Does Mortality priming increase religious thinking? Evidence from implicit spatial-religious associations

According to Terror Management Theory, people manage their fear of death by defending their cultural worldview, and values of that worldview are typically strengthened when confronted with death. An interesting case is religious believes, for which an increase or decrease has been found depending on the prior religiousness and level of assessment (explicit or implicit). In this study (n = 135) we further assessed the impact of mortality salience on implicit religious believes using an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the link between vertical space and deity (good-up, devil down). We found that implicit associations increased when people think about their own death, but not when they think about a tooth treatment. Moreover, the increase in the IAT-effect was higher for people with a lower self-esteem. Making use of a metaphorical spatial association, this study provides further support for an increase in implicit religiousness when thinking about one’s own dead