Terror management theory
Encyclopedia
Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology
, states that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker
's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death
, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound—albeit subconscious—anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance
) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems
, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept as self-esteem
; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture's expectations.
According to TMT theorists, symbols that create cultural worldviews are fiercely protected as representations of actual life. The Terror Management Theory posits that when people are reminded of their own deaths, they more readily enforce these symbols, often leading to punitive actions, violence, and war. Experiments have been performed to lend evidence to TMT, primarily carried out by Sheldon Solomon
, Tom Pyszczynski
, and Jeff Greenberg
, seeking to provide proof that mortality salience, or the awareness of one's own death, affects the decision-making of individuals and groups of people.
Ernest Becker
's (1925–1974) life work was his 1973 book The Denial of Death
in which he asserts that, as intelligent animals, humans are able to perceive the inevitability of their deaths. They therefore spend their lives building and believing in cultural elements that illustrate how to make themselves stand out as individuals and give their lives significance and meaning. Death creates an anxiety in humans; it strikes at unexpected and random moments, and its nature is essentially unknowable, causing people to spend most of their time and energy to explain, forestall, and avoid it.
Becker expounded upon the previous writings of Sigmund Freud
, Søren Kierkegaard
, Norman O. Brown
, and Otto Rank
, putting the greatest emphasis on Kierkegaard and Rank. According to clinical psychiatrist Morton Levitt, Becker replaces the Freudian preoccupation with sexuality with the fear of death as the primary motivation in human behavior.
People desire to think of themselves as beings of value and worth with a feeling of permanence, a concept in psychology
known as self-esteem
, that somewhat resolves the realization that people may be no more important than any other living thing. Becker refers to high self-esteem as heroism:
lies at the heart of TMT, and is a fundamental part of its main experimental paradigms. TMT, fundamentally, seeks to elucidate the causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem, and theoretically, it draws heavily from Ernest Becker
’s conceptions of culture and self-esteem (Becker, 1971; Becker, 1973). TMT doesn’t just attempt to explain what self-esteem is, but rather tries to account for why we need self-esteem, and what psychological functions it may serve. The answer, according to TMT, is that “self-esteem functions to shelter people from deeply rooted anxiety inherent in the human condition ... [it] is a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe...” (pg. 436). That is the why. The what for TMT is that self-esteem is a sense of personal value, that is “obtained by believing (a) in the validity of one’s cultural worldview and (b) that one is living up to the standards that are part of that worldview” (pg. 437).
Self-esteem is the feeling that one is a valuable and essential agent in a universe that is fundamentally meaningful. Therefore, TMT’s conception of self-esteem hinges on the notion that self-esteem is socially constructed
and maintained; that self-esteem is unintelligible irrespective of the particular culture that fostered those beliefs about the self, and of the other individuals within that culture that socially validate an individual’s self-esteem. Thus TMT is coherent with most notions of cultural relativism
, in that there is an infinite amount of ways that an individual can obtain and maintain self-esteem. This is precisely why self-esteem can be so tenuous and fragile: the very existence of other cultures and other esteemed individuals within those cultures threatens the very stability and validity of one’s own self-esteem, and hence, their sense of invulnerability (especially in the face of death). In sum, self-esteem serves as an anxiety buffer.
Experimentally, then, the anxiety buffer hypothesis states that if self-esteem and faith in one’s cultural worldview serve an anxiety buffering purpose, then bolstering self-esteem (whether artificially, or by selecting participants that are naturally high in self-esteem) should decrease an individual’s proneness to anxiety, and serve as a “shield” against threats to their psychological equanimity. One of the first TMT studies demonstrated just this. Greenberg, Solomon, and colleagues (1992) found that (1) boosting levels of self-esteem with positive feedback reduced self-reported anxiety on a standard anxiety scale after viewing graphic depictions of death, (2) bolstered self-esteem lead to less physiological arousal in anticipation of painful electric shocks, and (3) bolstered self-esteem made participants less likely to deny a short life expectancy (i.e., were realistic about their mortality). Subsequent support for this hypothesis comes from a vast literature that is constantly growing. For an empirical review of self-esteem as an anxiety buffer in TMT, see Pyszczynski et al. (2004).
Experimentally, the MS hypothesis has been tested in close to 200 empirical articles After being asked to write about their own death (vs. a neutral, non-death control topic, such as dental pain), and then following a brief delay (distal, worldview/self-esteem defenses work the best after a delay ... see Greenberg et al., 1994, for a discussion), the defenses are measured. In one early TMT study assessing the MS hypothesis, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and colleagues (1990) had Christian participants evaluate other Christians and Jewish students that were similar demographically, but differed in their religious affiliation. After being reminded of their death (experimental MS induction), Christian participants evaluated fellow Christians more positively, and Jewish participants more negatively, relative to the control condition. Conversely, bolstering self-esteem in these scenarios leads to less worldview defense and derogation of dissimilar others.
The DTA hypothesis has its origins in work by Greenberg and colleagues (1994) as an extension of their earlier terror management hypotheses (i.e., the anxiety buffer hypothesis and the mortality salience hypothesis). The researchers reasoned that if, as indicated by Wegner’s
research on thought suppression
(1994; 1997), thoughts that are purposely suppressed from conscious awareness are often brought back with ease, then following a delay death-thought cognitions should be more available to consciousness then (a) those who keep the death-thoughts in their consciousness the whole time, and (b) those who suppress the death-thoughts but are not provided a delay. That is precisely what they found.
