Abstract
Terror management theory posits that human awareness of the inevitability of death
exerts a profound influence on diverse aspects of human thought, emotion, motivation,
and behavior. People manage the potential for anxiety that results from this awareness
by maintaining: (1) faith in the absolute validity of their cultural worldviews and (2) selfesteem by living up to the standards of value that are part of their worldviews. In this
chapter, we take stock of the past 30 years of research and conceptual development
inspired by this theory. After a brief review of evidence supporting the theory's fundamental propositions, we discuss extensions of the theory to shed light on: (1) the psychological mechanisms through which thoughts of death affect subsequent thought
and behavior; (2) how the anxiety-buffering systems develop over childhood and
beyond; (3) how awareness of death influenced the evolution of mind, culture, morality,
and religion; (4) how death concerns lead people to distance from their physical bodies
and seek solace in concepts of mind and spirit; and (5) the role of death concerns in
maladaptive and pathological behavior. We also consider various criticisms of the theory
and alternative conceptualizations that have been proposed. We conclude with a discussion of what we view as the most pressing issues for further research and theory
development that have been inspired by the theory's first 30 years.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ... of the tree of the knowledge
... thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die... And when the woman saw that the tree was ... to be desired to make one
wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband
with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew
that they were naked ... And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast ... eaten of
the tree ... cursed is the ground for thy sake; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou
art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Genesis Chapters 2 and 3, King James Version
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and ... the dead were
judged ... according to their works ... And God shall wipe away all tears from
their eyes; and there shall be no more death...
Revelation 20 and 21, King James Version
s0005 1. INTRODUCTION: PURPOSE AND GOALS OF THE
THEORY
p0010 Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, &
Solomon, 1986; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991, 2015) was
2 Tom Pyszczynski et al.
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originally developed 30 years ago to address three broad questions about the
roots of human motivation and behavior: (1) Why do people need selfesteem? (2) Why do people need to believe that out of all the possible ways
of understanding the world, theirs is the one that happens to be correct? (3)
Why do people who are different from each other have such a hard time
peacefully coexisting? Back then, the three of us had recently finished our
graduate studies in experimental social psychology and were beginning to
settle into academic positions. Social cognition was flourishing, as many psychologists attempted to explain virtually all human behavior in terms of the
workings (and sometimes mis-workings) of an information processing system; computers as a metaphor for the functioning of the human mind dominated the field. Emotions and motives, when they were discussed, were
viewed as particular types of information deployed by cognitive systems
to guide behavior. Indeed, it was not unusual to engage in discussions with
respected proponents of this approach who, while acknowledging that cognitive analyses had not yet reached the point where they could provide comprehensive explanations for all behavior, argued that eventually such
information processing perspectives would eliminate the need for motivational and emotional constructs in psychological theorizing.
p0015 While intrigued by many of the new ideas and methods that came out of
the purely cognitive approach, we also felt that some important things were
missing from the social psychological discourse in the early 1980s.1 For
starters, the field consisted almost exclusively of a plethora of mini-theories
focused on explicating the concrete details of psychological processes rather
than tackling broad questions about why people behave the way they do. It
seemed to us that social psychologists were more devoted to explaining
the findings of laboratory experiments than elucidating the real world phenomena that these experiments were purportedly designed to help us understand (Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Steinberg, 1988). Indeed,
students in our classes bemoaned the lack of central organizing principles
for grasping the long lists of fascinating findings about human behavior that
were cataloged by the textbooks of the day. In addition, social psychology
seemed intellectually isolated, both from other related academic disciplines
and from previous developments in the field of psychology itself. In particular, psychological science had all but outlawed consideration of
1
np0005 Whether our criticisms of the state of social psychology in the early 1980s were reasonable and justified
is a question that is open to debate and obviously a matter of personal and professional opinion. We
discuss these impressions here because they were important to us at the time and played an important
role in what we hoped to accomplish with TMT. Whether these concerns continue to apply to the field
today is another open question that we think worthy of discussion and debate.
Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 3
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psychoanalytic and existential ideas in theory construction and empirical
research. Yet when we first encountered and seriously entertained such ideas
after completing our graduate education, we were stunned by their relevance
to the questions that social psychologists pondered and to the panoply of
pressing problems that plagued people in their daily lives.
p0020 TMT was our attempt to redress some of what we thought was missing
from the field of social psychology at that time. We aimed at producing a
theory focused on basic “why” questions regarding the roots of social motivation and behavior. We sought to bring together ideas, old and new, to
illustrate important insights that could be gleaned from various sources rarely
given much credence within academic psychology. We also hoped to show
that applying state of the art experimental methods to test such ideas would
infuse them with new life by establishing their empirical credibility. We
wanted to develop a theory that was integrative and synthetic; a theory that
would shed light on diverse and superficially disparate human phenomena
that would itself be refined due to engagement with these phenomena
and the conceptual and empirical traditions that surrounded them. Although
we didn’t realize it at the time, TMT was part of an emerging wave of
broader and more integrative theories within social psychology, including
self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1980) and evolutionary psychology (e.g., Buss, 1989). In the Enlightenment tradition, we wanted the theory
to provide insights about the human condition that could be useful for fostering personal growth and social progress; accordingly, we concluded our
first presentation of the theory in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
(Solomon et al., 1991, p. 146) with a section entitled, “Toward an Applied
Experimental Social Psychology.”
p0025 We also wanted to draw attention to the problem of death and the possibility that the uniquely human awareness of this existential certainty might
play an important role in life. We had never encountered even passing reference to existential concerns in the psychological literature of the day. But
given how hard humans (and indeed, all forms of life) usually strive to stay
alive, it seemed extremely unlikely to us that knowledge of the inevitability
of death would not have vital cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences. TMT posits that the fear of death lies at the root of some very
important psychological motives. To clarify a common misconception,
though, our view has never been that the fear of death is the only motivational force that drives human behavior; e.g., in our first TMT chapter in
Advances, we noted that “...it is important to acknowledge that this theory
focuses on one particular motive... many other factors, both historical and
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psychological, need to be considered to fully understand the determinants of
any particular human behavior” (Solomon et al., 1991, p. 149). Rather, we
argue that attempts to explain human behavior that ignore this fear neglect
an extremely important aspect of the human condition and are thus fundamentally incomplete. In a related vein, we never claimed that TMT explains
everything that needs to be known about anything; rather, we argue that TMT
sheds important new light on crucial aspects of most of what people think,
feel, and do. For this reason, we designed TMT with an eye toward interfacing with other social psychological theory and research.
p0030 We begin this chapter marking the 30th anniversary of the initial publication of TMT (Greenberg et al., 1986) with this brief overview of the
concerns and goals that fueled the development of the theory as a prelude
to an assessment of the current state of the theory, which is our primary
aim here. How well has the theoretical and empirical work derived from
TMT over the past three decades addressed these concerns and met the goals
we set for it? More importantly, how well does the theory do what theories
are supposed to do? Does TMT provide a useful way of integrating findings
across diverse literatures in social psychology? Does it shed new light on
these issues and direct us to new phenomena not apparent from the perspective of other theories? Does it serve a generative function and suggest novel
directions for both empirical research and conceptual refinement? Does it
suggest potentially useful ways of addressing important individual and societal problems?
p0035 Toward these ends, we start with an overview of the theory and a very
brief review of the empirical evidence for its fundamental propositions. We
then consider a series of distinct conceptual extensions that have emerged
from the theory’s core propositions to interface with other theory and
research to explain: (1) the cognitive and motivational mechanisms through
which awareness of death affects human thought and action; (2) the development of terror management processes and the anxiety-buffering system
over the course of childhood and individual life spans; (3) the evolution
of human mind and culture; (4) how these processes affect the way human
beings relate to their bodies and the rest of the natural world; and (5) the role
that mismanagement of existential terror plays in psychological dysfunction.
We then consider the most important and influential critiques of TMT and
alternative explanations for our research findings. Finally, we close with a
consideration of some of the most important questions that have emerged
from the first 30 years of TMT research that we think are especially important for furthering our understanding of these issues.
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 5
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s0010 2. THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF TERROR
MANAGEMENT THEORY
p0040 TMT was initially inspired by Becker (1973), a cultural anthropologist
whose life work centered on integrating and synthesizing what he believed
were the most important ideas and insights afforded by diverse scholarly
traditions focused on understanding human nature. He drew heavily from
psychology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, sociology, anthropology,
and the humanities to propose what he hoped would become a “general
science of man.” Becker was especially influenced by the work of Otto Rank,
Sigmund Freud, Gregory Zilborg, Norman Brown, William James, Erich
Fromm, George Herbert Mead, Robert Jay Lifton, Erving Goffman, Søren
Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche, all thinkers whose ideas have made
essential contributions to understanding human nature, but were generally
viewed as difficult to test empirically and therefore given little attention
within scientific psychology. We were struck, however, by the relevance
of their thinking to the issues that we and other social psychologists were
focused on and to the many social problems that people have faced throughout history that continued to be pressing issues for contemporary society.
Consequently, we thought it would be worthwhile to try to incorporate
these ideas within contemporary social psychological discourse.
p0045 This led to our initial presentation of TMT in a chapter reviewing the
empirical literature on the need for self-esteem and its influence on diverse
aspects of human behavior (Greenberg et al., 1986). In addition to providing
a simple explanation of what self-esteem is, Becker’s work addressed the previously unasked question of why people need self-esteem. Following Becker,
TMT defined self-esteem as the individual’s assessment of the extent to
which he or she was living up to the standards of value associated with
the cultural worldview to which he or she subscribed, and posited that
self-esteem functions to buffer the anxiety that results from awareness of
the inevitability of death.
p0050 Our initial goals for this paper were to: (1) argue that addressing the question of why people need self-esteem is imperative for understanding an
undeniably important aspect of human nature; (2) propose a plausible and
provocative answer to this question; and (3) assert that awareness of the inevitability of death has a profound influence on many aspects of life. We also
hoped to remind fellow social psychologists that there was a long history of
scholarly work in psychology and other disciplines that offered valuable
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insights that ought not be ignored if our discipline is to be a truly cumulative
and progressive enterprise. Moreover, we realized that recent methodological developments within experimental psychology could be deployed to test
hypotheses derived from TMT and other ideas that previous generations of
psychologists had deemed untestable. We also realized that recent developments within the field of social psychology fit well with these ideas and could
shed new light on them that would facilitate their further refinement and
specification. This instigated a program of research and theory development
that has kept us and many others busy over the past 30 years.
s0015 3. FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS OF TERROR
MANAGEMENT THEORY
p0055 Although most psychological perspectives emphasize either the similarities (e.g., evolutionary and behavioral theories) or differences (e.g.,
cognitive and humanistic theories) between human beings and other animals,
TMT focuses on the interplay between these similarities and differences.
Although humankind shares many evolutionary adaptations with other
species, including diverse bodily and motivational systems that ultimately
function to keep us alive, our capacity for symbolic and abstract thought
make us different from all other living entities. Such sophisticated intelligence
is adaptive because it increases behavioral flexibility and helps us solve diverse
challenges; however, it also inevitably makes human beings realize that they
will someday die, and that death can come at any time for any number of
unpredictable and uncontrollable reasons. TMT posits that awareness of
death in an animal designed by natural selection to avoid premature
termination creates the potential for intense primal fear, which we refer to
as terror to underscore its potency and connection to death. This potential
for terror in response to awareness of a basic fact of life would seriously
impede successful goal-directed behavior and perhaps survival itself unless
effectively managed. Although fear in response to proximal threats to survival
has obvious adaptive value in facilitating behavior that averts death, terror in
response to awareness of the long-term inevitability of an inescapable fate is
another matter—and the focal problem addressed by TMT.
p0060 People use the same intellectual abilities that give rise to their awareness
of the inevitability of death to manage their potential for terror with ideas,
beliefs, values, and concepts. Specifically, they invent, absorb, and cling to
cultural worldviews, which are sets of ideas that provide: (1) a theory of reality
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that gives life meaning, purpose, and significance; (2) standards by which
human behavior can be assessed and have value; and (3) the hope of literal
or symbolic immortality to those who believe in and live up to the standards
of their cultural worldview. Literal immortality entails believing that one will
continue to exist after death, usually in a form that transcends the limitations
of the physical bodies we inhabit. It typically reflects the religious aspects of
cultural worldviews, which promise heaven, reincarnation, or the myriad
other types of afterlives that people have aspired to since the earliest days
of our species. Symbolic immortality entails being part of something greater
than oneself that continues to exist after one’s own death and on into eternity. People acquire symbolic immortality by being valued contributors to
the worlds in which they live and leaving reminders that they were here,
such as families, fortunes, monuments, or anything else that persists after they
are gone, whether tangible (e.g., books, pictures, music) or intangible (e.g.,
memories, histories, ideas).
p0065 Qualifying for either literal or symbolic immortality requires that people
maintain faith in their cultural worldviews and live up to the standards of
value that are part of them. Doing so provides the sense that one is a valuable
participant in a meaningful universe, which is the essence of self-esteem.
Uncertainty regarding the validity of one’s worldview or one’s value within
the context of the standards it provides undermines the efficacy of these psychological structures as a shield against existential terror. And because there
are many possible ways of understanding reality and there are rarely objective metrics of how well one is meeting cultural standards, people require
consensual validation of their worldviews and self-esteem from others to
effectively buffer anxiety. Others who share one’s worldview or evaluate
one positively increase this certainty, but others with different worldviews
or who evaluate one negatively decrease this certainty. Consequently, people are motivated to seek consensual validation of their worldviews from
others and avoid or dismiss any disconfirmation of these structures that
may come their way. The power of consensual validation depends on the
value of the others whose worldview and evaluations impinge on us.
Accordingly, people exaggerate the value of those who share their worldview or who provide positive evaluations and denigrate the value of those
with diverging worldviews or who provide negative evaluations.
p0070 Although there are other elements of the theory that address how this
dual component (i.e., cultural worldview and self-esteem) anxiety-buffering
system develops and functions, these are its core propositions. Over the
years, a variety of theoretical modules regarding specific aspects of these
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processes have emerged that we believe elucidate the evolution, development, and functioning of the anxiety-buffering system. We discuss these
developments in a later section of this paper in which we promote the utility
of conceptual interconnectedness across theories. But first we present empirical evidence for the theory’s fundamental propositions. This research provided initial support for the viability of the theory and posed questions that
led to theoretical refinements and the emergence of some of the theoretical
modules to be discussed later.
s0020 4. RESEARCH ON THE FUNDAMENTAL PROPOSITIONS
OF TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
p0075 Our research strategy for assessing the empirical validity of TMT follows the time-honored tradition of logically deducing hypotheses from the
theory and subjecting them to experimental tests. As with most theories, no
single hypothesis captures the entirety of the phenomena that TMT seeks to
explain or the processes it posits. Therefore, we rely on a set of distinct logical deductions from the theory that yield hypotheses that converge on the
core ideas to evaluate the theory’s fit with empirical reality. These “building
block” hypotheses have been combined with each other to yield more complex predictions that further enhance the convergence across distinct deductions from the theory. Although the fundamental propositions of TMT are
relatively simple, they entail claims that involve processes that are involved
in many diverse forms of behavior. Thus, our strategy was to test the hypotheses derived from the theory by applying them to a correspondingly diverse
range of behavioral domains. Support for these hypotheses has been highly
consistent across these domains.
s0025 4.1 Anxiety-Buffer Hypothesis
p0080 One of the most straightforward implications of TMT is that if a psychological structure serves an anxiety-buffering function, then increasing the
strength of that entity should reduce anxiety in threatening situations. When
we embarked on this research, studies had already shown that self-esteem
was negatively correlated with anxiety (for a review, see Greenberg et al.,
1986), threats to self-esteem increase anxiety and negative affect (e.g.,
Burish & Houston, 1979), and defending self-esteem reduces anxiety produced by self-esteem threats (McFarland & Ross, 1982). But TMT posits
that self-esteem is a general anxiety buffer, so the effects of enhancing it
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should extend to threats in other domains unrelated to the one in which selfesteem is damaged. In particular, elevated self-esteem should reduce anxiety
related to thoughts of death.
p0085 In the initial test of the anxiety-buffer hypothesis, Greenberg, Simon,
Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Chatel (1992) randomly assigned participants
to receive positive or neutral feedback on a personality inventory to increase
their self-esteem or leave it unaltered, respectively; manipulation checks
confirmed that it did. They then viewed a video clip of graphic depictions
of death or a neutral film. Whereas neutral self-esteem participants showed a
significant increase in self-reported anxiety in response to the death-related
video, those who received a self-esteem boost did not. A follow-up study
with different manipulations of self-esteem (high scores on a supposed IQ
test) and threat (anticipating painful electric shocks) showed the same effect
on galvanic skin response, a physiological measure of autonomic arousal
associated with anxiety.2 Subsequent studies demonstrated that both manipulated and chronically high levels of self-esteem mitigated defensive reactions to reminders of death (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1993). Taken
together, these studies confirm that self-esteem does indeed buffer anxiety
and that this effect extends beyond self-esteem-related threats.
s0030 4.2 Mortality Salience Hypothesis
p0090 Far and away the most oft-tested implication of TMT is that reminders of
death (mortality salience, MS) should increase one’s need for the protection
provided by one’s worldview, self-esteem, and close attachments and therefore increase one’s commitment to or striving for them. Consequently, MS
is predicted to lead to more positive responses to anyone or anything that
bolsters them and more negative responses to anyone or anything that
threatens them. Support for this hypothesis comes from studies showing that
MS increases motivation to enhance and defend diverse aspects of these
components of the cultural anxiety buffer. A now 5-year-old meta-analytic
review of 277 studies concluded that this is a moderate to strong effect
(r
2
¼0.35) that is among the top 20% of the strongest effects in the field
of social psychology (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010). This burgeoning
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2
np0010 We used threat of electric shock because of its independence from threat to self-esteem and its compatibility with a procedure that allowed us to measure a physiological indicator of anxiety. But we
should note that although the threat of being shocked may indeed conjure the threat of possible death,
it may also raise a fear of pain. Because our developmental analysis posits self-esteem as a general source
of protection, we consider it an open question whether it is a general anxiety-buffer that extends
beyond direct threats of death and to terror management resources.
10 Tom Pyszczynski et al.
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literature is so large that we can provide only a few illustrative examples here.
MS increases: worldview defense in the form of harsher punishment for
moral transgressors (e.g., Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, &
Lyon, 1989); more positive evaluations of those who praise one’s culture
and more negative evaluations of those who criticize it (e.g., Greenberg
et al., 1990); greater in-group bias (e.g., Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, &
Sacchi, 2002); less aggression toward those who share one’s worldview and
more aggression toward those with worldviews different from one’s own
(e.g., McGregor et al., 1998); greater support for violent solutions to ethnic,
religious, and international conflicts (e.g., Hirschberger & Ein-Dor, 2006;
Pyszczynski, Abdollahi, Solomon, Greenberg, & Weise, 2006); increased
anxiety when handling cultural icons in a disrespectful way (e.g.,
Greenberg, Simon, Porteus, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1995); more positive
evaluations of essays that argue that humans are different from other animals
and more negative evaluations of essays that argue that humans are similar
to other animals (e.g., Goldenberg et al., 2001); and increased preference
for well-structured information and greater dislike for poorly structured
information (e.g., Landau, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2004). MS also increases
self-esteem striving in the form of increased self-serving attributional biases
(e.g., Mikulincer & Florian, 2002); effort and risk taking on activities that
are central to one’s self-esteem (e.g., Taubman-Ben-Ari, Florian, &
Mikulincer, 1999; Peters, Greenberg, Williams, & Schneider, 2005); desire
for fame (e.g., Greenberg, Kosloff, Solomon, Cohen, & Landau, 2010);
preferences for self-esteem enhancing romantic partners (e.g., Kosloff,
Greenberg, Sullivan, & Weise, 2010); and behavior in line with both chronic
and situationally primed standards (e.g., Rothschild, Abdollahi, & Pyszczynski,
2009). MS increases attachment motivation, as indicated by: greater attraction
to romantic partners (e.g., Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2003); greater
willingness to instigate social interactions (e.g., Taubman-Ben-Ari, Findler,
& Mikulincer, 2002); increased desire for intimacy in romantic relationships
(e.g., Mikulincer & Florian, 2000); more positive associations with one’s
parents (e.g., Cox et al., 2008, Studies 4 and 5); greater desire for children
(e.g., Wisman & Goldenberg, 2005); and larger allocation of resources to
maintain contact with attachment figures (e.g., Cox et al., 2008, Study 6).
s0035 4.3 Death Thought Accessibility Hypothesis I
p0095 It also follows from the theory that threats to any component of a person’s
anxiety buffer should increase the accessibility of death-related thoughts.
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 11
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Threats to worldviews, self-esteem, and close attachments increase the number of incomplete word stems completed in death-related ways and reduce
latencies for recognizing death-related words but not other negative or neutral words on a linguistic decision task (e.g., Hayes, Schimel, Faucher, &
Williams, 2008). Moreover, the same conditions that increase death thought
accessibility (DTA) also increase defense of one’s worldview and striving for
self-esteem and close attachments (e.g., Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon,
Simon, & Breus, 1994). Defending one’s worldview, bolstering one’s
self-esteem, or thinking about attachment figures decreases DTA
(Harmon-Jones et al., 1997). The DTA literature is also quite substantial
and had reached over 80 studies back in 2010 (see Hayes, Schimel,
Arndt, & Faucher, 2010).
s0040 4.4 Combining the Hypotheses
p0100 Various combinations of these three core hypotheses have also been tested.
For example, affirming one’s self-esteem, worldview, or attachments
eliminates the increase in DTA and defense of other anxiety-buffer components that MS produces in the absence of such affirmation (e.g., Arndt,
Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1997; Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon,
Pyszczynski, & Simon, 1997; Harmon-Jones et al., 1997). Giving participants supposed evidence supporting the existence of an afterlife eliminates
the effect of MS on both worldview defense and self-esteem striving
(Dechesne et al., 2003), and affirming one’s religious faith has similar effects
among those with an intrinsic religious orientation ( Jonas & Fischer, 2006).
This body of research documents the dynamic relation between DTA and
the various components of the anxiety buffer posited by TMT.
s0045 5. TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY AND CONCEPTUAL
INTERCONNECTIONS
p0105 As empirical support for the theory’s fundamental propositions grew
and we examined an expanding array of phenomena from a TMT perspective, important questions arose that took us considerably beyond the core
ideas. What are the finer grained processes through which death-related
thoughts lead people to think, feel, and behave as they do? Considering that
young children are clearly not capable of conceptualizing death, how does
the anxiety-buffering system develop in early childhood and across the life
span? How do death-related anxiety and the mechanisms that manage it
interact with motive systems that produce growth, development, and
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self-expansion? How did awareness of death, which TMT posits as a central
turning point in the evolution of our species, affect the evolution of mind
and culture? How do cultural concepts of mind and soul relate to physical
bodies? What produces variability in the content and effectiveness of the
worldviews and standards of value that people use to manage their anxiety?
What happens when the anxiety-buffering system breaks down? The fact
that the theory led to these and many other questions, along with plausible
and testable potential answers to them, is testament to its generative power.
p0110 These questions led to theoretical refinements, which led to conceptual
interfaces with other theories and research, both within social psychology
and beyond. Although these conceptual refinements were developed with
an eye toward compatibility with both the core propositions of the theory
and knowledge from other domains of psychology and related disciplines,
they each dealt with unique processes and, to some extent, are independent
of each other. We believe that conceptual interconnectedness across theoretical constructions is a useful way of promoting integration across research
domains toward a more complete understanding of human behavior. Conceptual interconnectivity is also likely to increase the generative power of a
theory, in that advances in understanding often come from focusing on the
intersection of differing ideas and phenomena. The ultimate explanatory
power of a theory can be best appreciated by considering the entire explanatory network with which it interfaces.
p0115 Because TMT was initially developed as an attempt to understand
the roots of many of the motives that other theories use as a point of departure
(e.g., self-esteem, meaning, belonging), it was important that it could effectively interface with other theories that addressed these and related phenomena. Over the years, research has been conducted that used TMT to build on
ideas from many other theories, including social identity theory (e.g.,
Castano et al., 2002), cognitive dissonance theory (e.g., Jonas,
Greenberg, & Frey, 2003), optimal distinctiveness theory (e.g., Simon
et al., 1997), objective self-awareness theory (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg,
Simon, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1998), just world theory (e.g.,
Hirschberger, 2006), objectification theory (Goldenberg, McCoy,
Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000), self-determination theory
(e.g., Vail, Arndt, Motyl, & Pyszczynski, 2012; Vail, Juhl, et al., 2012), ironic
process theory (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, et al., 1997), reactance
theory (e.g., Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2004), attribution theory
(e.g., Mikulincer & Florian, 2002), balance theory (e.g., Landau et al., 2004),
ego depletion theory (e.g., Gailliot, Schmeichel, & Baumeister, 2006), and
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 13
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lay epistemology theory (e.g., Dechesne & Kruglanski, 2004). Indeed, even
the staunchest critics of TMT seem to have constructed their alternative
accounts using essential elements of TMT, including the concept of worldview defense and importance of time passing between threat induction and
defense assessment (e.g., McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001; van
den Bos & Miedema, 2000).
p0120 We now turn to a discussion of what we view as the most central
conceptual interfaces that have emerged regarding TMT-related issues.
s0050 5.1 Psychological Mechanisms Through Which Thoughts
of Death Affect Behavior
p0125 Initial tests of terror management hypotheses produced consistently supportive results, showing that boosting self-esteem reduced anxiety and anxietyrelated behavior (Greenberg et al., 1992, 1993) and that reminders of
mortality led to harsher evaluation of moral transgressors (Rosenblatt
et al., 1989), greater in-group bias (Greenberg et al., 1990), and more negative evaluations of those who criticized one’s culture and more positive
evaluations of those who praised it (Greenberg et al., 1990). But soon after
our initial findings were published, German psychologist Randolph
Ochsmann contacted us to report that he was unable to replicate the MS
effect. After consulting about the details of the procedures he was using,
it became apparent that his MS induction was much more intensive than
ours. When he tried the study again with the simpler MS induction we
had been using, he replicated the effects of MS on evaluations of moral transgressors and found that they generalized to other types of transgressions
beyond the effects of evaluations of a prostitute that we had reported
(Ochsmann & Mathy, 1994).
p0130 These observations led us to suspect that, contrary to the usual dose–
response relationship, milder MS inductions might produce stronger effects
than more intensive ones. This was confirmed in a study that directly compared the two open-ended questions about death we had been using with a
more intensive induction in which, after answering our two questions
about death, participants were asked to vividly imagine they were on their
deathbed, with only a few days remaining to live (Greenberg et al., 1994).
Whereas the milder MS induction produced the usual effect on worldview
defense, the more intensive one did not.
p0135 Though initially puzzling, this pattern of results shed a glimmer of light
on some troublesome inconsistencies in results from our own research:
whereas studies conducted by one of us yielded very consistent MS effects,
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those conducted by another did not. Looking more carefully at the details of
these studies, we realized that all of the successful MS effects came from studies in which substantial intervening tasks (filler or affect measures and experimental instructions) were placed between the MS manipulation and the
dependent variable; but when the dependent variable was assessed immediately after the MS manipulation, significant effects were not found. This
raised the possibility that when people are actively contemplating the problem of death, they do not cling to their worldviews—and made us wonder
what else they might be doing to cope with death under such conditions.
This led to studies comparing the immediate and delayed effects of MS,
which showed that worldview defense occurred only when a delay and distraction separated the MS manipulation and assessment of defensive
responses (Greenberg et al., 1994, Studies 2 and 3). But why would a delay
between MS induction and worldview defense assessment be needed for
these effects to emerge—and what were people doing immediately after
being reminded of their mortality?
p0140 These questions led to the development of the dual defense model that
posits distinct defensive tactics for coping with thoughts of death when they
are in current focal attention and when they are on the fringes of
consciousness—highly accessible but not in current focal attention
(Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999). We reasoned that when
thoughts of death are in focal attention, people might cope with them in
a seemingly rational manner that “makes sense” and directly addresses the
problem. For example, when consciously thinking about death, people deny
their vulnerability, exaggerate their health and hardiness, or simply suppress
such thoughts. This enables them to convince themselves that death is a
problem for the distant future and of little relevance to them now. We refer
to these as proximal defenses because their content is logically related to the
problem of death and addresses this threat directly.
p0145 Proximal defenses remove death thoughts from focal attention but do
nothing to negate the fact that death is our inevitable fate. The fact that
we will someday die is a bit of declarative knowledge, similar to our address
or phone number—something that rarely occupies conscious attention but
can easily and quickly be brought to mind. Such thoughts linger on the
fringes of consciousness, in a state of high accessibility, always ready to enter
consciousness (Wegner, 1994). People push these implicit thoughts further
away from consciousness with distal defenses that entail viewing themselves as
valuable contributors to a meaningful world; these distal defenses are the
core components of the anxiety-buffering system specified by TMT. They
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 15
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prevent death-related thoughts from entering conscious attention by reducing their accessibility before they can reach consciousness.
p0150 The idea that worldview defense and self-esteem striving occur when
thoughts of death are outside of conscious attention explains why people
have little or no awareness of these processes and why many people are able
to honestly say that they rarely think about death. When thoughts of mortality enter consciousness, people push the problem into the distant future by
convincing themselves of their health and hardiness or simply suppressing
such thoughts by seeking distractions (Wegner, 1994). Once these thoughts
are banished from consciousness and people are no longer aware of them, the
suppression is relaxed, which makes it possible for these thoughts to become
more accessible. But they then activate distal defenses to reduce the accessibility of these thoughts and further reduce the likelihood that they will
enter consciousness. The greater the accessibility of death-related thoughts
outside of conscious awareness, the more vigorous the distal defenses. Thus,
proximal and distal defenses work together to keep death thoughts out of
consciousness and keep people unaware of the influence that they exert from
the fringes of consciousness. This, in turn, enables them to maintain an illusion of objectivity and rationality about their thoughts and feelings
(Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987) and be unaware of the role these defensive
processes play in protecting them from the problem of death.
p0155 A large and growing body of evidence supports the dual defense model.
