Terror Management Theory

Terror management theory (TMT) is a prominent theory in social psychology that holds the idea that basic motivation for human cognition and behavior is the fear of death. Based on Ernest Becker's ideas regarding human motivation, TMT was generated and published in the late 1980s by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon, and centers around the psychological mechanisms typically used to buffer the anxiety deriving from the awareness of one's own death. The authors assert that in order to avoid the feelings of helplessness and terror aroused by the knowledge of the inevitability of death, human beings have developed psychological mechanisms that help eliminate such thoughts from their consciousness. These symbolic defenses are conceptualized as a dual-process model of proximal and distal defenses, whereby proximal defenses consist of attempts to suppress thoughts of death, while distal defenses address the issue of death in a symbolic manner by modifying perceptions of the self and the world.

Most of the empirical work on TMT thus far has focused on two types of distal defenses. The first is based on validating one's cultural worldview, thereby providing a set of standards for values and behavior, as well as the promise of transcending death. The second is intended to increase self-esteem by living up to the standards prescribed by the culture. In other words, people are motivated to maintain faith in their cultural worldviews and satisfy the standards associated with these worldviews.

Accordingly, TMT has given rise to the mortality salience hypothesis, which holds that individuals exposed to reminders of death react positively to ideas and people that support and validate their cultural worldview, and they react negatively to ideas and people that deviate from it. Similarly, mortality salience is expected to lead to cognitive and behavioral efforts toward maintaining or enhancing self-esteem. This hypothesis has received extensive empirical support. In most studies, mortality salience is manipulated by using two openended questions: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die.” Other mortality salience manipulations have included proximity to a cemetery, films evoking thoughts of death, death anxiety scales, and exposure to subliminal primes of deathrelated words.

Research has shown that mortality salience leads people to oppose and even act aggressively toward others on the basis of political, religious, national, moral, and ideological differences, as well as to commend those who uphold their cultural values, such as turning a criminal in to the police. After exposure to a mortality salience induction, participants are also more willing to donate to charity, particularly charities that benefit their ingroup, indicate higher motivation to enlist in the army, and even show a tendency to sit closer to an ingroup than an outgroup member.

Moreover, several studies have found that awareness of death evokes a diverse set of both adaptive and maladaptive responses through which individuals seek to protect themselves from conscious and unconscious death-related cognition. Hence, some studies have found that in order to preserve or validate their self-esteem following a mortality salience induction, participants show higher intentions of keeping fit and other manifestations of positive health behavior, while other studies report a greater willingness to take risks, such driving recklessly and engaging in unsafe sex, along with the denial of vulnerability to health risks. The reactions were most often found to relate to the degree of the relevance of each behavior to the individual's self-esteem.

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