In these initial studies (i.e., Greenberg et al., 2004; Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Simon, 1997), and in numerous subsequent DTA studies, the main measure of DTA is a word fragment task, whereby participants can complete word fragments in distinctly death-related ways (e.g., coff_ _ as coffin, not coffee) or in non death-related ways (e.g., sk_ _l as skill, not skull). If death-thoughts are indeed more available to consciousness, then it stands to reason that the word fragments should be completed in a way that is semantically related to death.
Here it is important to note how the DTA paradigm subtly alters, and expands, TMT as a motivational theory. Instead of solely manipulating mortality (as in the mortality salience paradigm) and witnessing its effects (e.g., nationalism, increased prejudice, risky sexual behavior, etc.), the DTA paradigm allows a measure of the death-related cognitions that result from various affronts to the self (e.g., self-esteem threats, worldview threats, etc.), and is therefore valuable in assessing the role of death-thoughts in self-esteem and worldview defenses. Furthermore, the DTA hypothesis lends unique support to TMT in that it corroborates its central hypothesis that death is uniquely problematic for human beings, and that it is fundamentally different in its effects than meaning threats (i.e., Heine, Proulx, &Vohs, 2006), and that is indeed death itself, and not say, uncertainty and lack of control associated with death (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008).
Since its inception, the DTA hypothesis had been rapidly gaining ground in TMT investigations, and as of 2009, has been employed in over 60 published papers, with a total of more than 90 empirical studies.
, motivating genetic self-preservation instincts in species and promoting natural selection (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, 1997). Emotion is both motivational (Lazarus, 1991) and evolutionary (Darwin, 1872). In spite of these obvious similarities, the amount of effort directed at examining affect and emotion in the process of terror management and elicited by mortality salience has been limited (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, & Cornwell, 2001). The following will examine the role that emotion plays in the terror management and the discrete emotions elicited by mortality salient primes.
to a specific set of categorically similar primes (Curtis & Biran, 2001). For terror management, distal defense is akin to the fight-type response; individuals heighten the liking of similar others and accentuate their dislike of dissimilar others. Proximal defense, on the other hand, typically results in the flight response; given the lack of self-efficacy associated with the insurmountability of death, one simply takes evasive action and drives death-related thoughts from their mind through distraction (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999).
The effects of fear on attitude change have been intensely debated. The orthodox view of fear appeals states that the level of fear is crucial to attitude outcomes. Research has shown that mortality salient fear associated with highly-hedonically relevant attitudes results in message rejection (Shehryar & Hunt, 2005). Individuals who highly enjoyed drinking alcohol
rejected messages that linked drunk driving to death but accepted messages that tied drunk driving to arrest
or social ostracism. TMT research therefore demonstrates that qualitative inquiry into the type of fear, not simply the gross amount of fear elicited, is crucial to the outcome of fear appeals on attitude change.
Experiential processing which relies on emotional memory is a crucial prerequisite to terror management processes. Rational processing, a logical, step-by-step system of cognitive evaluation, alternately impedes the cultural worldview defense mechanism intrinsic to terror management processes. Studies that varied experimenter formality/informality and explicit processing instructions demonstrate that worldview defense only occurs under conditions of emotional processing (Simon, Greenberg, Harmon-Jones, Solomon, Pyszczynski, Arndt, & Abend, 1997). Cognitive evaluations interfere with the symbolic, often arbitrary, associations between novel cultural defenses and fear of death (Pyszczynski, et al., 1999). Emotion
, then, lies at the heart of all terror management.
Emotional elicitation has not been found to be a prerequisite for terror management processes. Many terror management studies have examined elicited affect as a covariate to mortality salience (see Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, & Cornwell, 2001), and only one reviewed study has found elicited affect (fear) in the terror management process (Harmon-Jones, Simon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & McGregor, 1997). Why? Terror management is a non-conscious process. The process occurs very quickly, imperceptibly, and automatically (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). As Rosenblatt and colleagues put it, terror management is designed to prevent any “conscious experience of emotion” (p. 689).
, for instance, has been described as a need primarily for ordered interactions, lasting feelings of self-esteem and self-worth (which TMT associated directly with a prescribed role in a cultural drama), and vicarious immortality (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Solomon et al., 1991).
) or avoidance (shame/guilt
) other emotions (Hirschberger, Florian, & Mikulincer, 2003). Others argue that the perceived need to link sex
with love is primarily due to existential anxiety, reflecting a need to reject the baser, animalistic need for sex (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000). These authors argue that relationship-seeking is a largely independent defense against existential angst
, functioning without the assistance of either the self-esteem or worldview defense explanations (Mikulincer, et al., 2003).
is another emotion linked to terror management. While many researchers bemoan the lack of analytic clarity linking discrete disgust elicitors (Royzman & Sabini, 2001), Goldenberg et al. (2000) find the rejection of animality or creatureliness to function as the central tendency driving disgust. Terror management’s distal processes ought to naturally attempt to distinguish human
s from our basic, animal
nature; these base processes that link humans and animals are the same processes that make death inexorable. Studies demonstrate that mortality salience is associated with the rejection of animal traits (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, & Cornwell, 2001). Even moral disgust, the most difficult type of disgust to categorically link with core disgust elicited, say, by feces
, maintains the linkage to culturally relevant defenses against death-related anxiety.
