American voters' decade-long slide toward conservatism (Gallup, 2024) may be a result of migrant crises and even the COVID-19 pandemic. Terror Management Theory (TMT) considers threats a motivator for voters to seek stability and security, which conservative ideologies often provide. Although TMT enjoyed broad support from earlier studies, recent replications struggled to reproduce the conservative shift. This presentation starts by describing two published studies by the presenter to highlight specific difficulties of using four threats to shift participants toward conservatism in four countries. The presentation then describes two new experiments that found partial support for TMT by successfully shifting participants' policy stance but not their overall ideology toward conservatism.


Retail theft and mob robberies have been rampant in liberal cities in America in recent years. Among the possible culprits is legislation that curtailed how low-level offenders are punished. For example, California voters passed Proposition 47 in 2014 and downgraded many "nonviolent" offenses from felonies to misdemeanors if the dollar value involved was below $950. A TMT-informed hypothesis posits that reminders of retail crime would rally participants behind security policies and even make them embrace conservatism.


Two experiments were conducted by recruiting participants in San Francisco, California (206 adults; 98 college students). Participants viewed either a video of retail crimes or local tourist attractions. They were also asked to revise the $950 threshold in pre- and post-test (within subject), by proposing an ideal threshold and also the minimum and maximum thresholds that they would endorse in a fictitious ballot measure. Significant mixed-level interactions and simple comparisons, across both studies, on a majority of the thresholds, showed that the experimental group (not the control group) significantly reduced the thresholds and became tougher on crime. However similar analyses did not find sweeping ideological shifts toward conservatism due to the exposure to the crime video.