Unintended effects of measuring implicit processes: The case of death-thought accessibility in mortality salience studies

According to terror management theory, mortality salience (MS) increases distal worldview and self-esteem defensiveness by arousing unconscious death-thought accessibility (DTA). Although numerous studies support this theoretical process model, no research to date has ever found that DTA mediates the effect of MS in a single study, using the measurement-of-mediation approach. In this paper, we argue that the lack of evidence for this effect is due to methodological issues associated with the measurement of DTA. Specifically, measuring DTA primes death-thoughts and thereby disrupts the psychological processes that are typically initiated by MS. We provide evidence for this theorizing in three studies. Study 1 shows that merely administering a DTA task (vs. a neutral non-death-related task) increases distal self-esteem enhancement following a delay period (cf., a typical MS effect). Study 2 is a preregistered replication of Study 1, and found parallel effects, but only among participants who did not speed through the study. Study 3 demonstrates that whereas MS increases self-enhancement after a delay when DTA is not measured, administering a DTA task following MS eliminates this effect. Implications for understanding the implicit processes initiated in response to MS are discussed, and methodological recommendations for conducting empirically sound MS studies are suggested.