Yes, water
is wet, but the interesting part was the actual study and you had to click the link and read the whole thing to get that part. I wasn't going to post the whole thing, but here is some of it:
Quote:
For their first study, Solomon, Greenberg and colleagues asked students to think about either their own death or a neutral topic.
They then read the campaign statements of three hypothetical candidates for governor, each with a different leadership style. One was charismatic, said Solomon.
"That was a person who declared our country to be great and the people in it to be special," Solomon, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
The others were task-oriented -- focusing on the job to be done -- or relationship-oriented -- with a "let's get it done together" style, Solomon said.
...
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.
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Quote:
In one we asked half the people to think about the September 11 attacks, or to think about watching TV," Solomon said. "What we found was staggering."
When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about Sept. 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions.
"They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq," Solomon said.
Solomon, a social psychologist who specializes in terrorism, said it was very rare for a person's opinions to differ so strongly depending on the situation.
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I think these results say a lot more than the headline suggests, particularly in the second study. I'm equally suspicious of television and the Bush administration. I think it's a dangerous attitude to believe that America is an inherently safe place, but that seems to be the general consensus based on the people in the study, who seemed to be unaffected by thoughts of danger after thinking about a neutral topic like television.