Handbook of Terror Management Theory

Clay Routledge, Matthew Vess

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780128118443
• eBook ISBN: 9780128118450
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Handbook of Terror Management Theory provides an overview of Terror Management Theory (TMT), including critical research derived from the theory, recent research that has expanded and refined the theory, and the many ways the theory has been utilized to understand domains of human social life. The book uses TMT as a lens to help understand human relationships to nature, cultural worldviews, the self, time, the body, attachment, group identification, religion and faith, creativity, personal growth, and the brain. The first section reviews theoretical and methodological issues, the second focuses on basic research showing how TMT enhances our understanding of a wide range of phenomena, and the third section, Applications, uses TMT to solve a variety of real world problems across different disciplines and contexts, including health behavior, aging, psychopathology, terrorism, consumerism, the legal system, art and media, risk-taking, and communication theory. - Examines the three critical hypotheses behind Terror Management Theory (TMT) - Distinguishes proximal and distal responses to death-thoughts - Provides a practical toolbox for conducting TMT research - Covers the Terror Management Health Model - Discusses the neuroscience of fear and anxiety - Identifies how fear motivates consumer behavior - Relates fear of death to psychopathologies

Chapter 1

A Consideration of Three Critical Hypotheses

Jeff Schimel¹, Joseph Hayes² and Michael Sharp¹, ¹Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, ²Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Canada

Abstract

The crowning achievement of terror management theory (TMT) was that it formalized the broad theorizing of Ernest Becker into specific hypotheses that could be tested through experimentation. To date, evidence consistent with three broad hypotheses has provided strong support for TMT’s core postulates. In this chapter we provide a sweeping overview of those three hypotheses and discuss the evidence to support them. First, we discuss the mortality salience hypothesis, which states that activating thoughts of death should elicit responses aimed at amplifying the strength of psychological structures (e.g., self-esteem) that protect people from death anxiety. Second, we discuss the death-thought accessibility hypothesis, which states that threatening/weakening structures that protect people from death anxiety (e.g., self-esteem) should directly increase the mental accessibility of death-related concerns. Third, we discuss the anxiety-buffer hypothesis, which states that amplifying structures that protect people from death anxiety (e.g., self-esteem) should mitigate negative reactions to reminders of mortality. Finally, we present a series of additional hypotheses concerning the role of immortality in people’s need to manage thoughts and concerns about death. In presenting these immortality postulates, we demonstrate how TMT’s three critical hypotheses continue to generate new and interesting research directions.

Keywords

Terror management theory; cultural worldview; self-esteem; mortality salience; immortality; death-thought accessibility; death anxiety

Introduction

In his lectures and writings on theory evaluation, Kuhn (1977) identified several criteria scientists should consider when choosing among theories that compete to explain the same phenomena. One of the criterions he discussed was termed, fruitfulness. According to Kuhn, “a theory should be fruitful of new research findings: It should, that is, disclose new phenomena or previously unnoted relationships among those already known.” On this standard, terror management theory (TMT) fares quite well. Since it was introduced in 1986, TMT has led to a number of novel findings concerning the psychological function of self-esteem and cultural worldviews. These discoveries have come from hundreds of studies conducted over the last three decades testing TMT’s three key hypotheses: (1) the mortality salience (MS) hypothesis, (2) the death-thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis, and (3) the anxiety-buffer hypothesis. In the pages that follow, we review the various studies supporting each of the three hypotheses, with an eye toward some of the particularly novel, counterintuitive findings that have been revealed. Following this review, we use TMT’s three key hypotheses to generate a series of testable predictions about the role of immortality in people’s defense of the cultural worldview and pursuit of self-esteem. To date, only a handful of studies have directly examined immortality as a terror management motive, which is somewhat surprising given that a desire for death-transcendence is a core component of the theory. We begin with a brief overview of TMT.