, often linked to romantic love
(particularly in monogamous
relationships but sometimes also in polyamorous
relationships) ought to be heightened under conditions of mortality salience (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 1991). Shame
, guilt
, and humiliation
are all associated with threats to self-esteem, a core terror management defense mechanism (Goldenberg et al., 2000; Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 1991). Thus, mortality salience ought to paradoxically reduce the capacity for each by prompting independent self-esteem defense mechanisms. Anger
and contempt
have been neither directly examined nor hypothesized as outcomes of terror management theory, but both are likely accentuated by the outsider rejection mechanisms triggered by distal defense. Goldenberg et al. (2000) argue that pride
, especially that related to body image
, is explained by existential anxiety, but no studies yet conducted have examined pride as an outcome of mortality salience. Future research ought to examine these and other discrete emotions in the context of terror management theory.
In one particular study on TMT (Cohen et al., 2004), the preferences for different types of leaders was tested while reminding people of their mortality. Three different candidates were presented to participants. The three leaders were of three different types: task-oriented (emphasized setting goals, strategic planning, and structure), relationship-oriented (emphasized compassion, trust, and confidence in others), and charismatic. The participants were then placed in one of two conditions: mortality salient or control group. In the former condition the participants were asked to describe the emotions surrounding their own death, as well as the physical act of the death itself, whereas the control group were asked similar questions about an upcoming exam. The results of the study were that the charismatic leader was favored more, and the relationship-oriented leader was favored less, in the mortality-salient condition. Further research has shown that mortality salient individuals also prefer leaders who are members of the same group and men rather than women (Hoyt, Simon, & Reid, 2010). This has links to social role theory.
With regards to the studies that found similar effects, TMT theorists have argued that in the previously mentioned studies where death was not the subject thought about, the subjects would quite easily be related to death in an individual’s mind due to “linguistic or experiential connection with mortality”(p. 332). For example, being robbed invokes thoughts of violence and being unsafe in one’s own home – many people have died trying to protect their property and family. A second possible explanation for these results involves the death-thought accessibility hypothesis: these threats somehow sabotage crucial anxiety-buffering aspects of an individual’s worldview or self esteem, which increases their DTA. For example, one study found increased DTA in response to thoughts of antagonistic relations with attachment figures. (For a comprehensive review of the unique import of death, see Pyszczynski et al., 2006).
TMT theorists argue that the MMM cannot describe why different sets of meaning are preferred for a symbol by different people, and that while they may exist, “different [(i.e., more concrete)] types of meaning have different psychological functions”. For example, MMM theorists argue that all types of meaning are basically equal, and yet one could not compare the likelihood of defensive responses resulting from exposure to a deck of cards containing black hearts with something like the 9/11 terrorists attacks. TMT theorists argue, essentially, that unless something is an important element of a person’s anxiety-buffering worldview or self-esteem, it will not require broad meaning maintenance.
In sum, TMT theorists believe that the MMM cannot accurately claim to be an alternative to TMT because it does not seem to be able to explain the current breadth of TMT evidence. As an example, TMT theorists assert that mortality salience would not be a threat to meaning, since our eventual demise is a necessary condition of life. Therefore, it should not cause an individual to engage in general meaning maintenance. MMM also makes no attempt to explain why threatening meaning increases DTA.
Though TMT theorists acknowledge that many responses to mortality salience (MS) involve greater approaches (zealousness) towards important worldviews, they also note examples of MS which resulted in the opposite, which Offensive Defensiveness cannot account for: when negative features of a group to which participants belong were made salient, people actively distanced themselves from that group under MS.
– for example: “... because fear is an adaptive fitness response designed by natural selection to respond to specific fitness challenges, inhibiting anxiety would have been maladaptive in our ancestral past and ... it is therefore implausible that psychological processes for inhibiting anxiety ... would be active today”(p. 491). In response, TMT theorists argue that this critique is mixing up fear related to immediate danger with anxiety related to thoughts of threats that will or may occur eventually. TMT is talking about the protection that self-esteem and cultural worldviews offer against the threat of unavoidable death in the future. While anxiety may be adaptive in avoiding entering a dangerous place (e.g. because a predator may be waiting), this doesn’t mean that anxiety must be adaptive in all cases – just ask any clinician who helps people suffering from anxiety disorders. For a more comprehensive review of TMT and evolutionary psychology, see Landau et al., 2007.
Coalitional Psychology (CP) is presented as another alternative to TMT, which proposes that there is an evolutionary tendency to seek safety in groups (coalitions) as a reaction to adaptive threats. People already a part of coalitional groups seek to protect their membership by exhibiting their value to the group. In other words, “belief systems, cosmologies, values, rituals, and various other trappings of culture exist simply to facilitate group cohesiveness; thus any meaning, sense of personal value, or hope of death transcendence such beliefs may provide is purely epiphenomenal to their coalition-binding function”. However, Landau et al. (2007) make several criticisms of this position, including the objection that CP cannot be a useful alternative for TMT because it doesn’t provide evidence that cannot be applied to any number of theories, and because it does not directly account for the empirical evidence supporting TMT.
TMT and Self-Esteem
Hansen, J., Winzeler, S., & Topolinski, S. (2010). When the death makes you smoke: A terror management perspective on the effectiveness of cigarette on-pack warnings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (1), 226-228 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.09.007
Social psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
, states that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.-Early life:...
's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death is a work of psychology and philosophy written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1974, two months after the author's death...
, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound—albeit subconscious—anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems
Religion and happiness
Religion and happiness have been studied by a number of researchers. The science of positive psychology has identified many components of happiness, and religion seems adapted to satisfy many of them...
, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept as self-esteem
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is a term in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame: some would distinguish how 'the self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, the...
; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture's expectations.
According to TMT theorists, symbols that create cultural worldviews are fiercely protected as representations of actual life. The Terror Management Theory posits that when people are reminded of their own deaths, they more readily enforce these symbols, often leading to punitive actions, violence, and war. Experiments have been performed to lend evidence to TMT, primarily carried out by Sheldon Solomon
Sheldon Solomon
Sheldon Solomon is a professor of psychology who teaches at Skidmore College. He earned his B.A. from Franklin and Marshall College and his doctoral degree from the University of Kansas...
, Tom Pyszczynski
Tom Pyszczynski
Tom Pyszczynski is an American Social Psychologist.He is notable, together with Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon, for founding the field of Terror Management Theory.-References:...
, and Jeff Greenberg
Jeff Greenberg
Jeff Greenberg is a professor at the University of Arizona.He is notable for coining the concept of Terror Management Theory, with two of his colleagues, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski....
, seeking to provide proof that mortality salience, or the awareness of one's own death, affects the decision-making of individuals and groups of people.
Background
The culmination of cultural anthropologistCultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.-Early life:...
's (1925–1974) life work was his 1973 book The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death is a work of psychology and philosophy written by Ernest Becker and published in 1973. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1974, two months after the author's death...
in which he asserts that, as intelligent animals, humans are able to perceive the inevitability of their deaths. They therefore spend their lives building and believing in cultural elements that illustrate how to make themselves stand out as individuals and give their lives significance and meaning. Death creates an anxiety in humans; it strikes at unexpected and random moments, and its nature is essentially unknowable, causing people to spend most of their time and energy to explain, forestall, and avoid it.
Becker expounded upon the previous writings of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel...
, Norman O. Brown
Norman O. Brown
Norman Oliver Brown was an American classicist.-Life:Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin...
, and Otto Rank
Otto Rank
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's...
, putting the greatest emphasis on Kierkegaard and Rank. According to clinical psychiatrist Morton Levitt, Becker replaces the Freudian preoccupation with sexuality with the fear of death as the primary motivation in human behavior.
People desire to think of themselves as beings of value and worth with a feeling of permanence, a concept in psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
known as self-esteem
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is a term in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame: some would distinguish how 'the self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, the...
, that somewhat resolves the realization that people may be no more important than any other living thing. Becker refers to high self-esteem as heroism:
Role of Self-Esteem in TMT
Self-esteemSelf-esteem
Self-esteem is a term in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame: some would distinguish how 'the self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, the...
lies at the heart of TMT, and is a fundamental part of its main experimental paradigms. TMT, fundamentally, seeks to elucidate the causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem, and theoretically, it draws heavily from Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker
Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.-Early life:...
’s conceptions of culture and self-esteem (Becker, 1971; Becker, 1973). TMT doesn’t just attempt to explain what self-esteem is, but rather tries to account for why we need self-esteem, and what psychological functions it may serve. The answer, according to TMT, is that “self-esteem functions to shelter people from deeply rooted anxiety inherent in the human condition ... [it] is a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe...” (pg. 436). That is the why. The what for TMT is that self-esteem is a sense of personal value, that is “obtained by believing (a) in the validity of one’s cultural worldview and (b) that one is living up to the standards that are part of that worldview” (pg. 437).
Self-esteem is the feeling that one is a valuable and essential agent in a universe that is fundamentally meaningful. Therefore, TMT’s conception of self-esteem hinges on the notion that self-esteem is socially constructed
Social constructionism
Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. A social construction is a concept or practice that is the construct of a particular group...
and maintained; that self-esteem is unintelligible irrespective of the particular culture that fostered those beliefs about the self, and of the other individuals within that culture that socially validate an individual’s self-esteem. Thus TMT is coherent with most notions of cultural relativism
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and...
, in that there is an infinite amount of ways that an individual can obtain and maintain self-esteem. This is precisely why self-esteem can be so tenuous and fragile: the very existence of other cultures and other esteemed individuals within those cultures threatens the very stability and validity of one’s own self-esteem, and hence, their sense of invulnerability (especially in the face of death). In sum, self-esteem serves as an anxiety buffer.
Self-Esteem as Anxiety Buffer
The anxiety buffer hypothesis starts with a brief look at the literature regarding children’s development of self-esteem (e.g., Becker, 1971/1973; Bowlby 1969/1982). Essentially, the human child is born completely helpless and dependent upon its caregivers, and learns through an extensive process of socialization that in order to maintain the feelings of security that come from being attached to the powerful other (i.e., the mother), he/she must concede its physicality and “trade it in” for a symbolic sense of self (i.e., self-esteem). In this way the child quickly learns that its security is dependent upon living up to the standards and values of his/her caregivers, and ultimately, to his/her culture. The preeminent example of this process is in toilet training, whereby the child must give up the pleasure and convenience of soiling itself wherever/whenever, and adopt the largely arbitrary rules of the caregivers/culture that the toilet is the depository of human waste, and that to go elsewhere, is to result in shame and exclusion from the mother’s death-denying aura (cf. Becker, 1973).Experimentally, then, the anxiety buffer hypothesis states that if self-esteem and faith in one’s cultural worldview serve an anxiety buffering purpose, then bolstering self-esteem (whether artificially, or by selecting participants that are naturally high in self-esteem) should decrease an individual’s proneness to anxiety, and serve as a “shield” against threats to their psychological equanimity. One of the first TMT studies demonstrated just this. Greenberg, Solomon, and colleagues (1992) found that (1) boosting levels of self-esteem with positive feedback reduced self-reported anxiety on a standard anxiety scale after viewing graphic depictions of death, (2) bolstered self-esteem lead to less physiological arousal in anticipation of painful electric shocks, and (3) bolstered self-esteem made participants less likely to deny a short life expectancy (i.e., were realistic about their mortality). Subsequent support for this hypothesis comes from a vast literature that is constantly growing. For an empirical review of self-esteem as an anxiety buffer in TMT, see Pyszczynski et al. (2004).
