Reading an attack on your worldview can make thoughts of death surface
Patriotic Canadians who read an essay attacking their national values became more likely to complete COFF__ as COFFIN. Psychologists say that is because a worldview, the deep frame through which we interpret reality, also shields us from anxiety about dying. Challenge it, and that buffer weakens.
A worldview is the basic orientation a person or society brings to the world: its knowledge, values, emotions and assumptions about how things work. Two people watching the same event can reach opposite conclusions because each notices things and makes assumptions the other does not. English borrowed the idea from the German Weltanschauung, world perception, a term first used by Kant and popularised by Hegel. It is often wrongly credited to Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose own concept, Weltansicht, described how a language community grasps reality.
In 1911 Wilhelm Dilthey sorted worldviews into three recurring types. Naturalism, found in Democritus, Hobbes and Hume, gives priority to perception and experiment. The idealism of freedom, from Plato to Kant, is dualistic and puts free will first. Objective idealism, which he saw in Heraclitus, Spinoza and Hegel, looks for the harmony running through all things. Leo Apostel later argued a full worldview should answer questions such as where we are heading, what we should do, how to reach our goals and what is true, and should even explain its own origins.
Because a worldview rests on basic beliefs that work like axioms, they cannot be proven from inside it; people argue from them rather than for them. When two worldviews share enough beliefs, dialogue is possible. If they are wholly incompatible, the result is cultural relativism, which philosophical realists criticise. Clément Vidal proposed judging worldviews on objective, subjective and shared consistency.
Terror management theory holds that living up to a worldview's ideals gives people self-esteem and a sense of outlasting death, literally through religion or symbolically through art, children or culture. In Jeff Schimel's experiments, the 61 Canadians showed the effect compared with a control group whose essay criticised Australian culture instead, and their mood scores did not shift, ruling out simple anger; and a similar study with 60 people found it in creationists reading a defence of evolution.
Source: Worldview