Whereas the distal defenses of clinging to one’s worldview and self-esteem
striving emerge only when there is a delay and distraction separating the
death reminder and assessment of defensive responses, the proximal defenses
of denying one’s vulnerability and suppressing death-related thoughts
emerge immediately after death reminders (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg,
Pyszczynski, et al., 1997; Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, et al., 1997;
Greenberg, Arndt, Simon, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 2000). The two exceptions are that distal defenses occur immediately after subliminal death
reminders or if cognitive load is high during the MS induction (Arndt,
Greenberg, Pyszczynski, et al., 1997; Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, et al.,
1997); this provides further evidence that these defenses emerge when
thoughts of death are accessible but not in conscious attention. Research also
shows that threats to one’s worldview, self-esteem, and attachments increase
DTA (for a review, see Hayes et al., 2010). Importantly, stimuli that increase
death thought accessibility increase commitment to one’s worldview and
self-esteem striving, which in turn reduces death thought accessibility to
baseline levels (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, et al., 1997;
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Harmon-Jones et al., 1997). Although we generally avoid assessing both
death thought accessibility and worldview defense in the same study because
of the possibility that the DTA assessment would prime thoughts of death
and thus contaminate control participants, several recent studies have done
this and shown that DTA mediates the relation between MS and worldview
defense (e.g., Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof, & Cermeulen, 2009). MS
also increases the accessibility of concepts that are central to one’s worldview
and thus especially useful for defusing the threat of death (Arndt,
Greenberg, & Cook, 2002).
p0160 Support for the dual defense model has been obtained across a diverse
range of applications of TMT, particularly in research inspired by the Terror
Management Theory Health Model (TMTHM; Goldenberg & Arndt,
2008), which posits that people generally respond in health-promoting ways
via proximal defenses immediately after death reminders but in self-esteem
enhancing and cultural worldview bolstering ways via distal defenses after
being distracted from thoughts of death. For example, in one study, participants chose a more protective sunscreen than controls immediately after a
death reminder (presumably to protect themselves from skin cancer), but if
there was a delay after the reminder, people who value a tan as a basis of selfworth chose a less protective one. For a more comprehensive review of the
literatures on the dual defense model and TMTHM, see Goldenberg and
Arndt (2008).
p0165 Recent studies suggest that there may be other ways people cope with
their fear of death in addition to the particular proximal and distal defenses
specified by TMT and the dual process model. DeWall and Baumeister
(2007) showed that reminders of death increase attention to positive affect,
presumably to counteract the anxiety that could otherwise arise; specifically,
MS increased completions of word stems with positively valenced affective
words and marginally decreased completions with negatively valenced affective words. In a related vein, MacDonald and Lipp (2008) found that MS
produced a significant reduction in the attentional bias for fear-relevant
stimuli that was obtained in the absence of MS. Research also suggests that
alcohol and other drugs may sometimes serve a terror management function.
Ein-Dor et al. (2014) showed that a death reminder increased the likelihood
of participants consuming an alcoholic beverage shortly thereafter, and
Chatard and Selimbegovic´ (2011) and Nagar and Rabinovitz (in press)
showed that MS increased cannabis users’ desire to get high and that cannabis
use reduced the accessibility of death-related thoughts. These responses all
seem to fit within the category of proximal defenses that likely divert
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 17
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attention from these troubling thoughts. However, they could also be distal
defenses because alcohol and drug consumption can serve as sources of selfworth for some people in certain social contexts. Clearly, these and other
possible ways of coping with thoughts of death merit further exploration.
p0170 Somewhat surprisingly, the MS inductions used in TMT research do not
typically produce measureable signs of anxiety, distress, or negative affect.
When we designed the first MS study, we gave little thought to whether
healthy young adults writing about death in the safety of our labs would
consciously experience fear. On the one hand, fear of death is the central
motivating force in the theory. On the other hand, Becker posited that this
fear is largely unconscious, and people have presumably spent their lives
investing in cultural worldviews and striving for self-esteem to minimize
their experience of that fear. Our first six MS studies showed no hint of
either elevated self-reports of fear or anxiety and no increase in autonomic
or cardiovascular indicators of arousal. Hundreds of studies have subsequently similarly failed to find an impact of MS on self-reported affect
relative to various control conditions; one study (Arndt, Allen, &
Greenberg, 2001) found a small increase in corrugator activity during
subliminal presentation of death primes, but it didn’t persist beyond the
primes, and this activation did not mediate the increased worldview defense
the death primes produced.
p0175 Of course, encounters with death often do produce strong emotional
reactions. Threat of immanent death from disease, violence, or airplane turbulence can quickly generate feelings of terror and palpable signs of physiological arousal. Even healthy people sometimes awaken in the safety of
their bedrooms terrified by dreams or ruminations about their inevitable
fate. The consistent finding that our MS induction did not produce negative
affect but did increase worldview defense and self-esteem striving led us to
posit that these and other relatively subtle death reminders produce a potential
for anxiety or negative affect that is quickly averted by the activation of terror management defenses. This lack of consciously experienced affect in the
many studies demonstrating that MS increased worldview defense was one
of the findings that led us to infer that responses to MS were not simply the
result of negative affect or anxiety that any unpleasant event could produce.
Indeed, in the first of many studies directly comparing the effect of MS with
reminders of other aversive events, we found that whereas thoughts of taking
an important exam or worries about life after college produced significant
increases in negative affect but no increase in worldview defense, thoughts
of death did not increase negative affect but did increase worldview defense;
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this research also found that negative affect in response to MS was associated
with lower rather than higher levels of worldview defense ("0.50;
Greenberg et al., 1995).
p0180 Greenberg et al. (2003) provided more direct evidence for the proposition that it is the potential for anxiety rather than consciously experienced
anxiety that drives MS effects by showing that giving participants a placebo
believed to block the experience of anxiety for an hour eliminated the
MS effect (measured within the hour) obtained in the absence of this
placebo. In other words, if participants didn’t believe they could get anxious,
they had no need to bolster faith in their worldview in response to MS.
If actual arousal or anxiety was driving the increased worldview defense
that MS produced, the misattribution of arousal literature (e.g., Storms &
Nisbett, 1970) suggests that these instructions might have led to increased
defensiveness, similar to what has been found in many previous studies
in which participants who are experiencing arousal were told that a
placebo pill would make them feel relaxed, which increased their subjective
experience of emotion (e.g., Zanna & Cooper, 1974). These ideas fit
the general view that many behaviors, including psychological defenses,
are motivated not by the direct experience of affect, but rather the anticipation of that affect (e.g., Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007;
Erdelyi & Goldberg, 1979).
p0185 Lambert et al. (2014) recently reported four studies that did detect
increased affect in response to an MS induction using a more refined measure of fear rather than general negative affect, consisting of a subset of items
from the PANAS (fearful, afraid, scared, frightened). They also showed that
this increased fear mediated a decrease in self-esteem in response to MS. It is
not clear what to make of these findings in light of the hundreds of studies
that did not find a difference in reported general negative affect between MS
and control conditions3 and the fact that decreased self-esteem in response to
MS runs counter to what would be predicted from TMT and has not been
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3
np0015 Lambert et al. (2014) argue that previous research has not provided a fair test of the possibility that the
MS manipulation used in TMT research produces increases in subjectively experienced affect. In addition to arguing that the mostly widely used affect measure in these studies, the PANAS-X, is not specific enough to pick up the subjective fear that they view as the most likely response to thoughts of
death, they argue that the large majority of MS studies entail comparison with other aversive events
rather than a true neutral control condition. Although this is true of the majority of studies (to respond
to reviewer and critic concerns about alternative explanations), over 20 studies have compared MS to
neutral controls such as watching television or eating food. In addition, the majority of studies using
aversive controls found no differences on affect but differences on the primary dependent variables,
which suggests that the differential effects of MS were not the results of differential affective reactions.
Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 19
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found in previous research; TMT predicts that, if anything, MS should
increase self-esteem striving, which makes this decrease in reported selfesteem difficult to interpret from the perspective of the theory. Their study
did show that, as in many previous studies, MS increased worldview defense
along with self-reported fear; but, importantly, this increased fear did not
mediate worldview defense, much as the small increase in corrugator activity
in response to subliminal death primes did not mediate worldview defense in
Arndt et al. (2001). It is unclear what if anything these findings imply regarding the processes through which MS increases defensiveness.
p0190 Other recent research has shown that MS leads to activation of brain
regions associated with affect, such as the right amygdala, anterior cingulate
cortex, and right caudate nucleus (Quirin et al., 2012). Tritt, Inzlicht, and
Harmon-Jones (2012) argue that this evidence challenges our conclusion
that MS does not produce affect and that affect does not mediate defensive
responses to it. But activation of brain regions associated with affect is not the
same as the subjective experience of affect. Perhaps MS produces some form
of implicit affect, or unconscious signal of impending affect, but that’s essentially what we mean by the concept of potential affect. Regardless of what
one calls it, though, it makes perfect sense that some sort of neural activation
would be involved in signaling the potential for affect. But there is still no
evidence that subjectively experienced emotion mediates MS effects. Nonetheless, these recent findings indicate that further research on the role of
affect and arousal in MS effects is surely warranted.
p0195 It is important to realize, though, that TMT is not a theory of MS effects
per se; rather, the MS research is one line of evidence regarding TMT’s claims
about the role of awareness of death in life. Indeed, the theory is mute as to
whether particular reminders of death will or will not arouse measureable
subjective affect; presumably this depends on how threatening and intense
the death reminders is. Consequently, although it would certainly change
our understanding of the mechanisms through which MS effects are produced, the basic theory would not be fundamentally altered or called into
question if MS effects were found to be mediated by affect and/or arousal
(as some researchers who equate the theory with the MS evidence have
implicitly implied or explicitly claimed).
s0055 5.2 Development of the Anxiety-Buffering System
p0200 The fact that children are clearly not aware of death in their earliest years of
life, nor are they aware of themselves or capable of the conceptualizing even
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the most rudimentary elements of cultural worldviews, raises the question of
how awareness of death and the anxiety-buffering capacities of worldviews
and self-esteem develop. Our analysis of how children develop the capacity
to use beliefs, values, and self-esteem to manage anxiety builds on the work
of Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Jean Piaget, Ernest
Becker, John Bowlby, and other developmental theorists. The core idea
is that these more sophisticated anxiety-buffering capacities develop out
of the attachment system that evolved to insure the survival of offspring
too immature to survive on their own.
p0205 Human infants are born helpless, unable to meet their own needs, and
prone to experience and express distress when those needs are unmet. From
the beginning, the child innately fears what could harm and ultimately kill it.
These innate fears protect the child from premature death. Parents and caregivers respond to children’s distress signals by holding, rocking, and comforting them, while doing what must be done to meet their needs. These
interactions produce strong affectional bonds that provide comfort to parent
and child alike. As the child’s cognitive abilities develop, internal representations of the parent are formed which serve as an additional source of security. Then as the child’s behavioral capacities increase, the parents’ displays of
affection gradually become more contingent on the child’s behavior.
Whereas in the early months of life, children receive affection from the parents for simply existing, as they become increasingly capable, the parents
reserve their more enthusiastic displays of affection for increasingly sophisticated behavior—crawling, walking, simple verbalizations, then phrases,
sentences, and behavior that later must comport with the parents’ beliefs
and values. Through this process, children learn that meeting their parents’
versions of their culture’s values brings love and protection, whereas falling
short of their standards can bring rebukes and apparent withdrawal of affection. In this way, children learn that they are safe when they live up to the
parents’ standards and are in jeopardy when they fall short of them. Because
the parents’ values reflect those of the culture at large, the child’s emotional
well-being soon becomes dependent on living up to the values of the cultural worldview.
p0210 Children subsequently develop awareness of themselves as unique beings
with minds and experiences that are distinct from anyone else. They also
come to realize that there are limits to their parents’ power and ability to
protect them, and that their parents, like everyone else, themselves included,
are mortal. These unwelcome realizations create a need for a basis of security
broader than what the parents can provide by themselves. To help them
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 21
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cope with their increasing fears, children are taught about deities that make it
possible for them and those they love to move on to a better mode of existence when they die. They also learn about secular institutions, their ethnic
and religious heritage, their nation, and various other cultural institutions
that give life meaning and permanence that they can be part of if they stay
in the good graces of others. Through these interactions with their parents,
family, clergy, teachers, and peers, they gradually become indoctrinated into
the cultural worldview that relieves anxiety by giving meaning to life and
value to themselves. Although this security is initially based on the parents’
love, it is gradually transferred to the culture at large, and in most cases, the
protective providence of the deity and spirit world that is part of the cultural
worldview. Thus, what starts as an innate threat management system that
protects preverbal children form things that could kill them adds explicit
death-denying components as children become more and more aware
of death.
p0215 In the one direct empirical evaluation of this developmental account of
which we are aware, Florian and Mikulincer (1998a) assessed the effect of
responding to a series of questions about death on 7- and 11-year-old Israeli
children’s attitudes toward other children who were either Israeli or recent
immigrants from Russia. The death reminders affected both groups’ attitudes toward the other children, but in different ways. Whereas the youngest
children’s evaluations of both groups became more negative in response to
the death reminders, the older children exhibited the typical pattern of
worldview defense found among adults: they became more positive in their
evaluation of the fellow Israeli children but more negative in their evaluation
of the recent immigrants. These findings suggest that the use of in-group
favoritism to manage death concerns probably emerges between the ages
of 7 and 11.
p0220 Research has also shown that attachment relationships continue to be
important sources of existential security long after people have begun using
their worldviews and self-esteem for this protection. A large body of evidence documents the use of romantic relationships to manage death fears
(for a review, see Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2004). MS increases
interest in romantic relationships, willingness to compromise to have them,
and expressions of love for one’s partner. Thoughts of separation from
romantic partners increase DTA, and thoughts of intimacy with one’s partner decrease DTA and the worldview defense that thoughts of death otherwise produce. Other research shows that adults continue to use their parents
as terror management resources and that parents get protection from death
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concerns from their children through the sense of self-worth and symbolic
immortality afforded by offspring who continue into future generations
(e.g., Cox et al., 2008; Wisman & Goldenberg, 2005).
p0225 But as is clear from the attachment literature, children vary in how
securely they bond with their parents and, therefore, in the extent to which
they associate security with pleasing their parents and, later, living up to their
internalized versions of the cultural worldview. Insecure attachments likely
force alternative ways of managing anxiety, which can interfere with their
relationships with others, ability to buy into important aspects of the cultural
worldview, and obtain security by maintaining a positive self-image.
Although most people learn to manage anxiety by maintaining a positive
self-image, those with less fortunate childhood experiences may be less able
to do so and, therefore, turn to other less adaptive ways of finding security. In
some cases, people seem to seek security in a negative self-image. Indeed,
there are relatively rare instances where people appear to hope to be remembered for things that they themselves realize are moral atrocities, as documented in the writings of the Columbine High School and Virginia Tech
mass murderers, who seemed to want their horrific actions to achieve an
ignorable sort of immortality. This suggests that those who feel rejected
by others and unable to garner attention for their positive qualities may
attempt to leave their mark on perpetuity by dramatically violating cultural
values. Perhaps difficulties in the initial development of the capacity to be
comforted by close relationships, self-esteem, and culturally shared meanings
increase the likelihood of such deviant behavior in later life.
p0230 It also seems clear that many people show developmental changes in the
way they cope with death in their later years.We propose that this transition is
instigated by the increased proximity to death that is inherent in old age,
coupled with the reduced ability to meet the standards through which people
maintained self-esteem in their younger years, the changes in dominant
worldview promoted by the now dominant younger generation, and the loss
of the close relationships (due to death and illness) that were previous bases of
security. Older adults are less prone than young persons to respond to MS
with harsher judgments of moral transgressors and those who criticize their
worldviews (e.g., Maxfield et al., 2007). Instead, older adults are more likely
to respond to MS by increasing their prosocial generative concern for future
generations (Maxfield et al., 2014). These developmental shifts are most
apparent among older adults with high levels of executive functioning
(Maxfield, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Pepin, & Davis, 2011); the finding that
older adults with low levels of executive functioning continue to respond to
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death reminders the same way younger adults do suggests that intact executive functioning may be necessary to facilitate such changes in how one relates
to and copes with the increased proximity to death associated with aging.
s0060 5.3 The Body, Nature, and Physicality
p0235 TMT posits that people cope with knowledge of the inevitability of death by
living their lives in a symbolic world of meaning in which they are enduringly significant beings rather than mere animals fated only to obliteration
when they die. A major component of most culture’s solution to this problem is to imbue life with mind and spirit, an essence that transcends the body
and is not dependent on it. This makes it possible to construe ourselves as
continuing to exist after our bodies have perished. Because bodies are the
clear culprits in death, people identify their selves more with their minds
and spirits than with their bodies, which are often viewed as mere containers
for the more essential immaterial self.
p0240 Because our physical bodies are a continual reminder of our vulnerability
and mortality, we distance ourselves from our animal nature as best we can.