Terror Management Theory

Building on the work of the late cultural anthropologist, Becker (1962/1971, 1973, 1975), TMT posits that a key difference between Homo sapiens sapiens and other organisms is the size and complexity of the brain. This evolved complexity afforded humans the intellectual capacity to be aware of their own existence and of the passage of time. These intellectual proclivities, among others such as language, provided humans with a number of survival advantages in terms of anticipating future outcomes, planning, cooperating, and overcoming environmental challenges. Yet, these advanced abilities also came with a downside: the capacity to ponder one’s own existence combined with the ability to think about the future made humans aware of their inevitable death. TMT asserts that the knowledge of one’s own mortality is problematic because it conflicts with a basic drive to stay alive that humans share with all other living organisms. Knowing that one is destined to die, coupled with a drive for continued life, thus creates a potential for existential terror that other animals likely do not possess.

The Role of Cultural Worldviews and Self-Esteem

According to TMT, if people were to experience existential terror unabated it would interfere with many effective forms of thought and behavior (see Chapter 19, this volume). Thus, humans developed a defensive psychological system geared to keeping thoughts and concerns about death away from consciousness so as to limit the potential for debilitating death anxiety. The primary way humans manage the fear of death is through large-scale cultural belief systems (i.e., cultural worldviews) and self-esteem. Cultural worldviews are humanly constructed, shared, symbolic conceptions of reality that infuse human existence with a sense of meaning, order, and permanence. Self-esteem is the general sense that one is heroic within the context of the cultural meaning system. Thus, people acquire self-esteem by living up to specific contingencies of value that are prescribed by the culture but that are integrated into a unique, individualized version of the worldview by each person.

This analysis suggests that there should be considerable variability, across cultures and individuals, in the particular contingencies of worth the individual pursues in order to feel heroic. Ultimately, maintaining faith in a cultural worldview and self-esteem functions to alleviate the fear of inevitable death by providing individuals with a sense of death-transcendence, or immortality, which can be literal or symbolic. Literal immortality refers to the belief in some form of an afterlife. Symbolic immortality refers to symbolic extensions of the self (e.g., the family lineage, works of art, or written works) that persist within the culture after one’s physical death. From this view, self-esteem is the sense that one is on a path to achieving death-transcendence by living up to the particular standards of value prescribed by the culture.

Development of the Self-Esteem Motive

Another important component of TMT is its analysis of how the two psychological structures, cultural worldviews and self-esteem, obtain their anxiety-buffering properties over the course of child development. This analysis draws from John Bowlby’s work on the attachment bond observed among mammals and especially primates. Before human infants have the cognitive capacity to understand their mortality, they nevertheless experience innate fear in response to anything that could end their existence (strangers, the dark, ferocious animals) and prolonged separation from attachment figures. This experience of fear is unpleasant and thus motivates the infant to seek close proximity to attachment figures, which alleviates the fear. Thus, early on in development, fear is reduced through close, soothing contact with attachment figures (e.g., parents). However, later in development, parents begin to place expectations on the child to act in certain ways. When the child goes against these expectations, parents may express disapproval, withdraw signs of affection, or dispense punishment. Similarly, when the child is successful in meeting parental expectations, parents may express approval and offer affectionate praise.

These experiences compose the early stages of the socialization process in which the child learns that being “bad” and breaking parental standards leads to a feeling of vulnerability and heightened fear, whereas being “good” and meeting parental standards leads to safety and the abatement of fear. This progression from attachment to socialization, in which the child internalizes and follows parental standards of value to maintain emotional closeness to parental figures, denotes the emergence of self-esteem as a symbolic, standard-based psychological structure that functions to manage the child’s basic fears and anxieties. Thus, the self-esteem system for managing fear develops on the heels of the earlier attachment mechanism.