Mortality Salience
The mortality salience hypothesis (MS) states that if indeed one’s cultural worldview (or their self-esteem) serves a death-denying function, then threatening these constructs should produce defenses aimed at restoring psychological equanimity (i.e., returning the individual to a state of feeling invulnerable). In the MS paradigm, these “threats” are simply experimental reminders of one’s own death. This can, and has, taken many different forms in a variety of study paradigms (e.g., asking participants to write about their own death; conducting the experiment near funeral homes or cemeteries; having participants watch graphic depictions of death, etc.). Like the other TMT hypotheses, the literature supporting the MS hypothesis is vast and diverse. For a meta analysis of MS research, see Burke, Marten and Faucher (2010).Experimentally, the MS hypothesis has been tested in close to 200 empirical articles After being asked to write about their own death (vs. a neutral, non-death control topic, such as dental pain), and then following a brief delay (distal, worldview/self-esteem defenses work the best after a delay ... see Greenberg et al., 1994, for a discussion), the defenses are measured. In one early TMT study assessing the MS hypothesis, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and colleagues (1990) had Christian participants evaluate other Christians and Jewish students that were similar demographically, but differed in their religious affiliation. After being reminded of their death (experimental MS induction), Christian participants evaluated fellow Christians more positively, and Jewish participants more negatively, relative to the control condition. Conversely, bolstering self-esteem in these scenarios leads to less worldview defense and derogation of dissimilar others.
Origins and Measures
Another paradigm that TMT researchers use to get at unconscious concerns about death is what is known as the death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis. Essentially, the DTA hypothesis states that if individuals are motivated to avoid cognitions about death, and they avoid these cognitions by espousing a worldview or by buffering their self-esteem, then when threatened, an individual should possess more death-related cognitions (e.g., thoughts about death, and death-related stimuli) than they would when not threatened.The DTA hypothesis has its origins in work by Greenberg and colleagues (1994) as an extension of their earlier terror management hypotheses (i.e., the anxiety buffer hypothesis and the mortality salience hypothesis). The researchers reasoned that if, as indicated by Wegner’s
Daniel Wegner
Daniel M. Wegner is an American social psychologist. He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
research on thought suppression
Thought suppression
Thought suppression is the process of deliberately trying to stop thinking about certain thoughts . It is often associated with obsessive–compulsive disorder, in which a sufferer will repeatedly attempt to prevent or "neutralize" intrusive distressing thoughts centered around one or more obsessions...
(1994; 1997), thoughts that are purposely suppressed from conscious awareness are often brought back with ease, then following a delay death-thought cognitions should be more available to consciousness then (a) those who keep the death-thoughts in their consciousness the whole time, and (b) those who suppress the death-thoughts but are not provided a delay. That is precisely what they found.
In these initial studies (i.e., Greenberg et al., 2004; Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Simon, 1997), and in numerous subsequent DTA studies, the main measure of DTA is a word fragment task, whereby participants can complete word fragments in distinctly death-related ways (e.g., coff_ _ as coffin, not coffee) or in non death-related ways (e.g., sk_ _l as skill, not skull). If death-thoughts are indeed more available to consciousness, then it stands to reason that the word fragments should be completed in a way that is semantically related to death.
Importance of the DTA Hypothesis
The introduction of this hypothesis has refined TMT, and led to new avenues of research that formerly could not be assessed due to the lack of an empirically validated way of measuring death-related cognitions. Also, the differentiation between proximal (conscious, near, and threat-focused) and distal (unconscious, distant, symbolic) defenses that have been derived from DTA studies have been extremely important in understanding how people “manage their terror”.Here it is important to note how the DTA paradigm subtly alters, and expands, TMT as a motivational theory. Instead of solely manipulating mortality (as in the mortality salience paradigm) and witnessing its effects (e.g., nationalism, increased prejudice, risky sexual behavior, etc.), the DTA paradigm allows a measure of the death-related cognitions that result from various affronts to the self (e.g., self-esteem threats, worldview threats, etc.), and is therefore valuable in assessing the role of death-thoughts in self-esteem and worldview defenses. Furthermore, the DTA hypothesis lends unique support to TMT in that it corroborates its central hypothesis that death is uniquely problematic for human beings, and that it is fundamentally different in its effects than meaning threats (i.e., Heine, Proulx, &Vohs, 2006), and that is indeed death itself, and not say, uncertainty and lack of control associated with death (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008).
Since its inception, the DTA hypothesis had been rapidly gaining ground in TMT investigations, and as of 2009, has been employed in over 60 published papers, with a total of more than 90 empirical studies.
TMT & Emotion
Terror management theory is a master motivational theory, attempting to link human drives together under the rubric of the fear of death. According to Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski (1991), “All anxiety is derived from self-preservation instincts” (p. 102). TMT further argues that fear of death is the central force in evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, motivating genetic self-preservation instincts in species and promoting natural selection (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, 1997). Emotion is both motivational (Lazarus, 1991) and evolutionary (Darwin, 1872). In spite of these obvious similarities, the amount of effort directed at examining affect and emotion in the process of terror management and elicited by mortality salience has been limited (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, & Cornwell, 2001). The following will examine the role that emotion plays in the terror management and the discrete emotions elicited by mortality salient primes.
