Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology, states that human behavior is mostly 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.
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The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.
The culmination of cultural anthropologist 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.[2]
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.[3]
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:
the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child's need for self-esteem as the condition for his life. Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.[4]
Self-esteem 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;[5] Becker, 1973[6]). 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.[7] 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).[7]
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.
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).[8] 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).[7]
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;[9] conducting the experiment near funeral homes or cemeteries;[10] having participants watch graphic depictions of death,[8] 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).[11]
Experimentally, the MS hypothesis has been tested in close to 200 empirical articles [11] 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,[12] for a discussion), the defenses are measured. In one early TMT study assessing the MS hypothesis, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and colleagues (1990)[13] 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.[14]
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.[15]
The DTA hypothesis has its origins in work by Greenberg and colleagues (1994)[12] 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[16]), 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.
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”.[17]
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[18]), and that is indeed death itself, and not say, uncertainty and lack of control associated with death (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008[19]).
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.[15]
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 evolution, 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.
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 response 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).
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. Love, 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).
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 (pride) 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).
Disgust 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 humans 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.
Other discrete emotions have been conceptually linked to terror management, but have yet to be studied directly. Jealousy, 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.
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.
Several psychologists, especially evolutionary psychologists, have argued against terror management theory.[20] 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"[21] 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.
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.[22] 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.[22] 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).[22] 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.[22] (For a comprehensive review of the unique import of death, see Pyszczynski et al., 2006).
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.[18] 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."[18] 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."[18]
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”.[22] 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.[22] 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.[22]
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.[22] 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.[22]
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.[23] 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).[22] 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.[22]
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.[22]
Several critiques have been proposed against TMT from evolutionary psychologists – 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).[24] 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.[24] 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.[24] For a more comprehensive review of TMT and evolutionary psychology, see Landau et al., 2007.[24]
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.[25] 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”.[25] 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.
Discusses TMT at length
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