An important line of research spearheaded by Jamie Goldenberg (for a
review, see Goldenberg, 2012) has demonstrated the many ways people
engage in this process. MS increases denial of similarities between humans
and other animals, disgust in response to bodily products, distancing from
animals and animalistic activities, and even avoidance of physical sensations.
MS also increases dislike of nonhuman animals (Beatson & Halloran, 2007)
and support for killing them (Lifshin, Greenberg, & Sullivan, 2014), as a way
of feeling superior to them. Additionally, DTA is increased when people are
reminded of bodily products, disgusting things, and the physical (but not
romantic) aspects of sex. These propensities are particularly strong for people
high in neuroticism or who have recently been reminded of their similarity
to other animals. Recent evidence that MS increases belief in an afterlife primarily among people who are high in mind–body dualism or when dualistic
thinking has been experimentally enhanced (Heflick, Goldenberg, Hart, &
Kamp, 2015) supports the idea that separating the mind or soul from the
body facilitates belief in literal immortality. These diverse lines of research
provide converging evidence for the proposition that people distance from
their bodies and invest their selves in abstract concepts of mind and spirit
because of the undeniable fact that bodies die.
p0245 This tendency to distance from our animal nature helps explain the
ambivalence that people feel about sex despite the great potential for
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pleasure that it entails. Cultures vary widely in both the content and restrictiveness of their rules regarding sexual conduct. Some restrict sex as something that should occur only between married men and women, in private
and in the dark, sometimes through a hole in a sheet, done only for the purpose of procreation. Other cultures encourage sharing sex partners,
expressing one’s carnal desires whenever and wherever one likes, in whatever way strikes one’s fancy, either alone or with others present. However,
even the most sexually permissive cultures attach important cultural meaning to sex, making it an expression of transcendent love, a means of spiritual
fulfillment, one’s duty to replenish the group, or an athletic contest of some
sort. Most other theories that address these issues (e.g., Buss, 1984) view sexual ambivalence as the result of innate intuitions and cultural restrictions that
evolved to facilitate group harmony and prevent disputes over mates. While
not disputing this function, TMT views the universal existence of these cultural norms as attempts to distance ourselves from our animal nature, of
which sex is a rather striking reminder.
p0250 This analysis also provides an explanation for the near universal tendency
to place greater emphasis on beauty and purity in women than men. This
may be due to the more obvious role that women’s bodies play in the creaturely activity of reproduction—menstruation, pregnancy, giving birth, and
lactation are all creaturely activities that make many people squeamish. Or it
could result from the power men have over women in most cultures. Support for these ideas is provided by studies showing that reminders of death or
one’s creaturely nature increase distancing from and derogation of pregnant,
menstruating, breast-feeding, or sexually provocative women (for a review,
see Goldenberg, 2012). Other studies have shown that witnessing a woman
accidentally drop a tampon from her purse leads both men and women to
derogate her and distance from her, while also increasing the importance
that they place on the value of physical beauty for women in general
(Roberts, Goldenberg, Manly, & Pyzsczynski, 2002). Cultures reduce the
threatening nature of reproductive processes by putting women on pedestals, treating them as objects of beauty to be admired, and placing greater
value on virginity and purity for women than men. Thus, MS leads to
devaluing of women who are overtly sexual but not women who are modestly clothed and wholesomely attractive. For example, in a recent study
(Morris & Goldenberg, 2015), MS led men to report lower liking for photos
depicting sexually provocative women posed next to physical objects, compared to a non-MS control condition. Interestingly, if these provocative
women were objectified (quite literally) by fusing them with the objects,
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MS actually led men to report more liking for the photos, compared to a
non-MS control condition. Presumably, the objectification reduced the
threat of the provocative women, which increased liking under conditions
of MS.
s0065 5.4 The Evolution of Mind and Culture
p0255 Although the primary goal of TMT is to explain contemporary psychological functioning, from its earliest incarnations, the theory also provided an
analysis of how the awareness of death affected the emergence and content
of culture (Solomon et al., 1991, Solomon, Greenberg, Schimel, Arndt, &
Pyszczynski, 2004). Thus, like most religions and contemporary evolutionary psychology, TMT provides an “origin story” for humankind—
something that the theory posits is appealing because it provides meaning
for human existence. The TMT analysis builds on evolutionary theory
and is consistent with most variations of this approach, although it adds additional forces that are given little attention by most evolutionary psychologists. Perhaps the biggest point of departure from most, but not all (e.g.,
Deacon, 1997; Langer, 1967), evolutionary analyses is that TMT draws
attention to the importance of the internal environment of the human mind as
exerting adaptive pressures that affected human nature and culture
(Pyszczynski, Sullivan, & Greenberg, 2014). TMT also places greater
emphasis on the role of human ingenuity in solving both internal and external adaptive challenges and the impact that these human inventions played in
the development of mind and culture.
p0260 Consistent with all evolutionary accounts of the origins of our species,
TMT posits that the sophisticated cognitive abilities unique to our species
were selected for because they facilitated our ability to survive, reproduce,
and care for our young, which ultimately led to the propagation of the genes
responsible for these successes into future generations. In particular, these
cognitive capabilities increased the flexibility of our ancestors’ capacity to
respond to the diverse and rapidly changing environments that they
inhabited. This culminated in a new form of behavior regulation, in which
linguistic concepts of current self and standards of personal value served as
monitors that signaled the need to adjust behavior to keep it on track in
the pursuit of important goals (Becker, 1971; Carver & Scheier, 1981a,
1981b; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, & Hamilton, 1990). Although
generally highly adaptive, these sophisticated intellectual capacities made
our ancestors aware that death was inevitable, for themselves and for all other
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humans, and that death could come at any time for any number of reasons.
The juxtaposition of this awareness with the strong desire for life that came
with the diverse adaptations that facilitated surviving long enough to reproduce and care for offspring created the potential for terror. Such terror
would have seriously impeded effective goal-directed behavior, and eventually reproduction and gene perpetuation, unless effectively managed.
Whereas fear in response to clear and present danger is adaptive because
it motivates behavior to avert such threats, terror in response to awareness
of the long-term inevitability of death has little direct utility because there
is nothing that can be done to avoid this fate.
s0070 5.4.1 Gods, Morality, and Death
p0265 TMT posits that our ancestors used the same sophisticated cognitive abilities
that gave rise to the problem of terror to create a partial solution to it—they
invented ideas that enabled them to live with relative equanimity in spite of
their awareness of the inevitability of death. This awareness emerged around
the same time our ancestors were using their newfound intelligence to
answer questions about how the world works and how to survive and prosper in it with other members of their groups. Beliefs and values that helped
minimize their fears were especially appealing and likely to be communicated and spread to others and eventually became institutionalized as cultural
knowledge. As cognitive capacities continued to evolve and people became
more adept at using them, human life became increasingly dependent on the
cultural world of symbols, ideas, and values; this likely influenced the further
evolution of the human brain, in that those who were best able to adapt to
and prosper in the cultural environments of ideas, values, rules, and deities
were more likely to have their genes be propagated into future generations
(Baumeister, 2005). Our species was gradually transformed from groups of
conspecifics who responded to the challenges of the external environment,
to social animals that worked together to prosper in the external environment
and therefore were forced to adapt to the challenges of living in groups, to
cultural animals that lived in a world of symbols, words, ideas, and values,
populated by spirits and deities, that they themselves invented to ward off
their fears.
p0270 Early presentations of TMT did not address the question of where these
cultural beliefs and values came from, other than to say they were invented
to help manage terror. More recently (e.g., Greenberg et al., 2014;
Pyszczynski & Kesebir, 2012), we built on theorists who emphasize the
dialectic interplay between natural selection and cultural innovation
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(e.g., Deacon, 1997; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Shweder & Haidt, 1993) to further explicate the content of the beliefs and values that our ancestors
invented to assuage their fears. For example, Boyer (2001), Atran (2002),
and others have argued that the concept of spirits and deities emerged as
a nonadaptive side effect of the evolved human tendency to perceive mental
states and agency in other humans. Application of these mind-concepts to
other natural phenomena is claimed to be responsible for the emergence
of concepts of gods and religions, which themselves are claimed to serve
no adaptive function. Others argue that religion emerged to facilitate social
cooperation within groups by creating a sense of fictive kinship (e.g., Bering,
2006). Although these views are sometimes presented as alternatives to the
view that religion functions to manage death-related fear (e.g.,
Kirkpatrick & Navarrete, 2006), we view them as complementary to the
TMT analysis. Concepts of spirits and deities may have indeed initially
emerged as our ancestors applied cognitive tools that had evolved to facilitate
social interaction to help them understand the workings of what we now
view as the nonpersonal forces of nature. As awareness of death emerged,
these primitive intuitions and concepts were then used as the building blocks
for the more complex death-denying beliefs about deities and spirits that
became central to culture. Because spiritual entities could not be directly
observed, people relied on the shared beliefs of others within their group
to validate their belief in them. This shared need for validation of their belief
in invisible entities that protected people from existential fears encouraged
people to congregate in groups, engage in shared rituals, and build tangible
monuments to the gods that they created. Consistent with these ideas,
research has shown that reminders of death increase belief in deities, spirits,
and an afterlife (for a review, see Vail et al., 2010), as well as estimates of
social consensus for one’s attitudes (Pyszczynski et al., 1996).
p0275 Experiential knowledge that resulted from parent–child and other
person-to-person interactions was another likely source of inspiration for
the content of religious beliefs. As discussed in Section 5.2, children’s initial
protection from distress and fear comes from meeting the wishes of their
seemingly omnipotent parents. Experiences such as these may have inspired
initial conceptualizations of even more powerful deities and how to procure
and maintain their protection. The idea that God is an attachment figure that
substitutes for our parents has been suggested by scholars of varying theoretical orientations over the years (e.g., Freud, 1930; Kirkpatrick, 2005). Viewing socialization experiences with parents who guarded our well-being in
our early years as providing intuitive inspiration for the cultural innovation
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of omnipotent gods who control access to the afterlife helps explain the specific characteristics of the deities that cultures created. Perhaps some of the
variability of conceptions of gods across cultures and historical epochs
reflects differences in parenting practices—and this variability in concepts
of gods likely influenced later cultural values regarding optimal parenting.
p0280 Another likely source of inspiration for the images of deities that our
ancestors created may have been other powerful figures with whom they
interacted, such as chiefs, shamans, and kings, who likely enjoyed the
fawning fealty that many religions assume their deities similarly require from
their followers. This helps explain the despotic, egotistical, and occasionally
benevolent character attributed to the various gods that have populated
human cultural history. As Wright (2009) suggested, religious conceptions
often reflect social and political realities that people were facing at the time,
with vengeful gods emerging during times of conflict and more benevolent
ones flourishing during times of peace, when cooperation and commerce
between different tribes were needed. As Feurbach (1841/1989) put it,
“Man created God in his own image.”
p0285 The central point of the TMT analysis of the evolution of mind and culture is that the emergence of awareness of the inevitability of death was the
cataclysmic problem that brought the experiential world of our prehuman
ancestors into play as grist for the solutions to existential problems developed
by the inquisitive minds of our newly emerging species. From this point on,
explanations for how the world works that helped assuage death-related fears
had a distinct advantage and became increasingly popular. The fear of death
and corresponding hope for immortality had a powerful influence on the
sorts of beliefs and values that people sought. Before this point, explanations
for how the world works that were effective in meeting people’s tangible
needs for food, water, warmth, and safety from predators and rival bands
of humans were most desirable and adaptive. Moral and social structures
functioned primarily to preserve peace within the group and facilitate dominance over other groups; this is the essence of the explanations for the ongoing function of morality and religion proffered by most contemporary
theories (e.g., Bering, 2006; Graham et al., 2013; Norenzayen et al., in
press). While not disputing these accounts of the earlier precursors to contemporary morality and religion, TMT adds that emerging awareness of
death altered the psychological landscape such that beliefs and values that
were effective in managing existential terror gained a distinct advantage.
Morality, which initially functioned to keep one in the good graces of
others, now became the primary basis for admission to the afterlife.
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p0290 Consistent with this view, MS increases behavior and attitudes in line
with all five of the moral intuitions posited by Moral Foundations Theory
(Haidt & Joseph, 2004): fairness, harm, loyalty, authority, and sanctity (for a
review, see Pyszczynski & Kesebir, 2012). Other research (Bassett, Van
Tongeren, Green, Sonntag, & Kilpatrick, 2014) has shown that MS polarizes
moral judgments, exaggerating the differences typically found between conservatives and liberals (e.g., Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Additionally,
priming the concept of god, which TMT posits is the prepotent line of existential defense for many people, increases charitable giving and benevolent
judgments of others and decreases cheating (for a review, see Norenzayan
et al., in press). From the perspective of TMT, thoughts of one’s deity
increase morality by activating efforts to defeat death by qualifying for the
literal immortality that is believed to depend on staying in the deity’s good
graces by behaving in a moral manner.
p0295 Continuing cognitive evolution probably accelerated the pace at which
cultural knowledge was created and codified, which in turn likely created
further adaptive advantage for brain structures that promoted sophisticated
intellectual abilities. With increasing civilization, scholarly, scientific, and
religious traditions (which for most of human history were the same thing)
expanded in varying directions. As these intellectual traditions increased in
influence, the ideas, beliefs, narratives, and values that constituted cultural
worldviews came under increasing scrutiny, and pressures to make the many
pieces of the puzzle fit together increased. Thus, elaborate cosmologies
emerged that tried to explain everything—usually by invoking an allknowing all-powerful deity who created the universe and whose desires
and dictates became the ultimate answer to all questions. Why are we here?
Because the gods wanted us and therefore created us! What should we do?
Whatever the gods want us to do! Why? In order to attain everlasting life and
avoid eternal damnation. Thus, the cultural revolution of 40,000 years ago
likely involved a gradual shift in the motives that drove human behavior,
especially those involving morality, from staying in the good graces of other
humans to transcending death.
p0300 The idea that experiential knowledge gleaned from socialization and
interactions with others inspired the kinds of gods that cultures created
may help explain the parallels between the literal and symbolic modes of
immortality that we have often noticed over the years but not explicitly discussed in previous presentations of TMT. The two modes of immortality
may have built on and influenced each other over thousands of years of cultural evolution, such that qualifying for either requires the same things: faith
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in the cultural worldview and heroically exemplifying its standards. Just as
most religions teach that literal immortality in the form of a blissful afterlife
is granted to those who believe in their teachings and live up to their value,
the hope of symbolic immortality typically depends on leaving a lasting positive contribution to one’s culture that will be remembered long after
one dies.
s0075 5.5 Terror Management and Psychological Disorder
p0305 TMT posits that psychological equanimity requires a well-functioning anxiety buffer that entails faith in one’s worldview, self-esteem, and close interpersonal attachments. Threats to any of these anxiety-buffer components
signal a potential for anxiety that typically engenders defensive efforts to
restore the integrity of the system and thus ward off this anxiety. From this
perspective, many of the vicissitudes of thought, emotion, and behavior in
daily life reflect attempts to respond to fluctuations in the functioning of this
system. But the effectiveness of this anxiety-buffering system varies across
persons and situations, leaving some people secure and confident and others
riddled with anxiety. TMT follows many previous theories in suggesting
that many forms of psychological dysfunction and disorder result from, or
are exacerbated by, ineffective control of anxiety and reflect maladaptive
attempts to cope with such malfunctions.
p0310 Consistent with the idea that many psychological disorders result from an
inability to effectively manage anxiety, high levels of anxiety are central
components of many DSM-V diagnoses, including not only the many problems that fall under the blanket category of anxiety disorders but also others
where anxiety itself is not the defining feature, such as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive–compulsive disorder, substance
abuse, sexual difficulties, and schizophrenia. Anxiety is widely recognized as
a common comorbid problem associated with many psychological disorders.