Emotion in the Process of Terror Management
Terror management theory is interested in the effect of fear in producing cultural worldview defense. Fear is a basic emotion typically associated with an active fight-or-flight responseFight-or-flight response
The fight-or-flight response was first described by Walter Bradford Cannon....
to a specific set of categorically similar primes (Curtis & Biran, 2001). For terror management, distal defense is akin to the fight-type response; individuals heighten the liking of similar others and accentuate their dislike of dissimilar others. Proximal defense, on the other hand, typically results in the flight response; given the lack of self-efficacy associated with the insurmountability of death, one simply takes evasive action and drives death-related thoughts from their mind through distraction (Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999).
The effects of fear on attitude change have been intensely debated. The orthodox view of fear appeals states that the level of fear is crucial to attitude outcomes. Research has shown that mortality salient fear associated with highly-hedonically relevant attitudes results in message rejection (Shehryar & Hunt, 2005). Individuals who highly enjoyed drinking alcohol
Alcohol
In chemistry, an alcohol is an organic compound in which the hydroxy functional group is bound to a carbon atom. In particular, this carbon center should be saturated, having single bonds to three other atoms....
rejected messages that linked drunk driving to death but accepted messages that tied drunk driving to arrest
Arrest
An arrest is the act of depriving a person of his or her liberty usually in relation to the purported investigation and prevention of crime and presenting into the criminal justice system or harm to oneself or others...
or social ostracism. TMT research therefore demonstrates that qualitative inquiry into the type of fear, not simply the gross amount of fear elicited, is crucial to the outcome of fear appeals on attitude change.
Experiential processing which relies on emotional memory is a crucial prerequisite to terror management processes. Rational processing, a logical, step-by-step system of cognitive evaluation, alternately impedes the cultural worldview defense mechanism intrinsic to terror management processes. Studies that varied experimenter formality/informality and explicit processing instructions demonstrate that worldview defense only occurs under conditions of emotional processing (Simon, Greenberg, Harmon-Jones, Solomon, Pyszczynski, Arndt, & Abend, 1997). Cognitive evaluations interfere with the symbolic, often arbitrary, associations between novel cultural defenses and fear of death (Pyszczynski, et al., 1999). Emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
, then, lies at the heart of all terror management.
Emotional elicitation has not been found to be a prerequisite for terror management processes. Many terror management studies have examined elicited affect as a covariate to mortality salience (see Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, & Cornwell, 2001), and only one reviewed study has found elicited affect (fear) in the terror management process (Harmon-Jones, Simon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & McGregor, 1997). Why? Terror management is a non-conscious process. The process occurs very quickly, imperceptibly, and automatically (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). As Rosenblatt and colleagues put it, terror management is designed to prevent any “conscious experience of emotion” (p. 689).
Emotion Elicitation and Terror Management
Of course, the unconscious process of terror management does produce conscious emotional responses. Many discrete emotional states are at least partially explained by terror management theory. LoveLove
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
, for instance, has been described as a need primarily for ordered interactions, lasting feelings of self-esteem and self-worth (which TMT associated directly with a prescribed role in a cultural drama), and vicarious immortality (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Solomon et al., 1991).
Love and Terror Management
Research corroborates the link between love and the fear of death. Studies reveal an association between close relationship seeking and mortality salience (for overview, see Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2003). Moreover, further studies demonstrate that the desire for close relationships under conditions of mortality salience trumps other needs including self-esteem and maintenance (pridePride
Pride is an inwardly directed emotion that carries two common meanings. With a negative connotation, pride refers to an inflated sense of one's personal status or accomplishments, often used synonymously with hubris...
) or avoidance (shame/guilt
Guilt
Guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. It is also a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that...
) other emotions (Hirschberger, Florian, & Mikulincer, 2003). Others argue that the perceived need to link sex
Sex
In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...
with love is primarily due to existential anxiety, reflecting a need to reject the baser, animalistic need for sex (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000). These authors argue that relationship-seeking is a largely independent defense against existential angst
Angst
Angst is an English, German, Danish, Norwegian and Dutch word for fear or anxiety . It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of apprehension, anxiety or inner turmoil...
, functioning without the assistance of either the self-esteem or worldview defense explanations (Mikulincer, et al., 2003).
Disgust and Terror Management
DisgustDisgust
Disgust is a type of aversion that involves withdrawing from a person or object with strong expressions of revulsion whether real or pretended. It is one of the basic emotions and is typically associated with things that are regarded as unclean, inedible, infectious, gory or otherwise offensive...
is another emotion linked to terror management. While many researchers bemoan the lack of analytic clarity linking discrete disgust elicitors (Royzman & Sabini, 2001), Goldenberg et al. (2000) find the rejection of animality or creatureliness to function as the central tendency driving disgust. Terror management’s distal processes ought to naturally attempt to distinguish human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
s from our basic, animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
nature; these base processes that link humans and animals are the same processes that make death inexorable. Studies demonstrate that mortality salience is associated with the rejection of animal traits (Goldenberg, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, Kluck, & Cornwell, 2001). Even moral disgust, the most difficult type of disgust to categorically link with core disgust elicited, say, by feces
Feces
Feces, faeces, or fæces is a waste product from an animal's digestive tract expelled through the anus or cloaca during defecation.-Etymology:...
, maintains the linkage to culturally relevant defenses against death-related anxiety.
Other Discrete Emotions and Terror Management
Other discrete emotions have been conceptually linked to terror management, but have yet to be studied directly. JealousyJealousy
Jealousy is a second emotion and typically refers to the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety over an anticipated loss of something that the person values, particularly in reference to a human connection. Jealousy often consists of a combination of presenting emotions...
