Terror Management Theory

Definition

Terror management theory is an empirically supported theory developed to explain the psychological functions of self-esteem and culture. The theory proposes that people strive to sustain the belief they are significant contributors to a meaningful universe to minimize the potential for terror engendered by their awareness of their own mortality. Cultures provide their members with meaning-imbuing worldviews and bases of selfesteem to serve this terror management function.

Background

Former University of Kansas graduate student colleagues Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski developed terror management theory in 1984. These social psychologists were searching for answers to two basic questions about human behavior: Why do people need self-esteem? Why do different cultures have such a difficult time coexisting peacefully? The trio found potential answers to these questions in the writings of anthropologist Ernest Becker. Becker integrated insights from psychoanalysis, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy into a framework for understanding the motives that drive human behavior. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski designed terror management theory to summarize, simplify, and elaborate Becker's scholarly synthesis into a unified theory from which they could generate new testable hypotheses regarding the psychological functions of self-esteem and culture, and thereby address the two basic questions they originally posed.

The Theory

Terror management theory begins with two simple assumptions. The first is that, being evolved animals with a wide range of biological systems serving survival, humans have a strong desire to stay alive. The second is that, unlike other animals, humans have evolved cognitive abilities to think abstractly; to think in terms of past, present, and future; and to be aware of their own existence. Although these cognitive abilities provide many adaptive advantages, they have led to the realization that humans are mortal, vulnerable to all sorts of threats to continued existence and that death, which thwarts the desire to stay alive, is inevitable. According to the theory, the juxtaposition of the desire to stay alive with the knowledge of one's mortality creates an ever-present potential to experience existential terror, the fear of no longer existing. To keep the potential terror concerning mortality at bay, people need to sustain faith in a meaning-providing cultural worldview and the belief they are significant contributors to that meaningful reality (self-esteem). By psychologically living in a world of absolute meaning and enduring significance, people can obscure the possibility that they are really just transient animals in a purposeless universe destined only to absolute annihilation upon death.

The terror management functions of worldviews and self-esteem emerge over the course of childhood. Parents are the initial basis of security for the small vulnerable child and convey the core concepts and values of the prevailing cultural worldview. Throughout socialization, religious, social, and educational institutions reinforce and further elaborate this worldview. As part of this process, parents impose conditions of worth on the child that reflect the culture's customs and standards of value. These conditions must be met to sustain the parental love and protection and, later, the approval of one's peers, teachers, and cultural ideals and authority figures. In this way, believing in and living up to the values of the culture confer self-esteem and become the individual's basis of [Page 980]psychological security. As the child matures, the limits of the parents become apparent and the basis of security gradually shifts to the culture's broader spiritual and secular ideals and figures. Each cultural worldview offers its own bases of self-esteem, such that what bolsters self-esteem in one culture might not in another.

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