Avoidant Attachment as a Panacea against Collective Mortality Concerns: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between Individualist and Collectivist Cultures

Abstract

Despite the universality of cultural worldviews and self-esteem in providing people with general protection against death anxiety, recent empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that death anxiety is more pronounced in East-Asian collectivist cultures than in Western individualist cultures. We propose that collectivists are encumbered by the additive concerns for the mortal well-being of close others in addition to their own, whereas individualists are primarily concerned with their own mortality, which would explain the reported differential death anxiety between cultures. Focusing on individual differences in attachment avoidance, we predicted that avoidant collectivists, with disinterest in interpersonal relationships and staunch independence despite living in a collectivist culture, would report less death anxiety on par with enculturated individualists. Results from our study support the contention that elevated levels of death anxiety among collectivists are explained by their cultural predilection toward interdependence, which attachment avoidance undermines, thus leading to reduced death anxiety.