Reply #11: show her this article

[Zan_of_Texas]

Fear of Death Wins Minds and Votes, Study Finds

July 29, 2004
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040729/pl_nm/campaign_fear_dc&cid=615&ncid=1963&sid=96378800

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush may be tapping into solid human psychology when he invokes the Sept. 11 attacks while campaigning for the next election, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Talking about death can raise people's need for psychological security, the researchers report in studies to be published in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science and the September issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

"There are people all over who are claiming every time Bush is in trouble he generates fear by declaring an imminent threat," said Sheldon Solomon of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, who worked on the study. "We are saying this is psychologically useful."

Jeff Greenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said generating fear was a common tactic. "A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association. "Sometimes that may be the right thing to do. But it is a psychological approach, particularly when death is close to peoples' consciousness."

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The students who thought about death were much more likely to choose the charismatic leader, they found. Only four out of about 100 chose that imaginary leader when thinking about exams, but 30 did after thinking about death. <snip>