, often linked to romantic love
Romantic love
Romance is the pleasurable feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.In the context of romantic love relationships, romance usually implies an expression of one's love, or one's deep emotional desires to connect with another person....
(particularly in monogamous
Monogamy
Monogamy /Gr. μονός+γάμος - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time. In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction...
relationships but sometimes also in polyamorous
Polyamory
Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved....
relationships) ought to be heightened under conditions of mortality salience (Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 1991). Shame
Shame
Shame is, variously, an affect, emotion, cognition, state, or condition. The roots of the word shame are thought to derive from an older word meaning to cover; as such, covering oneself, literally or figuratively, is a natural expression of shame....
, guilt
Guilt
Guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. It is also a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that...
, and humiliation
Humiliation
Humiliation is the abasement of pride, which creates mortification or leads to a state of being humbled or reduced to lowliness or submission. It can be brought about through bullying, intimidation, physical or mental mistreatment or trickery, or by embarrassment if a person is revealed to have...
are all associated with threats to self-esteem, a core terror management defense mechanism (Goldenberg et al., 2000; Greenberg et al., 1986; Solomon et al., 1991). Thus, mortality salience ought to paradoxically reduce the capacity for each by prompting independent self-esteem defense mechanisms. Anger
Anger
Anger is an automatic response to ill treatment. It is the way a person indicates he or she will not tolerate certain types of behaviour. It is a feedback mechanism in which an unpleasant stimulus is met with an unpleasant response....
and contempt
Contempt
Contempt is an intensely negative emotion regarding a person or group of people as inferior, base, or worthless—it is similar to scorn. It is also used when people are being sarcastic. Contempt is also defined as the state of being despised or dishonored; disgrace, and an open disrespect or willful...
have been neither directly examined nor hypothesized as outcomes of terror management theory, but both are likely accentuated by the outsider rejection mechanisms triggered by distal defense. Goldenberg et al. (2000) argue that pride
Pride
Pride is an inwardly directed emotion that carries two common meanings. With a negative connotation, pride refers to an inflated sense of one's personal status or accomplishments, often used synonymously with hubris...
, especially that related to body image
Body image
Body image refers to a person's perception of the aesthetics and sexual attractiveness of their own body. The phrase body image was first coined by the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Paul Schilder in his masterpiece The Image and Appearance of the Human Body...
, is explained by existential anxiety, but no studies yet conducted have examined pride as an outcome of mortality salience. Future research ought to examine these and other discrete emotions in the context of terror management theory.
TMT and Leadership
It has been suggested that culture provides meaning, organization, and a coherent world view that diminishes the psychological terror caused by the knowledge of eventual death. The terror management theory can help to explain why a leader's popularity can grow substantially during times of crisis. When a follower's mortality is made prominent they will tend to show a strong preference for iconic leaders. A clear example of this is when George W. Bush's approval rating jumped almost 50 percent following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. As Forsyth (2009) posits, this tragedy made US citizens aware of their mortality, and Bush provided an antidote to these existential concerns by promising to bring justice to the terrorist group responsible for the attacks.In one particular study on TMT (Cohen et al., 2004), the preferences for different types of leaders was tested while reminding people of their mortality. Three different candidates were presented to participants. The three leaders were of three different types: task-oriented (emphasized setting goals, strategic planning, and structure), relationship-oriented (emphasized compassion, trust, and confidence in others), and charismatic. The participants were then placed in one of two conditions: mortality salient or control group. In the former condition the participants were asked to describe the emotions surrounding their own death, as well as the physical act of the death itself, whereas the control group were asked similar questions about an upcoming exam. The results of the study were that the charismatic leader was favored more, and the relationship-oriented leader was favored less, in the mortality-salient condition. Further research has shown that mortality salient individuals also prefer leaders who are members of the same group and men rather than women (Hoyt, Simon, & Reid, 2010). This has links to social role theory.
Criticisms
Several psychologists, especially evolutionary psychologists, have argued against terror management theory. A research paper written by UCLA Psychology and Anthropology researcher stated: "It would be quite astonishing were natural selection to produce a psychology in which, instead of orienting the organism to pressing adaptive challenges and motivating behavior that addressed them, anxiety regularly produced a paralytic state that could only be relieved through time-and attention-consuming mental gymnastics" These authors instead explain human behavior is selected to spur organisms to avoid situations likely to lead to death. This suggests that mortality salience effects reflect adaptive responses to solve specific life-threats rather than an unconscious attempt to avoid this realization.Specificity to Death
Since findings on mortality salience and worldview defense were first published, other researchers have claimed that the effects may have been obtained due to reasons other than death itself, such as anxiety, fear, or other aversive stimuli such as pain. Other studies have found effects similar to those that MS results in – for example, thinking about difficult personal choices to be made, being made to respond to open-ended questions regarding uncertainty, thinking about being robbed, thinking about being socially isolated, and being told (falsely) that one’s life lacks meaning. While these cases exist, thoughts of death have since been compared to various aversive experimental controls, such as (but not limited to) thinking about: failure, writing a critical exam, public speaking with a considerable audience, being excluded, paralysis, dental pain, intense physical pain, etc. Of all of these (and more), no effects were found to be uniform with those elicited by thoughts of one’s death. Further, TMT does not claim that thoughts of death alone are endowed with the capacity to elicit defensive responses.With regards to the studies that found similar effects, TMT theorists have argued that in the previously mentioned studies where death was not the subject thought about, the subjects would quite easily be related to death in an individual’s mind due to “linguistic or experiential connection with mortality”(p. 332). For example, being robbed invokes thoughts of violence and being unsafe in one’s own home – many people have died trying to protect their property and family. A second possible explanation for these results involves the death-thought accessibility hypothesis: these threats somehow sabotage crucial anxiety-buffering aspects of an individual’s worldview or self esteem, which increases their DTA. For example, one study found increased DTA in response to thoughts of antagonistic relations with attachment figures. (For a comprehensive review of the unique import of death, see Pyszczynski et al., 2006).
