StylesGrant Posted July 25, 2014 Posted July 25, 2014 In social psychology, terror management theory (TMT) proposes a basic psychological conflict that results from having a desire to live but realizing that death is inevitable. This conflict produces terror, and is believed to be unique to human beings. Moreover, the solution to the conflict is also generally unique to humans: culture. According to TMT, cultures are symbolic systems that act to provide life with meaning and value. Cultural values therefore serve to manage the terror of death by providing life with meaning.[1][2] The theory was originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski.[1] The simplest examples of cultural values which manage the terror of death are those that purport to offer literal immortality (e.g. belief in afterlife, religion).[3] However, TMT also argues that other cultural values – including those that are seemingly unrelated to death – offer symbolic immortality. For example, value of national identity,[4] posterity,[5] cultural perspectives on sex,[6] and human superiority over animals[6] have all been linked to death concerns in some manner. In many cases these values are thought to offer symbolic immortality by providing the sense that one is part of something greater that will ultimately outlive the individual (e.g. country, lineage, species). Because cultural values determine that which is meaningful, they are also the basis for self-esteem. TMT describes self-esteem as being the personal, subjective measure of how well an individual is living up to their cultural values.[2] Like cultural values, self-esteem acts to protect one against the terror of death. However, it functions to provide one's personal life with meaning, while cultural values provide meaning to life in general. TMT is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound – albeit subconscious – anxiety in people that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, self-esteem provides a buffer against death-related anxiety. Background[edit] The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. Ernest Becker, 1973[7] Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker asserts in his 1973 book The Denial of Death that humans, as intelligent animals, are able to grasp the inevitability of death. They therefore spend their lives building and believing in cultural elements that illustrate how to make themselves stand out as individuals and give their lives significance and meaning. Death creates an anxiety in humans; it strikes at unexpected and random moments, and its nature is essentially unknowable, causing people to spend most of their time and energy to explain, forestall, and avoid it.[8] Becker expounded upon the previous writings of Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Norman O. Brown, and Otto Rank. According to clinical psychiatrist Morton Levitt, Becker replaces the Freudian preoccupation with sexuality with the fear of death as the primary motivation in human behavior.[9] People desire to think of themselves as beings of value and worth with a feeling of permanence, a concept in psychology known as self-esteem, that somewhat resolves the realization that people may be no more important than any other living thing. Becker refers to high self-esteem as heroism: the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child's need for self-esteem as the condition for his life. Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning.[10] The terror management theory suggests that people's behavior is dependent upon fear; thus, support for the theory can be seen by examining people's reactions to death and their fear of death. Research not only shows people's reactions to the fear of death, but to suffering as well. Death was welcomed in some cases, by patients and hospicevolunteers, if it meant an end to suffering.[11] The reasons behind people's decisions regarding their own health can be explored through a terror management health model, which has three implications. First, consciousness of death leads people to try to remove all thoughts of death. Secondly, unconscious death thoughts can result in actions taken upon self-esteem as opposed to bodily health. Thirdly, preoccupation with one's physical body can hinder decision-making abilities regarding healthful behavioral choices.[12] Evolutionary backdrop[edit]Terror Management theorists consider TMT to be compatible with the theory of evolution:[13] Specific fears of things that threaten a human's continued existence have an adaptive function and helped facilitate the survival of ancestors’ genes. However generalized existential anxiety resulting from the clash between a desire for life and awareness of the inevitability of death is neither adaptive nor selected for. TMT views existential anxiety as an unfortunate byproduct of these two highly adaptive human proclivities rather than as an adaptation that evolution selected for its advantages. Just like bipedalism presents problems together with benefits, this anxiety occurs with the existence of human higher mental faculties. Anxiety in response to the inevitability of death threatened to undermine adaptive functioning and therefore needed amelioration. TMT posits that humankind used the same intellectual capacities that gave rise to this problem to fashion cultural beliefs and values that provided protection against this potential anxiety. TMT considers these cultural beliefs and values adaptive—even the unpleasant and frightening ones – only in that they manage potential death anxiety in a way that promotes beliefs and behaviors that facilitated the functioning and survival of the collective. Originally, the emergence of morality evolved to facilitate co-existence within groups, which together with language, served more pragmatic functions. However, the struggle to deny the finality of death, co-opted and changed these primitive functions. Neanderthals might have begun burying their dead as a means of avoiding unpleasant odors, disease-infested parasites, or dangerous scavengers. However, during the Upper Paleolithic era, these pragmatic burial practices appear to have become superimposed with layers of ritual and supernatural beliefs, suggested by the elaborate decoration of bodies with thousands of beads or other markers and including food and other necessities for an afterlife within the burial chamber. Hunter-gatherers began using their emerging cognitive abilities to understand their world and facilitate solving practical problems to help meet basic needs for nutrition, mates, and other resources before their cognitive abilities had evolved to the point where explicit death awareness arose. But once this awareness materialized, the potential for terror that it created put pressure on emerging conceptions of reality so that any formation that was to be widely accepted by the masses needed to provide a means of managing this terror. Evolutionary history also indicates that evolutionarily "the costs of ignoring threats have outweighed the costs of ignoring opportunities for self-development."