-making field,the mortality salience like cognitive load like cognitive load,which will damage the performance of analytical decision-making,making individuals can’t carry on rational thinking effectively.Third,when students solving the belief-bias task of reasoning and decision-making field,the mortality salience is influenced by religion beliefs,which buffer the negative effect of analytical thought,that is mortality salience effects.