Open to death: A moderating role of openness to experience in terror management

Research on terror management theory demonstrates that people respond to reminders of mortality with defenses aimed at maintaining their self-esteem and defending cultural worldviews. We posited that being open to experience should allow individuals to process death more receptively (i.e., with curiosity), attenuating the need to bolster self-esteem or defend worldviews, because death is a novel experience. Across three studies, dispositional openness moderated reactions to mortality salience. Individuals low in openness to experience responded to mortality salience with increased self-esteem striving (Study 1) and worldview defense (Study 2), and this functioned to decrease the subsequent availability of death-related thought (Study 2). Individuals high in openness to experience did not exhibit these same defense tendencies. Study 3 examined a possible mechanism for the attenuated effects observed among high openness individuals: increased curiosity in response to mortality salience was found to decrease worldview defense, but only for those high in openness. Together this research depicts openness as a resource facilitating reduced defensiveness following mortality salience.