[14] TMT and self-esteem[edit]Self-esteem lies at the heart of TMT, and is a fundamental part of its main experimental paradigms. TMT, fundamentally, seeks to elucidate the causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem, and theoretically, it draws heavily from Ernest Becker’s conceptions of culture and self-esteem (Becker, 1971;[15] Becker, 1973[16]). TMT does not just attempt to explain what self-esteem is, but rather tries to account for why we need self-esteem, and what psychological functions it may serve.[17] The answer, according to TMT, is that self-esteem is used as a buffer for people to help them cope with anxiety; it is a coping mechanism set in place to help control their terror, along with realizing that humans are animals just trying to manage the universe around them. That is the "why". The "what" for TMT is that self-esteem is a sense of personal value, that is obtained by believing in two things: the validity of one’s cultural worldview, and that one is living up to standards that are part of the worldview.[17] Critically, Hewstone et al. (2002) have questioned the causal direction between self-esteem and death-anxiety, asking questions such as, if people's need for self-esteem comes from the overall desire to reduce their death anxiety, or if it is the opposite.[18] Individuals' reduction of death anxiety is coming from their overall need to increase their self-esteem in a positive manner.[18] TMT and mortality salience[edit]The mortality salience hypothesis (MS) states that if indeed one’s cultural worldview, or their self-esteem serves a death-denying function, then threatening these constructs should produce defenses aimed at restoring psychological equanimity (i.e., returning the individual to a state of feeling invulnerable). In the MS paradigm, these "threats" are simply experimental reminders of one’s own death. This can, and has, taken many different forms in a variety of study paradigms (e.g., asking participants to write about their own death;[1] conducting the experiment near funeral homes or cemeteries;[22] having participants watch graphic depictions of death,[23] etc.). Like the other TMT hypotheses, the literature supporting the MS hypothesis is vast and diverse. For a meta analysis of MS research, see Burke et al. (2010).[24] Experimentally, the MS hypothesis has been tested in close to 200 empirical articles.[24] After being asked to write about their own death (vs. a neutral, non-death control topic, such as dental pain), and then following a brief delay (distal, worldview/self-esteem defenses work the best after a delay; see Greenberg et al. (1994)[23] for a discussion), the defenses are measured. In one early TMT study assessing the MS hypothesis, Greenberg et al. (1990)[4] had Christian participants evaluate other Christian and Jewish students that were similar demographically, but differed in their religious affiliation. After being reminded of their death (experimental MS induction), Christian participants evaluated fellow Christians more positively, and Jewish participants more negatively, relative to the control condition.[25] Conversely, bolstering self-esteem in these scenarios leads to less worldview defense and derogation of dissimilar others.[25] Death thought accessibility[edit]Another paradigm that TMT researchers use to get at unconscious concerns about death is what is known as the death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis. Essentially, the DTA hypothesis states that if individuals are motivated to avoid cognitions about death, and they avoid these cognitions by espousing a worldview or by buffering their self-esteem, then when threatened, an individual should possess more death-related cognitions (e.g., thoughts about death, and death-related stimuli) than they would when not threatened.[29] The DTA hypothesis has its origins in work by Greenberg et al. (1994)[23] as an extension of their earlier terror management hypotheses (i.e., the anxiety buffer hypothesis and the mortality salience hypothesis). The researchers reasoned that if, as indicated by Wegner’s research on thought suppression (1994; 1997), thoughts that are purposely suppressed from conscious awareness are often brought back with ease, then following a delay death-thought cognitions should be more available to consciousness than (a) those who keep the death-thoughts in their consciousness the whole time, and (b) those who suppress the death-thoughts but are not provided a delay. That is precisely what they found. However, other psychologists have failed to replicate these findings.[30] In these initial studies (i.e., Greenberg et al. (2004); Arndt et al. (1997)[31]), and in numerous subsequent DTA studies, the main measure of DTA is a word fragment task, whereby participants can complete word fragments in distinctly death-related ways (e.g., coff_ _ as coffin, not coffee) or in non death-related ways (e.g., sk_ _l as skill, not skull).[32] If death-thoughts are indeed more available to consciousness, then it stands to reason that the word fragments should be completed in a way that is semantically related to death. TMT and leadership[edit]It has been suggested that culture provides meaning, organization, and a coherent world view that diminishes the psychological terror caused by the knowledge of eventual death. The terror management theory can help to explain why a leader's popularity can grow substantially during times of crisis. When a follower's mortality is made prominent they will tend to show a strong preference for iconic leaders. An example of this occurred when George W. Bush's approval rating jumped almost 50 percent following theSeptember 11 attacks in the United States. As Forsyth (2009) posits, this tragedy made U.S. citizens aware of their mortality, and Bush provided an antidote to these existential concerns by promising to bring justice to the terrorist group responsible for the attacks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory 1
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