The Meaning Maintenance Model
The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) was initially introduced as a comprehensive motivational theory that claimed to subsume TMT, with alternative explanations for TMT findings. Essentially, it posits that people automatically give meaning to things, and when those meanings are somehow disrupted, it causes anxiety. In response, people concentrate on “‘meaning maintenance to reestablish their sense of symbolic unity’ and that such “meaning maintenance often involves the compensatory reaffirmation of alternative meaning structures." These meanings, among other things, should “provide a basis for prediction and control of our...environments, help [one] to cope with tragedy and trauma...and the symbolic cheating of death via adherence to the enduring values that these cultures provide."TMT theorists argue that the MMM cannot describe why different sets of meaning are preferred for a symbol by different people, and that while they may exist, “different [(i.e., more concrete)] types of meaning have different psychological functions”. For example, MMM theorists argue that all types of meaning are basically equal, and yet one could not compare the likelihood of defensive responses resulting from exposure to a deck of cards containing black hearts with something like the 9/11 terrorists attacks. TMT theorists argue, essentially, that unless something is an important element of a person’s anxiety-buffering worldview or self-esteem, it will not require broad meaning maintenance.
In sum, TMT theorists believe that the MMM cannot accurately claim to be an alternative to TMT because it does not seem to be able to explain the current breadth of TMT evidence. As an example, TMT theorists assert that mortality salience would not be a threat to meaning, since our eventual demise is a necessary condition of life. Therefore, it should not cause an individual to engage in general meaning maintenance. MMM also makes no attempt to explain why threatening meaning increases DTA.
Offensive Defensiveness
Some theorists have argued that it is not the idea of death and nonexistence that is unsettling to people, but the fact that uncertainty is involved. For example, these researchers posited that people defend themselves by “changing a fear response to uncertainty into a zealous or enthusiastic approach response in some other domain” (p. 336). TMT theorists agree that uncertainty can be disconcerting in some cases and it may even result in defense responses, but note that they believe the inescapability of death and the possibility of its finality regarding one’s existence is most unsettling. They ask, “‘Would death be any less frightening if you knew for certain that it would come next Tuesday at 5:15 P.M., and that your hopes for an afterlife were illusory?’.... Would you rather be certain that death is the end, or live with the uncertainty that it might not be” (p. 337)? They also note that people actually seek out some types of uncertainty, and that being uncertain is not always very unpleasant.Though TMT theorists acknowledge that many responses to mortality salience (MS) involve greater approaches (zealousness) towards important worldviews, they also note examples of MS which resulted in the opposite, which Offensive Defensiveness cannot account for: when negative features of a group to which participants belong were made salient, people actively distanced themselves from that group under MS.
Evolutionary Psychology, Coalitional Psychology, and TMT
Several critiques have been proposed against TMT from evolutionary psychologistsEvolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
– for example: “... because fear is an adaptive fitness response designed by natural selection to respond to specific fitness challenges, inhibiting anxiety would have been maladaptive in our ancestral past and ... it is therefore implausible that psychological processes for inhibiting anxiety ... would be active today”(p. 491). In response, TMT theorists argue that this critique is mixing up fear related to immediate danger with anxiety related to thoughts of threats that will or may occur eventually. TMT is talking about the protection that self-esteem and cultural worldviews offer against the threat of unavoidable death in the future. While anxiety may be adaptive in avoiding entering a dangerous place (e.g. because a predator may be waiting), this doesn’t mean that anxiety must be adaptive in all cases – just ask any clinician who helps people suffering from anxiety disorders. For a more comprehensive review of TMT and evolutionary psychology, see Landau et al., 2007.
Coalitional Psychology (CP) is presented as another alternative to TMT, which proposes that there is an evolutionary tendency to seek safety in groups (coalitions) as a reaction to adaptive threats. People already a part of coalitional groups seek to protect their membership by exhibiting their value to the group. In other words, “belief systems, cosmologies, values, rituals, and various other trappings of culture exist simply to facilitate group cohesiveness; thus any meaning, sense of personal value, or hope of death transcendence such beliefs may provide is purely epiphenomenal to their coalition-binding function”. However, Landau et al. (2007) make several criticisms of this position, including the objection that CP cannot be a useful alternative for TMT because it doesn’t provide evidence that cannot be applied to any number of theories, and because it does not directly account for the empirical evidence supporting TMT.
See also
- Cognitive dissonanceCognitive dissonanceCognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
- Social PsychologySocial psychologySocial psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
- Existential Psychology
- Ernest BeckerErnest BeckerErnest Becker was a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scientific thinker and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.-Early life:...
- Otto RankOtto RankOtto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's...
- Flight from DeathFlight from deathFlight from Death is a documentary film that investigates the relationship of human violence to fear of death, as related to subconscious influences. The film describes death anxiety as a possible root cause of many human behaviors on a psychological, spiritual, and cultural level. It was directed...
, a documentary film on this topic - Memento moriMemento moriMemento mori is a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die". It names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality...
Further resources
Discusses TMT at lengthTMT and Self-Esteem
Hansen, J., Winzeler, S., & Topolinski, S. (2010). When the death makes you smoke: A terror management perspective on the effectiveness of cigarette on-pack warnings. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (1), 226-228 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2009.09.007