And high levels of anxiety or neuroticism have been found to be associated
with a wide range of other undesirable psychological states and traits, such as
guilt, shame, uncertainty, shyness, procrastination, academic difficulties, and
interpersonal problems. Although most of this research is correlational, difficulties controlling anxiety seem likely to play at least some role in the etiology of diverse psychological problems.
p0315 Research has shown that reminders of death increase the severity of psychological symptoms of some disorders. For example, Strachan et al. (2007)
found that MS led diagnosed spider phobics to judge spiders depicted in
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photos as more dangerous and to spend less time looking at them, people
high in obsessive–compulsive tendencies to spend more time and use more
soap and water when washing their hands, and people high in social anxiety
to become more avoidant of social interactions. Following Yalom (1980),
Strachan et al. (2007) interpreted their findings as reflecting participants’ tendency to focalize their fear of death onto smaller objects that are easier to
control. Although there is nothing, one can do to avoid death, spiders,
germs, and embarrassing interactions with others can be avoided if one is
sufficiently vigilant.
p0320 Additional research found that concerns about death underlie psychological dissociation in response to trauma, and that individuals who experience
intense fear of death during a traumatic event are especially likely to dissociate and subsequently develop PTSD (Gershuny, Cloitre, & Otto, 2003).
Moreover, in 2005, New Yorkers reminded of their mortality and then
asked to recall how they felt during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or when they
watched video footage of the attacks, reported greater dissociative reactions,
such as feeling like they were outside of their own body, compared to a control group of students who thought about being in pain or an upcoming
exam (Kosloff et al., 2006). These dissociative reactions in turn led to more
anxieties about the future.
p0325 Another study (Abdollahi, Pyszczynski, Maxfield, & Luszczynska, 2011a,
2011b) tracked people who had survived a traumatic earthquake in Zarand,
Iran, in 2005, in which over 1500 people perished and almost 7000 had to
evacuate their homes. When reminded of their own death or the earthquake
a month later, survivors who did not dissociate in the aftermath of the earthquake responded without anxiety. They instead responded to MS by
expressing negativity toward foreigners, a typical defensive maneuver to
manage terror. However, survivors who did dissociate during the earthquake, when reminded of their mortality or the quake a month later,
reported a great deal of anxiety and did not express antipathy toward foreigners. The usual means of terror management, bolstering one’s own group
at the expense of others, was apparently unavailable to the survivors who had
dissociated. And 2 years later, these high dissociators were far more likely to
have developed PTSD than those who had not dissociated and continued to
show atypical responses to MS. This absence of defensive response to MS
mediated the relation between dissociation at the time of the quake and
PTSD 2 years later, suggesting that this disruption of normal terror management defenses plays an important role in the emergence of this disorder.
Similar results have been found for Polish victims of domestic violence
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(Kesebir et al., 2011) and survivors of a civil war in the Ivory Coast (Chatard
et al., 2012).
s0080 6. SUMMARY OF TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
AND RESEARCH
p0330 According to TMT, the uniquely human awareness of death gives rise
to potentially paralyzing terror that is assuaged by embracing cultural worldviews and meeting or exceeding the standards of value associated with them
(i.e., self-esteem) in pursuit of literal and/or symbolic immortality. Convergent empirical support for TMT was originally obtained by studies demonstrating that: momentarily elevated or dispositionally high self-esteem
reduces anxiety, autonomic arousal, and defensive cognitive distortions produced by psychological and physical threats; making MS increases defense of
the cultural worldview and self-esteem striving; and threats to cherished cultural beliefs or self-esteem increase the accessibility of implicit death
thoughts (DTA).
p0335 Subsequent theoretical and empirical inquiry has led to: an elucidation of
the psychological mechanisms underlying MS effects, culminating in the
development of a dual-process model of proximal and distal defenses that
are instigated in response to conscious and unconscious death thoughts,
respectively; a developmental account of how the anxiety-buffering system
emerges over time as an elaboration of infant attachment to primary caretakers; a research program devoted to explaining how existential concerns
foster discomfort with physical bodies and bodily processes, particularly
sex; important additions to contemporary understanding of how mind, culture, morality, religion, and other aspects of culture evolved in the early days
of our species and continue to change to this day; and a model of psychopathology as terror mismanagement.
s0085 7. CRITICISMS OF AND ALTERNATIVES TO TERROR
MANAGEMENT THEORY
p0340 Despite the large body of research inspired by TMT, the theory also
has attracted its share of criticism. This has sometimes been a little disturbing
to us—because condemnation of the theory threatens our cherished beliefs
and self-esteem, leaving us flooded with highly accessible death-related ideation, which is compounded by the constant reminders of death that litter
our papers. But critical skepticism is essential for scientific progress. We’re
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convinced that constructive critiques of TMT and associated research have
played an invaluable role in promoting the theory’s development and refinement. In the following section, we discuss what we believe are the most
important and influential criticisms of the theory and alternative explanations for the associated research. We organize our discussion around
Martin and van den Bos’s (2014) recent overview of criticisms of TMT,
because both of these authors have been long time critics of the theory
and are, as Stephen Colbert would put it, particularly persistent “worthy
adversaries.”
s0090 7.1 Falsifiability and Insularity
p0345 One criticism Martin and van den Bos (2014) lodge against TMT is that the
theory is not falsifiable because “conflicting results are not integrated into the
theory,” “alternative explanations have been ignored,” and it is problematic
that “mortality salience can heighten self-interest ... as well as prosocial
interest ... can make people more lenient ... as well as more punitive
... it can increase tolerance ... or it can increase aggression ... [and]
lead to health-promoting or health-endangering behavior” (pp. 52–53).
However, Martin and van den Bos neglected to mention that TMT hypotheses have to our knowledge always been derived from the core propositions
of TMT. The theory emphasizes the role of the cultural worldview and bases
of self-worth in determining how people will manage the potential terror of
death. Thus, the effects of MS are never really main effects. Indeed, we
began examining the moderating role of individual differences in worldview
defense in response to MS in our second MS study (Rosenblatt et al., 1989,
Study 2) and have continued ever since. When surprising results have
occurred, as those reported to us by Ochsmann, we have then sought to
understand those anomalies by exploring relevant process in a more refined
way. This is, according to Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), how “normal science” proceeds; i.e., anomalous findings
draw attention to areas of inquiry that foster either theoretical refinement
if the anomaly can be explained by the addition of internally consistent
assumptions that are then verified empirically, or abandonment of the theory
entirely if the anomalous findings are ultimately inexplicable without additional assumptions at odds with the theory.
p0350 To give another example, Greenberg et al. (1990) found that low authoritarians did not derogate an attitudinally different other in response to MS.
This led us to hypothesize that because political liberals value tolerance as
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part of their worldview, they will not derogate a different other after MS;
moreover, MS might lead them to increase their tolerance of a different
other. We then found support for these hypotheses in two studies
(Greenberg et al., 1992). In the first, MS led conservatives to be more harsh
toward a liberal, but tended to lead liberals to become less harsh toward a
conservative. We then considered an alternative explanation that MS led
all these participants to be supportive of conservative views. So in a second
study, we tested the valuing tolerance hypothesis by priming the value of
tolerance, a value to which virtually all Americans pay at least lip service.
We predicted and found that this prime led MS participants to become less
harsh toward an anti-American essay writer (Greenberg et al., 1992,
Study 2).
p0355 We agree with Martin and van den Bos that it is often difficult to predict
exactly how people will respond to reminders of death (or any other threat
for that matter). People are complex animals who differ in biological temperament, in the content of their cultural worldviews, and in the particular
aspects of the worldview that they internalize as their own. And situations
vary in terms of which beliefs and values are most salient. People are thus
likely to have multiple and sometimes conflicting elements of their worldviews to rely on for terror management purposes, making it difficult to make
a priori predictions of which one they will gravitate toward.
p0360 Accordingly, we have devoted considerable attention to specifying individual differences, such as self-esteem (e.g., Harmon-Jones et al., 1997),
attachment style (e.g., Mikulincer & Florian, 2000), personal need for structure (e.g., Dechesne, Janssen, & van Knippenberg, 2000), and right wing
authoritarianism (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1990), that determine which of
the many possible sources of security different people gravitate toward when
faced with existential threat. Other research has documented the important
role that momentary accessibility of beliefs and values plays in this process,
and has shown, for example, that MS can lead to diametrically opposed
responses, such as increased support for either war or peace, and greed or
prosocial behavior, depending on which values have recently been primed
(for reviews, see Anson, Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2009;
Rothschild et al., 2009). Although TMT doesn’t stipulate which of the many
possible sources of security particular people will gravitate toward in specific
situations, research is making progress toward providing such specification. It
now seems reasonably clear that people cope with death by clinging to values
in which they are highly invested and that are high in momentary accessibility. Still, we agree that even more precise elucidation of which anxiety-buffer
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elements will be used in any given instance is needed. Ironically, the theories
that have been proposed as alternatives to TMT provide even less basis for
predicting the specific nature of responses to threats, and most invoke concepts so undifferentiated (e.g., meaning, approach motivation, certainty) that
there is no conceptual basis at all for making specific predictions. This is an
issue for all complex multidimensional theories that entail dynamic interactions among their components (e.g., predicting when cognitive dissonance
will produce changes in attitudes, behavior, or adopting additional cognitions). Like all theories, TMT is a tool for expanding our understanding
of nature, which requires refinement in response to empirical findings, rather
than provides an immutable oracle that requires no additional input to generate accurate predictions.
p0365 Martin and van den Bos’s next claim, that we “ignore alternative
interpretations,” is simply untrue. A substantial portion of the empirical
research that we and others have conducted over the years was undertaken
with the explicit goal of answering questions raised by reviewers and critics,
involving issues such as the role of affect in the MS effect (e.g., Greenberg
et al., 2003, 1995), the cognitive processes through which thoughts of death
affect behavior (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, et al., 1997; Arndt,
Greenberg, Solomon, et al., 1997), whether the increase in DTA produced
by worldview and self-esteem threats is specific to death or simply reflects
general negativity (e.g., Schimel, Hayes, Williams, & Jahrig, 2007), various
alternative explanations for MS effects (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1995), and the
interface of defensive and growth-oriented motives (e.g., Vail et al., 2012). Au1
We’ve devoted entire papers to responding to critical assessments of TMT
(e.g., Landau, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2007; Pyszczynski,
Abdollahi, et al., 2006; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, Solomon, & Maxfield,
2006; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1997), including an extensive
response to an issue of Psychological Inquiry devoted entirely to critiques of
TMT. Although we find some critiques of TMT misguided, we have done
our best to respond to them and explain why we find them unconvincing, to
examine them empirically (e.g., we have used uncertainty salience as a
comparison condition in over 20 studies), and incorporated some of the
issues they raise into our conceptual analysis.
s0095 7.2 Consistency with Evolutionary and Biological Perspectives
p0370 Another common claim is that TMT is not consistent with modern evolutionary theory. Some have taken us to task for the statement that awareness of
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the inevitability of death is terrifying for “an animal instinctively driven
toward self-preservation and continued experience” (Solomon et al.,
1991, p. 95), arguing that evolution produces specific solutions to specific
environmental challenges rather than general all-purpose adaptations or
“instincts.” Our use of the term “self-preservation instinct” was intended
to give credit to the psychoanalytic roots of TMT’s fear of death construct
in Zilborg’s (1943) analysis of the fear of death. We included the selfpreservation construct in the theory to provide a simple explanation of
why knowledge of death would inevitably create fear; ironically, we assumed
this would be the least controversial aspect of the theory, because it seems
obvious that people want to stay alive. However, some evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Buss, 1997; Fessler & Navarrete, 2005) pointed out that a
unified motive oriented to stay alive is unlikely if one takes a modular
approach to thinking about evolution. Because the specifics of how the motivation to stay alive emerged is not particularly germane to the main points of
the theory, we changed our verbiage to refer to a “general inclination to stay
alive” rather than an instinct, noting that the vast majority of bodily systems
ultimately function to keep organisms alive long enough to reproduce and
care for their offspring. We suspect that in humans and other cognitively
complex species, a general motive to stay alive arises as an emergent property
of specific life-supporting adaptations in specific organ systems, especially the
brain; see Deacon (1997) and Langer (1967) for similar arguments. But
whether one conceptualizes this inclination to stay alive as a series of interrelated adaptations that serve the same function (survival so that genes can be
passed on) or a single emergent motive that results from these specific adaptations is largely irrelevant to the rest of the theory and the major points
it makes.
p0375 Others have argued that fear is a useful adaptation and that evolution
would never produce adaptations (i.e., cultural worldviews and self-esteem
as anxiety buffers) that undermine something as functional as fear (Fessler &
Navarrete, 2005; Kirkpatrick & Navarrete, 2006; Leary, 2004). Although
we of course agree that fear is an adaptive emotion that evolved because
it stimulates adaptive life-preserving behavior, it is clear that people do a
lot of things to minimize their fears, some of which are adaptive (e.g., taking
deep breaths; seeking help from others) and some of which are not (e.g.,
consuming large amounts of alcohol; exaggerating one’s abilities). It is also
clear that many antagonistic systems exist throughout the body to put the
brakes on adaptive responses to prevent too much of an otherwise good
thing. But this criticism misses the point: TMT views cultural worldviews
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and self-esteem as means to manage the fear produced by the ever-present
knowledge of the inevitability of death rather than immediate threats to continued existence. Although fear in response to imminent threats is usually
adaptive, fear in response to awareness of an inevitable unavoidable future
event is generally not. This is why we argue that our ancestors invented ways
of managing their fear of death.
p0380 More recently, Tritt et al. (2012) have taken the opposite tack, arguing
that it is unlikely a system designed specifically to deal with the problem of
death could be a product of evolution given that more primitive and
domain general systems exist to respond to simpler challenges that require
less cognitive complexity than what is needed to cognize death. We agree
to a certain extent. Specifically, while death awareness (and the potential
for terror engendered by this awareness) is a uniquely human problem, different from all other fears, the terror management system developed by
building on more primitive systems that evolved to respond to simpler
problems. Although our initial discussions of how the anxiety-buffering
system emerged in early humans did not go very far into the details of this
process beyond positing that it emerged in response to awareness of the
inevitability of death, we certainly never disputed the idea that both biological and cultural evolution build on earlier adaptations to previous adaptive challenges.
p0385 But this does not imply that understanding the primitive building blocks
of the human adaptation to awareness of the inevitability of death explains
the system that ultimately emerged to deal with it. It is widely agreed, for
example, that humankind’s complex visual apparatus evolved out of very
primitive light sensitive cells in far simpler species, but no one would suggest
that this provides a comprehensive explanation for the workings of the eye
and visual cortex. We argue that although interesting and useful in its own
right, identifying the primitive aspects or biological underpinnings that
served as the foundation of the system that our ancestors constructed to deal
with their burgeoning awareness of death is insufficient to provide a useful
understanding of that system.
p0390 Frankly, we’re puzzled by the general lack of attention given to the problem of death by most evolutionary psychologists. We question evolutionary
psychologists’ near exclusive emphasis on adaptation to features in the external physical and social environment, because there is nothing in Darwin’s or
any other evolutionary theory that limits evolution to adaptation to external
features. Indeed, it is clear that internal adaptive challenges are also subject to
natural selection, as when physical features of organs change over time in
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response to mutations that make them more compatible with other organs or
their products or processes. What is somewhat unique is that TMT focuses
on the impact of an idea (i.e., the inevitability of death), a product of the
human mind, as an important influence on other ideas generated by people
that are spread within and across groups, which then may make particular
biological features of the brain more adaptive, which therefore themselves
change over time in response to this idea (see Varki & Brower, 2013, for
a similar evolutionary account of the central role of death denial in human
mentation).
s0100 7.3 Cultural Differences
p0395 Hypotheses derived from TMT have been tested and supported in experiments conducted in over 25 countries the world over. Although most of
these studies were conducted with participants from Western cultures,
others were conducted in the Middle East and North Africa (e.g., Israel,
Palestine, Iran, Ivory Coast, Turkey), Asia (e.g., Japan, Korea, China, India,
Hong Kong, Tibet), Latin America (Mexico, Costa Rica), and at least one
was conducted with bicultural Aboriginal Australians. Nevertheless, Martin
and van den Bos (2014) argue that TMT trivializes culture and glosses over
cultural differences. We find this claim a little strange because we have—
long before it became fashionable to do so in social psychology—always
emphasized the importance of culture and cultural differences in bases of
self-esteem. They argue that MS effects are less consistent and of smaller
magnitude on the average in non-Western cultures and that several studies
in non-Western cultures have failed to find any MS effects at all (Yen &
Cheng, 2010).
p0400 Although we agree that much more research is needed in non-Western
cultures and there is much to be learned about cultural variations in dealing
with death, theory-predicted effects have been found in studies conducted
in all of the Asian countries in which TMT research has been conducted.