Later in development, with increasing cognitive complexity, children develop a mature understanding of death as biological, universal, and inevitable. At the same time, the child is also coming to the realization that once-seemingly omnipotent parents are, in fact, fallible and mortal and thus incapable of protecting him or her from the ultimate threat of inevitable death. These budding realizations are thought to trigger the child’s need for a broader source of security beyond that provided by parents. Children begin to internalize and live up to the ideals and teachings of the cultural worldview; that is, they strive to attain culturally valued occupations, roles, statuses, relationships, group identifications, and achievements. This transition from parents as a secure base to the cultural worldview is usually seamless because parents and other important caregivers serve as agents of the culture. Moreover, the final shift to investment in the cultural meaning system allows for the broadest form of security, one capable of providing death-transcendence.

Empirical Support

The Mortality Salience Hypothesis

One of the central predictions made by TMT is that reminders of death should increase people’s motivation to uphold cultural worldview beliefs and pursue self-esteem. In other words, if cultural worldviews and self-esteem function to reduce concerns about death, then reminding people of death should increase their need for these protective psychological structures. The lion’s share of research in support of TMT has tested variants of this hypothesis, commonly referred to as the mortality salience (MS) hypothesis. These studies show that briefly reminding individuals of their mortality causes them to exhibit higher levels of worldview defense and to pursue activities that have the potential to increase their self-esteem. Support for the MS hypothesis has been obtained cross-culturally, that is, reminders of death have produced effects on worldview defense and self-esteem striving in both Western (United States, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Israel) and non-Western cultures (e.g., Japan, Iran, China, and India). Moreover, substantial bodies of evidence have found these effects to be specific to heightened accessibility of death-related thought and different from the effects of thinking of other aversive topics (e.g., uncertainty, social exclusion, intense physical pain, or a looming exam).

Mortality Salience Increases Defense of the Cultural Worldview

Worldview defense has been operationalized in many different ways. The most common is to ask research participants to evaluate an individual who supports (vs opposes) the participant’s worldview or who belongs to a similar (vs different) culture or group. More favorability toward the worldview supporter (vs detractor) is considered an indication of worldview defense. Another common method of assessing worldview defense is to ask participants to provide an evaluation of or assign a punishment to a person who has violated cultural standards of value, such as a lawbreaker or moral transgressor. A harsh evaluation or more severe punishment toward such individuals is thought to represent increased worldview defense. In other studies, worldview defense has been measured as more favorable evaluations of people and ideas that support the cultural worldview.

One of the first studies testing the MS hypothesis was done with municipal court judges in the city of Tucson, Arizona, and assessed worldview defense as punishment toward a lawbreaker. In this study, Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Lyon (1989) had judges review a case brief for a prostitution charge and suggest a bond amount for the accused after writing about their own death (vs not). If upholding the law is a central component of a judge’s worldview, then, per the MS hypothesis, judges who were reminded of their own death should defend their worldview by reacting more harshly toward those that break the law through suggesting a higher bond amount for the accused than those not reminded of their own death. The results supported this prediction. Judges in the MS condition suggested an average bond of $455, whereas the control judges suggested an average bond of only $50. In a second study, Rosenblatt et al. (1989) replicated this effect among university students, but MS only increased bail allocation among those who indicated in an earlier session that they disapproved of prostitution (i.e., those for whom prostitution represented a violation of their worldview). A third study assessed whether MS would increase affinity for a cultural hero. In this study, participants were reminded of their mortality (vs not...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1. A Consideration of Three Critical Hypotheses
• Chapter 2. Proximal and Distal Terror Management Defenses: A Systematic Review and Analysis
• Chapter 3. What’s Death Got to Do With It? Controversies and Alternative Theories
• Chapter 4. The Method Behind the Science: A Guide to Conducting Terror Management Theory Research
• Chapter 5. Terror Management Motivation Fuels Structure-Seeking
• Chapter 6. We Supernaturals: Terror Management and People’s Ambivalent Relationship With Nature
• Chapter 7. The Curse and the Blessing: The Self as Source of the Terror and the Primary Avenue for Managing It
• