Every person is destined to die, and as human beings, we are unique in our intimate awareness of this stark fact. The truth is, however, that if we were always fully conscious of the fragility of life and our impending demise, we would be rendered unable to cope with life; effectively becoming paralyzed by overwhelming anxiety and terror. In order to avoid this most unpleasant experience, we repress our fears of death, in part by absorbing ourselves in things that provide us with a sense of meaning and purpose. In this way, we can quite effectively coast through life, almost entirely unaware of how this tremendous existential dilemma affects us on an unconscious level. In his Pulitzer-prize winning book, “The Denial of Death,” Ernest Becker (1973) demonstrated how man must continually seek to repress and deny the awareness of death by cultivating his own systems of symbolic immortality. In the mid 1980’s, three social psychologists began studying Becker’s ideas in the laboratory, eventually culminating in what is now known as Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1986).
The fundamental hypothesis of Terror Management Theory (TMT) is that repression of mortality awareness is accomplished by two primary mechanisms; having faith in a particular cultural worldview (or shared conception of reality) and self-esteem striving (see e.g., Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, & Shimmel, 2004, for reviews). Cultural worldviews imbue the psyche with a sense of meaning by providing explanations for existence, standards of acceptable behavior, and the potential to transcend physical death; either symbolically, through contributing to something greater and more enduring than one’s self (e.g., a nation, political ideology, family), or literally, by having faith in an afterlife (Arndt & Vess, 2008). TMT sees cultural worldview defense as essential to the establishment and maintenance of self-esteem, which also serves to buffer basic existential concerns. To date, an impressive body of evidence has lent support for the roles that self-esteem and worldview defense play on attenuating mortality concerns.
The bulk of TMT research is based on the mortality salience hypothesis, which contends that reminding people of their own death will lead them to increase their defense of certain cultural beliefs and their willingness to meet certain standards of behavior. Here is a typical example of how TMT studies are conducted: participants are first exposed to a mortality salience prime (e.g., writing a paragraph about their own death, watching video clips with death related stimuli, answering questionnaires that prime thoughts of death), then, engaged in a distraction task (which allows for conscious mortality concerns to be suppressed); and lastly, asked to complete a measure designed to assess cultural worldview defense (Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1997). One series of studies that has been particularly well reported in the literature has had participants answer two open-ended questions about their death, followed by an evaluation of other people who either threaten or support their worldview (e.g., Greenberg, Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Chatel, 1992). Results from these studies indicate that participants who are reminded of death (experimental group) demonstrate increased worldview defense (compared to those in the control group that are not primed with death), as witnessed by more positive evaluations of others who support their beliefs and more negative evaluations of those who challenge those beliefs (Arndt, Goldenberg, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 2000). These findings reveal both the positive and negative aspects of death-denial. Although clinging to worldview defenses can produce such positive effects as boosting self-esteem, it can also make individuals more prone to react negatively toward different others. In fact, a slew of other TMT studies have shown directly that, when reminded of death, people are significantly more prone to act with hostility towards those who do not share their cultural beliefs.
We all know how the 9/11 attacks led to nauseating displays of flag-waving in this country. It was, in effect, the perfect terror management experiment conducted on a massive scale. After the citizens of this country were reminded of their mortality, they could not help but display glowing pride in our nation and also the simultaneous desire to destroy some common enemy that threatened their worldviews. Patriotism is just one example of something that provides people with a sense of symbolic immortality. Feeling patriotic with regard to American values, for example, enables people to immerse themselves in a part of a greater whole, a whole that is much larger and certainly more enduring than their individual existences. When we are reminded of death, those with differing worldviews (e.g., Muslims, Zoroastrians, the French, etc) are all viewed with more open hostility. After all, if people have faith in a particular model of reality, than any disparate conceptions of the world only serve to threaten the legitimacy of their beliefs. In the most extreme cases, they become willing to give up their physical lives in order to maintain the symbolic immortality structures they have built.
It seems that Becker was right after all.
~Wolf
Arndt, J., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1997). Subliminal exposure to death-related stimuli increases defense of the cultural world view. Psychological Science, 08, NO 5.
Arndt, J., Goldenberg, J. L., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2000). Death can be hazardous to your health: Adaptive and ironic consequences of defenses against the terror of death. In J. Masling & P. Duberstain (Eds.), Psychoanalytic perspectives on sickness and health (Vol. 9, pp. 201-257). Washington D.C: American Psychological Association.
Arndt, J., & Vess, M. (2008). Tales from existential oceans: Terror management theory and how the awareness of death affects us all. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2/2, 909-928.
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: a terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public self and private self (pp.189-212). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Greenberg, J., Simon, L., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S, & Chatel, D. (1992). Terror management and tolerance: Does mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who threaten one's worldview? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 212-220.
Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (1997). Terror management theory of self-esteem and social behavior: Empirical assessments and conceptual refinements. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 29, pp. 61-139). New York: Academic Press.
Pyszczynksi, T., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., & Schimel, J. (2004). Why do people need self-esteem?: A theoretical and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 435-468.
Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!
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