Research conducted in East Asian cultures has shown that MS increases
nationalism, negative evaluations of those who criticize one’s culture, support for military action to defend one’s country, in-group bias in job allocations, and the appeal of material goods (for a review, see Park &
Pyszczynski, in press), much like what has been found in research conducted
in Western cultures. TMT posits that people from different cultures deal
with the awareness of death in different ways, depending on the nature of
their cultural worldviews. Thus, findings that people from individualistic
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cultures respond to reminders of death by striving to maximize their individual value while people from collectivist cultures respond by striving to
maximize their collective value (e.g., Kashima, Halloran, Yuki, &
Kashima, 2004) are exactly what is predicted by the theory. In related vein,
Wakimoto (2006) found that MS led Japanese students who were strongly
enculturated to the Japanese interdependent worldview to respond to success in a self-effacing manner but reduced self-effacement among those less
enculturated to the Japanese worldview. Similarly, a study of multicultural
Aboriginal Australians found that MS increased collectivist responses when
their aboriginal identity was primed and individualistic responses when their
Australian identity was primed (Halloran & Kashima, 2004).
p0405 Although TMT posits that the fear of death and cultural meaning systems
that mange this fear are universal, the content of these meaning systems are
viewed as culture specific, thus leading to cultural variations in how they are
manifested. Given that East Asian cultures value collective over individual
identity and view modesty and humility as virtues, what would appear to
reflect a lack of self-esteem striving within a Western context may actually
reflect attempts to demonstrate one’s value by behaving in a modest
nonself-aggrandizing way in a more collectivist cultural context. This issue
is not unique to TMT and has been debated extensively in the literature
on cultural differences in the self. Whereas some have argued that the
self-esteem motive is a uniquely Western phenomenon that is largely absent
in East Asian cultures (e.g., Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999),
others have argued that apparent cultural differences in self-esteem striving
reflect differences in what cultures value as prototypic of a good person
(Sedikedes, Gaertner, & Vevea, 2005). Clearly, TMT falls in the latter camp.
Ever-increasing trends toward globalization and infiltration of values from
other cultures complicate matters further, making it even more difficult
to specify exactly which values people from different cultures in specific situations will be oriented toward when motivated to demonstrate their value.
p0410 It is also possible that some cultures are more accepting of death than
others. For example, Yen and Cheng (2010) assert that many Asians view
death as a natural and even desirable part of life. Viewing life and death as
part of the same process is a central tenet of many forms of Buddhism
and other Eastern religions. However, many Americans also claim not to fear
death. We have found that what people consciously report about death bears
no clear relation to how they respond to reminders of mortality. And we are
skeptical that it’s biologically possible not to fear death. Of course, strong
terror management resources can help people endure reminders of mortality
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without need for additional defense. For example, recent studies suggest that
Buddhism, meditative states, and mindfulness may have such protective
value. We found that although MS increases derogation of a person who
criticizes Korea among Korean non-Buddhists, this effect does not occur
among Korean Buddhists (Park & Pyszczynski, in press). Interestingly, the
effect of MS on derogation of a person who criticized Korea was eliminated
among another sample of Korean non-Buddhists after a 45-min Zen meditation training exercise (Park & Pyszczynski, in press). Similarly, Niemec
et al. (2010) found MS effects among persons low but not high in dispositional mindfulness, a state that is a central goal of most meditation practices.
These findings may help explain some of the differences in responses to MS
between people from Eastern and Western cultures that research has sometimes (though not always) found.
s0105 7.4 What's so Special About Death?
p0415 In the early days of the theory, many psychologists told us that, because they
themselves are not afraid of death, it is unlikely that the fear of death could
play a significant role in much of what people do. As data came in, documenting the wide-ranging effects that reminders of death have on people,
the focus of criticisms shifted to the implausibility of a system which functions to manage this one specific fear. Indeed, TMT’s focus on the fear of
death runs counter to a long history of domain general theorizing in psychology that emphasizes very broad motives and processes that cut across the specific content of people thoughts and fears.
p0420 Far and away the most common critique of TMT consists of attempts to
reduce the problem of death to a specific instance of some other more general threat. Rather than arguing that death is not threatening, more recent
critics argue that death is a specific case of a more general threat, which is the
“real reason” thoughts of death produce the effects they do. The most popular and influential of these alternatives argue that death is threatening
because of the uncertainty it entails (e.g., Hohman & Hogg, 2011;
McGregor et al., 2001; van den Bos & Miedema, 2000); because it undermines meaning (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006); because it is largely uncontrollable (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008); or because it threatens social
relationships and belonging (e.g., Leary, 2004; Navarrete & Fessler, 2005).
p0425 People fear death for many reasons, including those proposed as alternatives TMT (Florian & Mikulincer, 1998b). But the problem of death cannot
be reduced to any one of these specific features. It encompasses all these
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concerns and many others: the absence of experience, the cessation of bodily
functions, bodily decay, burial or cremation, not being involved in future
events, and the possibility of continuation of consciousness after during
burial or during cremation. From the perspective of TMT, though, the most
basic problem with death is that it entails not living, which is the prerequisite
for all other human needs, motives, and desires. As we stated in the initial
presentations of the theory, from the perspective of TMT, it is the terror
of absolute annihilation, the fear of not being, that is most disturbing about
death (e.g., Solomon et al., 1991, p. 96).
p0430 Nonetheless, we agree that certainty, meaning, control, and interpersonal relationships are important motives in their own right. However, positing that these motives also play important roles in managing the terror of
death is quite different than claiming that they are the “real reason” people
fear death. Cultural worldviews buffer anxiety by imbuing existence with
meaning, the possibility of attaining personal value (self-esteem), and the
hope of transcending death. To effectively control death anxiety, people
require faith (i.e., certainty) in the validity of their worldviews and selfconcepts. Because the most important aspects of worldviews cannot be
directly observed and some violate direct sensory experience, people require
consensual validation of their worldviews and self-concepts from others to
maintain the certainty that enables these structures to manage their fears; thus,
acceptance from other people is essential for effective terror management.
p0435 This in no way implies, though, that effective anxiety-buffer functioning
is the only reason people need meaning, certainty, control, or other people.
Effective goal-directed behavior clearly requires these psychosocial
resources; these constructs play central roles in most contemporary theories
of self-regulation (e.g., Bandura, 1986; Carver & Scheier, 1981a, 1981b).
The central claim of TMT is that in addition to the pragmatic functions they
serve, these psychological entities are part of the system through which people control existential fear. As discussed above, the terror management system builds on more primitive systems that initially evolved to serve more
concrete pragmatic functions. TMT posits that awareness of death changes
the way the motives for meaning, certainty, control, and interpersonal connections operate. These needs extend beyond their pragmatic function to
that of maintaining a conception of reality and one’s contributions to it that
detoxify death.
p0440 Purely pragmatic motives that serve to facilitate effective action would
orient people toward the most accurate meanings possible and toward connections with people who are most useful for meeting their pragmatic needs.
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Although people sometimes seek accurate meanings that fit well with observable reality, they also sometimes go to great lengths to believe things that
conflict with the information provided by their senses and to connect with
those who help them to maintain these counter-experiential beliefs. Deathdenying motives help explain such departures from practical utility.
s0110 7.5 Do Other Threats Produce Effects Similar to Mortality
Salience?
p0445 Soon after our initial MS studies (Greenberg et al., 1990; Rosenblatt et al.,
1989) were published, critics asked whether these effects were driven by
thoughts of death, per se, or whether any aversive event or negative affective
state yields the same effects. This led us to begin contrasting MS with control
conditions in which participants were given parallel inductions regarding
other unpleasant and threatening events, such as failure, uncertainty, worries
about the future, general anxieties, meaninglessness, giving a speech in front
of a large audience, social exclusion, paralysis, and physical pain; our strategy
was to make the MS and control inductions parallel to each other but vary
the specific aversive event about which participants were asked. The first of
these studies showed that thoughts of worries about life after college did
increase negative affect but did not increase worldview defense; thoughts
of death, on the other hand, did not produce negative affect but did increase
worldview defense (Greenberg et al., 1995). Well over 100 other studies
have shown that MS produces effects different from thoughts of these other
threats. These studies make it clear that not just any aversive event or threat
leads to the effects that MS produces.
p0450 However, more recent studies have shown that other types of threats,
such as personal dilemmas (e.g., McGregor et al., 2001), thoughts of being
uncertain (van den Bos & Miedema, 2000), or not having control (Fritsche
et al., 2008), disconfirmation of expectations (Proulx & Heine, 2008), and
even abstract art and absurdist literature (e.g., Proulx & Heine, 2009), sometimes produce effects parallel to those of MS. Critics of TMT view these
studies as evidence that the problem of death is a specific instance of these
other threats. These are interesting findings, but there are important issues to
consider regarding their implications for TMT.
p0455 Prior to the development of TMT, there were already substantial literatures showing that people respond defensively to threats to their self-esteem
and meaning systems: e.g., self-serving biases, cognitive dissonance, just
world beliefs, and other motivated cognitive distortions. Thus, it is not surprising that research continues to show that threats to these psychological
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entities produce defensive reactions. TMT was developed, in part, to explain
why people need self-esteem and certainty regarding their meaning systems.
We developed the MS hypothesis as one of several converging approaches to
assessing the proposition that self-esteem and cultural worldviews provide
protection from death-related anxiety. The purpose of the MS hypothesis
is to serve as a tool for assessing the validity of TMT, rather than the purpose
of TMT being to provide an explanation for the MS effect. A compelling
alternative to TMT needs to go beyond providing an alternative explanation
for one line of evidence regarding the theory and address the literature in its
entirety.
p0460 But because the MS research is central to the TMT literature, it is clearly
important to understand the nature of the effects demonstrated there. What
should be made of this mixed evidence? Looking only at the pattern of
empirical results and ignoring conceptual arguments, one could summarize
the existing literature by saying it shows that in the vast majority studies, MS
produces different effects from many aversive control conditions, but that
some studies have found other threats producing effects paralleling a subset
of the effects of MS. Among that majority of studies, MS has been found to
produce different effects than making salient threats of uncertainty, pain, loss
of control, failure, meaninglessness, and attachment disruptions. If 100 studies found aspirin to have different effects than acetaminophen, and 40 studies
found similar effects, it would not make sense to conclude that aspirin is just
one version of acetaminophen and the same processes are triggered by both.
Pertinent to this point, Martens, Burke, Schimel, and Faucher (2011) found
in a meta-analysis that whereas MS effects get stronger with longer delays,
effects of threats to meaning and certainty get weaker, suggesting that different processes are often if not always involved.
p0465 In addition, given the impossibility of accepting the null hypothesis, it
cannot be concluded that MS produces the same effect as these other threats.
Given that all of the threats of interest here are abstract psychological states, it
is always possible that studies that find no difference between MS and other
threats have used ineffective manipulations of one or the other threat or
insensitive dependent measures, lack of statistical power, or have other problems that prevent them from finding real effects. But this is not a very satisfying answer to the question of whether MS is the same or different from
other threats.
p0470 This begs the question of whether the processes that produce defensive
responses to other threats are at least sometimes the same as those involved in
MS effects. From the perspective of TMT, similar processes might be
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involved if other threats increase the accessibility of death-related thoughts.
Because a large body of literature has shown that threats to worldviews, selfesteem, and attachments increase the accessibility of death related but not
other aversive thoughts (for a review, see Hayes et al., 2010), it is possible
that at least some of the defensive responses are caused by threats to the anxiety buffer, which increase DTA and produce defensive responses for this
reason.
p0475 Some researchers, for example, McGregor et al. (2001), van den Bos and
Miedema (2000), and Proulx and Heine (2009), report that the other threats
they have investigated increase worldview defense but do not increase DTA.
However, some of these studies used procedures that varied from ours in
small but theoretically significant ways. For example, McGregor et al.
(2001, Studies 3 and 4) found that a temporal discontinuity manipulation
(specifically, asking university student participants how they might think
about a childhood memory 35 years in the future) produced increased cultural worldview defense comparable to an MS induction, but did not
increase DTA. It seemed to us that asking people to think about themselves
in the distant future could plausibly conjure up intimations of mortality; and
when we examined the materials from this study, we noticed that the supposedly neutral passage between the temporal discontinuity manipulation
and the assessment of cultural worldview defense made explicit reference
to death, which could keep death thoughts in focal attention and suppress
DTA accordingly. Chaudry, Tison, and Solomon (2002) consequently replicated the McGregor et al. study with the neutral passage from our experiments and found that the temporal discontinuity manipulation produced
the same increase in DTA as a traditional MS induction. McGregor and
colleagues then replicated the finding that temporal discontinuity increases
DTA in their lab (Ian McGregor, personal communication to Sheldon
Solomon, October 16, 2001).
p0480 Other studies used DTA measures different from those used in most
TMT research that appear to be considerably less sensitive. Whereas the
word stems used in our measure are designed so that there are generally just
two possible words to complete each critical item which can be completed
by filling in two additional letters, the measures used in many of the studies
conducted by others had multiple possible completions, were more openended, and had more open letters. Weber, Zhang, Schimel, and Blatter
(2015) found that some of the manipulations of meaning threat used by
Proulx and colleagues (Proulx & Heine, 2009; Randles, Heine, & Santos,
2013) yielded increased DTA when our usual more sensitive measure was
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used. Thus, the possibility that these other threats produce effects parallel to
MS because they produce a subtle increase in DTA remains.
p0485 Besides the possibility that other psychological threats produce effects
similar to MS because they increase DTA (in which case such findings would
follow directly from TMT), it is also not clear how these alternative explanations for MS effects would account for the dramatic and reliable difference
in the nature of proximal defenses that emerge immediately after MS and
distal defenses that emerge when thoughts of death are accessible but not
in focal attention. Why would threats to certainty, meaning, control, or
belonging lead to behavior aimed at increasing one’s health and longevity
immediately after they are perceived but to behavior aimed at shoring up
one’s worldview, self-esteem, or attachments after a delay or distraction?
