Terror Management Theory

Theory and Background

In the early 1980s, while graduate students studying social psychology at the University of Kansas, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski met often and pondered these questions about the function of culture and self-esteem. Shortly thereafter, the trio discovered Ernest Becker's Pulitzer Prize-winning text, The Denial of Death. In this book, Becker postulates that the human species faces a unique existential dilemma. On the one hand, humans share with other animals instincts aimed at biological survival, yet, on the other hand, humans’ cognitive capabilities render them aware of the inevitably of their own death. This awareness, agued Becker, posed the potential to paralyze people with terror. However, rather than experience the terror, argued Becker, humans used these same cognitive capabilities that render them aware of the threat to contrive a solution: To the extent that individuals can conceive of themselves as beings of value in a symbolic world, rather than animals fated only to obliteration upon death, they can ameliorate the existential terror. The psychological insights of Becker's ideas were apparent to Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, thus they went on to develop TMT to provide an empirical framework to test these ideas in the context of social psychological research.

In developing TMT, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski began with two fundamental assumptions. First, Becker's perspective implies that faith [Page 828]in a worldview and maintenance of self-esteem should buffer anxiety and protect people from death-related concerns. The TMT team called this the anxiety-buffer hypothesis of TMT. They further deduced that if, as Becker indicated, worldviews and self-esteem provide protection against death-related concerns, then reminding individuals of death should increase their need for these structures. This was labeled the mortality salience hypothesis, because to test it, thoughts about mortality would have to be rendered salient. In conjunction with numerous colleagues, the trio tested these, and other, propositions, resulting in one of the most prolific programs of theory-driven empirical research in all of social psychology.

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