And, why would this difference evaporate and worldview defense emerge
immediately after these threats when they are presented subliminally (see
Arndt, Cook, & Routledge, 2004, for a review of this literature)? Indeed,
although researchers testing alternatives to TMT include a delay and distraction after their threat inductions, it is not at all clear why this would be
needed from their perspectives; rather than providing a theoretical rationale
for their use of a delay, these researchers simply cite our studies showing that
MS effects on worldview defense require a delay or distraction between the
threat induction and measurement of defense. Their explanations of why
uncertainty and meaning threats produce defensive responses make a little
more sense when people are consciously contemplating these threats, yet
that is precisely when symbolic terror management defenses do not occur.
p0490 Tests of other TMT hypotheses also undermine these alternative views.
Many studies have shown that threats to self-esteem, worldviews, and close
relationships increase DTA, and that boosts to each of these anxiety-buffer
components reduce both DTA- and MS-induced defense. Anxiety-buffer
threats increase DTA while not increasing the accessibility of other negative
thoughts (Hayes et al., 2010), and evidence for an afterlife reduces worldview defense in response to MS (e.g., Dechesne et al., 2003). The fact that
threats to these anxiety-buffer components activate and respond to content
specifically focused on death, and that bolstering these components reduces
DTA, shows that death is central to these processes. Studies have also shown
that DTA mediates the relation between MS and worldview defense (e.g.,
Cohen, Sullivan, Solomon, Greenberg, & Ogilvie, 2011; Das, Bushman,
Bezemer, Kerkhof, & Vermeulen, 2009; Vail, Arndt, et al., 2012). It is
not at all clear how any of the alternatives to TMT would explain these findings. Although critics usually restrict their focus to the MS effect itself, a viable alternative to TMT needs to account for all of the TMT literature.
46 Tom Pyszczynski et al.
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s0115 7.6 Conceptual Problems with Alternatives to TMT
p0495 Because we have provided extensive critiques of most alternatives to TMT
elsewhere (e.g., Landau, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2007;
Pyszczynski, Abdollahi, et al., 2006; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, et al., 2006;
Solomon et al., 1997), here we discuss only the most serious issues that render them conceptually implausible. Because we’ve yet to see responses to
our critiques of these alternative perspectives, we again invite the proponents of these alternatives to address the issues we raise so that we can better
understand their reasoning.
s0120 7.6.1 Uncertainty
p0500 Some theorists argue that uncertainty about either when and how death will
occur or what happens afterward (e.g., Hohman & Hogg, 2011) or general
personal uncertainty activated by reminders of death (e.g., McGregor, 2006;
van den Bos & Miedema, 2000) underlies the MS effects that have been
documented in the literature. However, death is one of the few truly certain
things in life. Although uncertainty surrounding death is one of the many
things that are troubling about it, there are certainly many other terrifying
aspects of death. Besides, people don’t always prefer certainty over uncertainty. Research has shown that people actively avoid certainty in many situations, usually when they fear unpleasant truths. Avoiding diagnostic
medical tests, self-handicapping, and gambling are all examples of active
avoidance of certainty. Unrealistic optimism in many domains of life,
including those related to one’s health and longevity, is well documented
(e.g., Weinstein & Klein, 1996). And although some people might believe
they would like to know with certainty what happens after death, we suspect
their enthusiasm for such knowledge would wane if the answers were not to
their liking. As we’ve asked uncertainty theorists before (Pyszczynski et al.,
2010, p. 7550): “Would people rather believe there certainly is not an afterlife or that there might be one? Would they rather believe they will certainly
be forgotten a few years after they die, or that their memory might live on
indefinitely? Would it be comforting for people to know that they were
absolutely certain to die a painful death a year from today, or would they
prefer the possibility that they will live a happy and productive life into their
90s and then die painlessly in their sleep?” Do uncertainty theorists really
believe that people would prefer to know with certainty they will never find
a loving partner or succeed in their career, as opposed to holding out hope
that they might? Would people rather be certain they are stupid, unattractive, and untalented or remain hopeful about these domains? Our point here
Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 47
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is that the motive to avoid undesirable information is often more powerful
than the motive for certain knowledge, and this seems especially true with
matters of life and death. Uncertainty theories leave us uncertain as to when
uncertainty will be avoided and when it will be sought.
s0125 7.6.2 Meaning Threat
p0505 It has also been argued that thoughts of death are threatening because they
undermine meaning. In their Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM), Heine
et al. (2006, p. 90) define meaning as “what connects things to other things
in expected ways – anything and any way that things can be connected.”
Because human beings are meaning-making animals, threats to meaning lead
to attempts to restore meaning, which sometimes extend to domains
unrelated to the original disruption. They argue that thoughts of death produce the effects they do because they undermine meaning frameworks and,
importantly, are not different in any significant way (except perhaps extremity) from any other expectancy disconfirmation or perceptual anomaly.
p0510 But is it plausible that the major reason death is threatening is that it undermines meaning? We simply don’t understand how thoughts of death, regardless of their content, are a threat to “any way that things can be connected”
(Heine et al., 2006, p. 90). The inevitability of death is a fact of life, part of the
meaning system of all but the youngest children, and surely part of the meaning systems of all who have ever participated in MS experiments. Another
meaning that can be affixed to death that fits the MMM definition of meaning
quite well is that all consciousness ends at the moment of death, never to be
regained, and that in a short time all remnants of our existence will be lost.
Although unpleasant, this meaning fits better with observable reality than
what most people believe. Yet people avoid meanings such as this and exert
considerable energy to preserve more pleasing, but less likely, meanings.
A fatal flaw of the MMM is that it has no conceptual basis for predicting a
preference between these two or any other alternative meanings.4
p0515 Although people sometimes say death robs life of meaning, it is not the
MMM’s very general “relationships among things” sort of meaning to which
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4
np0020 Although the vast majority of people hold comforting beliefs entailing some form of life after death,
some people do accept the less comforting idea that consciousness ends at death. It’s important to be
clear that although TMT posits a motive to believe comforting things about death, this does not mean
that this motive will outweigh all other forces and sources of information. The biological worldview
espoused by most of today’s scientists is compelling to many people for reasons that may outweigh the
desire to believe in an afterlife. TMT suggests that accepting worldviews that do not include literal
immortality requires greater commitment to symbolic immortality or other ways of coping with
the problem of death.
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they are alluding. Rather, this usually refers to the sort of cosmic significance
that TMT posits people use to shield themselves from the terror of nonexistence. From our perspective, the MMM has the problem backward: people
do not fear death because it undermines meaning, but rather, need life to be
meaningful to protect themselves from the fear of death. Both ontologically
and phylogenetically, it seems highly unlikely that the capacity to view life as
cosmically significant precedes the capacity to be frightened by the prospect
of death, which would be necessary if the fear of death was a response to
threats to cosmic meaning.
p0520 Importantly, not just any meaning will do when it comes to dealing with
death—or most other problems for that matter. People work hard to preserve the culturally transmitted meanings our ancestors invented to enable
them to cope with knowledge that death is an inevitable fact of life.
Research shows that MS (and other threats when they have such effects)
increases belief in an afterlife, deities, supernatural powers, nationalism,
and the value of one’s attachment figures. The MMM provides no specification of which meanings people seek and which they avoid and no basis for
predicting the direction of people’s responses to threats. Recent refinement
of the model (Proulx & Inzlicht, 2012) that posits an initial preference for
restoring meaning on the threatened dimension, which generalizes to other
domains only if the specific threat is not resolved, is a step in the right direction, but further specification of what determines the preferred content of
meaning-making efforts and further consideration of the functions of different levels and types of meaning are still needed.
s0130 7.6.3 Explaining MMM Effects
p0525 We suspect that the types of expectancy disconfirmations and perceptual discrepancies studied in MMM research do not motivate people toward any
specific types of meaning because they involve processes different from those
activated by MS. One sensible way to understand expectancy disconfirmations and perceptual discrepancies is that they arouse dissonance.
And dissonance motivates efforts to defend beliefs and affirm values. Indeed,
evidence shows that arousal mediates the effects in these studies. In contrast,
evidence suggests that MS does not produce physiological arousal and that
arousal does not mediate its effects.
p0530 Another way to understand these effects builds on research showing that
disconfirmed expectancies instigate inferential processes aimed at resolving
the disrupted meaning that such disconfirmations produce. For example,
Pyszczynski and Greenberg (1981) found that unexpected behavior from
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an attractive female confederate prompted questions to her that were relevant to the unexpected behavior over the more interesting things that college men were likely to ask in the absence of the unexpected behavior.
Wong and Weiner (1981) found that unexpected behavior increased interest
in “why” questions. This research raises the possibility that the effects produced by the expectancy violations and perceptual anomalies in MMM
research (e.g., Randles et al., 2013) are due to a general increase in epistemic
motivation and inferential processing. This of course is quite different from
the directional effects posited by TMT. Consistent with this general
increased epistemic activity explanation, recent studies have found that perceptual anomalies used in MMM studies improve artificial grammar learning
(Proulx & Heine, 2009), which is one sign of greater processing capacity
being devoted to incoming information. On the other hand, Tre´molie`re,
De Neys, and Bonnefon (2014) have shown that MS improves performance
on logical syllogisms when conclusions support one’s worldview but inhibits
performance when conclusions violate one’s worldview. Future research
should compare the effects of MS with those of expectancy disconfirmation
and perceptual anomalies on these measures of general epistemic activity and
the more specific worldview confirming attitudes that are predicted by
TMT as one strategy for determining whether the same or different processes are involved in these effects—and how they might be related.
s0135 7.6.4 Death Is Not Living
p0535 We agree that uncertainty about death, lack of clear understanding of what it
means, the loss of control that it entails, and the severing of social bonds are
among the many reasons that people fear death. Indeed, research suggests
that people vary in which aspects of death they report to be most troubling
(e.g., Florian & Mikulincer, 1998b). Death is a complex, multifaceted, and
very troubling aspect of human existence. TMT maintains that the most
basic reason death is upsetting and motivating is because it undermines
the most basic motive of all, which is a prerequisite for all other need
satisfaction—staying alive. More specifically, death is a unique motivator
because: (a) most biological systems function to keep the organism alive, thus
averting death; (b) death must be avoided to enhance opportunities for
reproduction and care of offspring, both essential for gene perpetuation;
(c) death is the only absolutely inevitable future event; and (d) death
threatens to undermine all human desires, whether for pleasure, belonging,
certainty, meaning, control, competence, self-actualization, or growth.
Human beings are the only species sufficiently cognitively complex to be
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aware of the inevitability of their own demise and the only species with the
cognitive wherewithal to invent conceptions of reality that deny the finality
of this fate.
s0140 7.7 Threat-General and Threat-Specific Theories
p0540 The most recent trend in alternatives to the TMT analysis of the role of death
in life are models positing very general biological mechanisms through which
all threats produce their effects (e.g., Jonas et al., 2014; McGregor, 2006; Tritt
et al., 2012). These models view all threats as functionally equivalent and posit
mechanisms that reduce anxiety produced by perceived discrepancies to
explain the effects of all threats and discrepancies. McGregor’s (2006) Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) model was the first of these and seems to
be the prototype upon which other models have built. From this perspective,
threats of all kinds are reduced to conflicts or discrepancies between actual
and expected or desired states, which activate the Behavioral Inhibitory System (BIS; Gray & McNaughton, 2000) and produce a subjective state of anxious uncertainty. The BIS produces an orienting response that disrupts
ongoing behavior and motivates efforts to resolve the discrepancy in question. If a resolution of the focal discrepancy is not forthcoming, the RAM
model posits a rapid switch to the approach-oriented Behavioral Activation
System (BAS) that refocuses the organism toward approaching other goals.
This switch to approach motivation is claimed to relieve the distress activated
by the original disruption, and thus either resolve the problem or provide a
palliative to the distress produced. From the RAM perspective, activation of
approach motivation is the central mechanism that resolves the distress produced by all threats, including thoughts of death. Jonas et al. (2014) posit a
somewhat different view, with threats activating the BIS so as to facilitate
a more rapid return to the BAS and the goal-oriented behavior.
p0545 It seems unlikely to us, though, that there are no meaningful differences
in the processes involved in terror management, cognitive dissonance, perceptual discrepancies, and the many other effects that Tritt et al., Jonas et al.,
and McGregor argue are produced by the same underlying process. There
are large and complex literatures surrounding all of these effects that cannot
be comprehensively explained by simple alternation between approach and
avoidance motivation. For example, there are no theoretical mechanisms in
any of these models to explain why choice and foreseeable aversive consequences play a role in dissonance processes or the interplay between worldviews, self-esteem, and attachments in terror management processes. The
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different moderating and mediating variables for these effects also suggest
that single process models are unlikely to provide adequate explanations.
The contents of cognition play important roles that cannot be ignored if
one hopes to explain the literature surrounding any of these processes.
p0550 Although proponents of these models offer some evidence of similarity
in the neurological correlates of some aspects of some of these effects, the
evidence that the processes are the same is far from compelling. For example,
Tritt et al. cite evidence suggesting that activation of the right amygdala
anterior cingulate gyrus is the common shared neural pathway through
which threats produce their effects. But there is also evidence of activation
of distinct neural structures in response to MS that does not appear to occur
in response to other threats (e.g., Agroskin, Klackl, & Jonas, 2014; Quirin
et al., 2012). The literature on neurological underpinnings of these processes
is far too tentative to make sweeping generalizations such as these. Even if
many of the neurological structures involved in responses to these different
types of threats did turn out to share common pathways, it is virtually certain
that there are also unique aspects of each, at neural, and all other levels of
analysis. Minimally, there must be neurological underpinnings of the contents of consciousness that differentiate the diverse array of events that these
models attempt to encompass.
p0555 Turning to the more specific claims of these models, it is implausible that
all of the findings from TMT research result from activation of approach
motivation. The large literature documenting the tendency of people to
move away from reminders of their animal nature when mortality is salient
is especially difficult to construe as approach focused: finding the physical
aspects of sex less appealing, withdrawing from both pleasant and unpleasant
physical sensations, distancing from a breast-feeding mother, and avoiding
breast self-examinations (for a review, see Goldenberg, 2012) provide just
a few examples. Indeed, many responses to MS involve negative evaluations,
derogation, or distancing from a person who is different from oneself or who
violates cultural values (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1990). Although threatgeneral theorists argue that aggression is an approach-oriented behavior, citing Harmon-Jones and Peterson (2008), and this might help account for
findings in which MS increases actual aggression (McGregor et al., 1998),
it is a major stretch to construe all negative evaluations as approach oriented.
MS has also been shown to increase distress when handling a flag or crucifix
disrespectfully (Greenberg et al., 1995), distancing from one’s own ethnic
group (Arndt et al., 2002), disdain for abstract art (Landau et al., 2006),
opposition to immigration (Weise, Arciszewski, Verlhiac, Pyszczynski, &
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Greenberg, 2012), derogation of a sexually provocative woman (Landau
et al., 2006), and giving harsher punishment to a moral transgressor
(Florian & Mikulincer, 1997), none of which can easily be construed as
approach-motivated behavior.
p0560 Taken literally, the RAM model predicts the opposite of what was found
in all these studies. Perhaps proponents would argue that these cases of overt
avoidance involve upholding values or standards of some sort, and that the
apparent avoidant nature of these attitudes and actions is ultimately serving
approach motives. But this sort of argument would obscure any meaning or
utility of the distinction between approach and avoidance, and illustrates the
looseness and inability to generate a priori predictions from this perspective.
It’s hard to imagine how a theory that views activation of approach motivation as the proximal source of relief from threat could generate any of
the predictions made by TMT, or any a priori predictions regarding specific
responses to particular threats (cf. Shepherd, Kay, Landau, & Keefer, 2011).
p0565 It is also important to recognize that most, if not all, behavior involves
simultaneous activation of both approach and avoidance systems. For example, theory and research (Wegner, 1994) suggest that suppressing unpleasant
thoughts (avoidance motivation) entails the generation of distractions
(approach). And pursuing most goals requires simultaneous avoidance of
appealing impediments to approaching the goal (Kuhl & Beckman,
1985)—as when avoiding extreme statements in order to craft a convincing
argument. Similarly, the proximal and distal defenses documented in the
TMT literature seem to involve coordinated activation of both approach
and avoidance motivation, as in the case of the proximal defense of intending
to go to the gym to exercise and the distal defense of supporting war to eliminate an enemy. Although one can assess the relative activation of brain
regions more associated with approach or avoidance, it is important to realize that most if not all behavior involves a blend of both approach and avoidance, and presumably activation of brain centers involved with both.
p0570 Tritt et al. (2012) argue that it is likely that the systems for responding to
complex abstract threats evolved in a way that built on earlier more primitive
systems for coping with more concrete threats. This is a good point with
which we concur. Although our original conceptualization of TMT didn’t
address the precursors upon which the terror management system was built,
we never claimed that it emerged out of nowhere; we provided a more thorough discussion of possible scenarios through which these processes might
have emerged among our ancestors in Pyszczynski and Kesebir (2012),
Pyszczynski et al. (2014), and Section 5.4. Au26
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p0575 Our perspective differs from that of Tritt et al. in placing much greater
emphasis on human innovation, cultural evolution, and the specific contents
of conscious and nonconscious ideation. Modern humans’ approach to dealing with death builds on the approach our ancestors invented that has been
passed down and modified over the millennia by further human innovations
that became institutionalized in our cultures. These cultural innovations
changed the environment to which human brains must adapt and thus likely
affected biological evolution as well. Importantly, though, being built upon
more primitive adaptations in no way implies that the terror management
system is the same as the various other systems that also built on these earlier
adaptations.
p0580 These general threat-compensation models are conceptualized at a different, more concrete, level of abstraction than TMT, focusing on neurological underpinnings and biological processes. For example, Tritt et al.
(2012, p. 716) describe their model as a “biologically informed, mechanistic
elucidation of threat-compensation processes” that provides an improvement over the “meta-physical explanations” (p. 727) provided by TMT.
Beyond the apparent misunderstanding of the term “meta-physics,” these
authors conflate reductionism with science. As many others have pointed
out before us, psychological processes cannot be reduced to or explained
by their neurological substrates (see, e.g., Jaynes, 1976). And although progressing at an impressive pace, current understanding of how neurological
locations and events relate to psychological processes involving meanings
and behavior is still in its infancy and far from able to produce confident conclusions regarding subtle distinctions in meaning, beliefs, or values.
s0145 8. ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH AND THEORY
DEVELOPMENT
p0585 Although there are many issues for which further research and theoretical specification are needed, here we briefly discuss what we see as some
of the most pressing ones.
s0150 8.1 The Relation Between Thoughts of Death and Other
Threats
p0590 The biggest point of contention between proponents and critics of TMT is
how the problem of death relates to other threats. We presented our analysis
of this relation and discussed the major problems with alternative accounts in
previous sections. But there is still much to be learned about this relation.
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Perhaps the most pressing question is whether the mechanism through
which MS produces its effects is the same as those invoked by other threats.
Although the evidence is mixed as to whether other threats produce the
same or different effects as MS, and there is compelling evidence that MS
effects are at least partially mediated by DTA, the mechanisms through
which other threats produce their effects is less clear. What role, if any, does
DTA play in these other effects? If DTA does not mediate them, does
increased accessibility of thoughts about these other threats play a role? If
so, do defensive responses reduce the accessibility of those thoughts, as they
do for death-related thoughts? Or are responses to other types of threats the
result of a general increase in epistemic activity that spills over to the domain
in which effects are assessed?
p0595 A related question is whether the time course for responses to other types
of threats is the same or different from that typically found for MS—and, if
not, what that tells us about the process. Because some level of delay and
distraction has been included in most studies of the effects of other threats,
it is unclear whether similar or different effects emerge immediately after
exposure to them. Recent research also shows that threats to meaning
increase DTA and worldview defense only when they produce increases
in self-reported negative affect (Weber, Zhang, Schimel, & Blatter,
2015). Studies directly comparing the immediate and delayed effects of
MS and various other threats on DTA, the accessibility of other relevant
cognitions, affect, and defensive responses would be especially useful for
addressing this question.
p0600 A related question concerns the growing body of research documenting
effects of thoughts of threatening events that are directly associated with
death but also involve other threatening content, often of a political or ideological nature. For example, it has been shown that reminders of terrorist
attacks (e.g., Landau et al., 2004), bombed out buildings (Vail, Arndt,
et al., 2012; Vail, Juhl, et al., 2012), nuclear accidents (Selimbegovic´,
Chatard, Er-Rafiy, & Pyszczynski, 2014), natural disasters (Kesebir &
Pyszczynski, 2014), and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and Japanese occupation of Korea (e.g., Hirschberger, Lifshin, Seeman, Ein-Dor, &
Pyszczynski, 2014) produce increases in various forms of worldview defense
similar to that produced by MS. Some of these studies show that thoughts of
these events also increase DTA (e.g., Landau et al., 2004); one showed that
defense was mediated by DTA, but another did not find such mediation
(Selimbegovic´ et al., 2014). Although we suspect that death-related ideation
is part of what drives these effects, these other threats are likely to also
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activate thoughts and emotions regarding the specific type of event in question. As Arndt et al. (2002) have shown, other thoughts activated along with
those directly related to death appear to influence the specific domains from
which security is sought. Specification of the dynamics of these processes is
an important issue for further theory development and research.
s0155 8.2 Variations in How Death Is Construed
p0605 Because TMT emphasizes the role of unconscious death-related ideation,
we’ve tended to assume that it is simply the idea of death or nonexistence
from which people must defend themselves. The fact that in our first few
studies, we attempted but did not find relations between the content of participants’ responses to the open-ended MS manipulation and the level of
worldview defense they exhibited supported this assumption; so we soon
stopped looking for such relations. But failing to find effects does not mean
they do not exist. More recent findings of cultural differences in some aspects
of responses to death-related thoughts have led to us to think about the possibility that different ways of construing death have different consequences.
Indeed, Eastern religions often view life and death as part of the same process
and advocate accepting one’s mortality as a major spiritual task. In a related
vein, many (but certainly not all) patients with terminal diseases report having made peace with their mortality, and research has shown that older adults
generally report less fear of death than middle-aged persons (Fortner &
Niemeyer, 1999) and that older adults with high levels of executive functioning do not show the harsher responses to moral transgressors and
worldview criticizers that younger persons do, though they are still affected
by them (e.g., Maxfield et al., 2007). This suggests that investigating the
consequences of different ways of construing death may be a fruitful avenue
for future research.
p0610 Recent studies conducted in the Netherlands (Doojse, Rutjens, &
Pyszczynski, 2015) show that a substantial minority of participants report
feelings of acceptance or curiosity when reminded of death and that these
responses are associated with lower levels of worldview defense. Followup experiments showed that MS inductions that encourage participants to
think about death with acceptance or curiosity eliminate the effects found
with the more typical open-ended MS induction, and also increase organ
donation willingness. This line of research raises the question of whether
such inductions actually eliminate death-related fear, albeit temporarily,
or if these ways of thinking about death are a particularly effective way of
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defending against it. Interestingly, Abdollahi (2006) began his exploration of
terror management processes when he noted that many of the Muslim students in his classes responded to his presentation of TMT by insisting that
they actually look forward to death because of the paradise that they were
certain would follow; similar responses are sometimes found in American
students’ responses to MS in our own studies. Despite this, Abdollahi
(2006) replicated five different types of defensive responses to MS among
Iranian students and community dwellers. This suggests that the relation
between conscious construal of death and how it affect one’s behavior is
likely a complex one—and certainly worthy of additional investigation.
s0160 8.3 Where Will People Turn for Protection?
p0615 TMT posits that people protect themselves from death-related anxiety by
maintaining faith in and living up to the standards of their cultural worldviews. But cultural worldviews are complex, multifaceted constructions that
each person abstracts from the diverse range of information to which they
are exposed and experiences they have over the course of their lives. What
determines which of these diverse worldview elements a person will turn to
for protection in any given situation? This question is at the root of the discussion over whether MS produces a shift toward conservative and dogmatic
attitudes, which tend to provide high levels of structure and certainty, or
toward one’s preexisting worldview, which presumably was adopted
because of the security it provides (e.g., Anson et al., 2009; Jost,
Fitzsimons, & Kay, 2004).
p0620 It has already been well established that individual differences in worldview and sources of self-esteem, along with recent priming of specific
worldview elements, are important predictors of these responses. We have
also assumed that the relative importance of particular beliefs and values to
one’s worldview is a major determinant. But a more precise conceptual
answer to this question would be that people gravitate toward whatever
worldview elements are most associated with safety and security. This probably depends on features inherent in the worldview element as well as one’s
socialization history with respect to the diverse teachings of one’s culture.
For example, research shows that behaviors related to morality are especially
important determinants of how people evaluate both self and others (e.g.,
Skitka et al., 2005). We suspect this is because most cultures teach that one’s
moral actions are the most important, if not the only, factor that determines
one’s eligibility for literal immortality. It is also likely that one’s parents,
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Thirty Years of Terror Management Theory 57
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significant others, and the culture at large place different emphasis on particular beliefs and values, which influences the extent to which one relies
on them for security. A reliable way of measuring or manipulating the security value of particular worldview elements would be an important step
toward making more precise predictions about where people will turn for
protection when existential threat is heightened.
s0165 8.4 Alternate Ways to Feel Protected from Death
p0625 Related to the issue of how a given individual will respond to the threat of
mortality is the nature of the interplay between different forms of immortality striving. The first elaborate written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, concerned Gilgamesh’s search for immortality through an afterlife, through an
elixir that eliminates death, and through accomplishments that yielded lasting fame. And humans have been seeking literal immortality, eternal life
without death, and symbolic immortality ever since.
p0630 TMT and research have focused primarily on striving for literal and symbolic immortality, and found plenty of evidence for both. In addition,
Dechesne et al. (2003) demonstrated that increased confidence in literal
immortality reduces self-esteem striving in response to reminders of death.
Furthermore, recent studies (Lifshin, Weise, Soenke, & Greenberg, 2015)
have shown that literal immortality via an immortal soul reduces defensive
reactions to the prospect of humanity becoming extinct. These findings suggest that these two forms of immortality belief can substitute for each other.
p0635 Recently, we have started to examine Gilgamesh’s third plan for immortality, finding a way not to die. Indeed, recent advances in understanding the
biological processes through which death occurs have made it now possible
to resuscitate people up to 4 h after clinical death (Parnia, 2013). Biologists
have been making strides toward the possibility of indefinite life extension
(ILE) by increasing our understanding and hopefully eventually controlling
the biological processes that produce aging (De Grey & Rae, 2008). While
debates rage about the feasibility and desirability of ILE, we have begun to
study the psychological impact of considering this as a plausible possibility.
Preliminary findings suggest that: as investment in literal immortality beliefs
increases, support for ILE decreases; American males are generally more on
board the ILE train, whereas women are more supportive of literal immortality; if ILE is presented as plausible, people tend to become less invested in
literal immortality beliefs; MS increases people’s ambivalence about lifeextending technologies, making them both view them as more plausible
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and have more doubts about the objectivity of the scientists exploring these
ideas. These studies just scratch the surface of the ways in which hopes of
ILE, literal, and symbolic immortality may interact. As we approach this
brave new world, we believe it is important to continue assessing the relations among these approaches to quelling the terror of death.
s0170 8.5 Variation in Anxiety-Buffer Functioning and Psychological
Disorder
p0640 The TMT analysis of psychological dysfunction posits that ineffective
anxiety-buffer functioning is responsible for many psychological disorders,
and research has shown that PTSD and depression are associated with the
absence of normal defenses to MS (Pyszczynski & Kesebir, 2011; Simon,
Arndt, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1998). But it has yet to be
determined whether these atypical responses are directly related to an
overabundance of anxiety or the specific psychological symptoms that we
claim are driven by this lack of protection. There is some evidence that people with phobias and obsessive–compulsive tendencies exhibit these symptoms to a greater extent after being reminded of their mortality. But these
studies reflect only a few disorders directly related to anxiety—are other dysfunctional behaviors the result of ineffective terror management? And many
questions remain about the antecedents and consequences of such dysfunctional responses to threat. It also seems likely that people without symptoms
of significant psychological disorders vary in the effectiveness of their
anxiety-buffering system. New strategies for assessing and manipulating
anxiety-buffer effectiveness are needed to further research on these issues.
s0175 8.6 Better Modes of Dealing with Death?
p0645 From the perspective of TMT, the fear of death is a universal aspect of
human experience, as is the system of managing it through worldviews,
self-esteem, and close interpersonal attachments. But as documented in
diverse lines of research, there is considerable variability in how individuals
within and across cultures approach this problem. Although we claim that
some version of a system for managing the fear of death is present in all cultures and passed on to children through the socialization process, we suspect
that some people transcend the anxiety-buffering systems of their cultures
and find new, perhaps better, ways of dealing with the problem of death.
Finding better ways to live life without fear or its troublesome consequences
has been the explicit goal of all religions and many philosophies probably
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since the earliest days of our species. This elusive goal continues to be pursued today, in the form of psychotherapies, programs for psychological harmony, spiritual growth, and self-actualization. Perhaps the ultimate question
for future exploration regarding the existential quagmire of mortality is
whether any of these practices actually help, and, if so, how they do so.
s0180 9. CONCLUSION
p0650 TMT has come a long way over the past 30 years. Both terror management research and the number of researchers contributing to it have been
increasing exponentially in the last decade (see tmt.missouri.edu). In fact,
when we entered “terror management” in a Psych Info search, we were startled to find, from January 2014 to January 2015 alone, 53 publications
(excluding dissertations). Although a handful of these were not empirical
papers, these publications reported a total of 83 supportive studies! Clearly,
to paraphrase a popular paraphrase of Mark Twain, “rumors of TMT’s death
are greatly exaggerated.” The theory and associated research programs continue to engage the interest of scholars in myriad academic disciplines; generate testable hypotheses that produce empirical findings in accord with
theory; widen the scope of conceptual domains to which TMT is now
applied (e.g., law, consumer behavior, political preferences, robotics); and
advance the ongoing refinement of the theory in light of novel empirical
findings. Like all theories, there will come a time when TMT will be
supplanted by a more potent theoretical perspective, but in the meantime,
the theory is continuing to contribute to progress in understanding important aspects of human behavior"

Hi, using this reference, can you please explain how your Terror Management Theory draws on or runs against at least one major framework or trend in psychology. What concepts does it draw on or resemble? What does it reject? Do this in 100 words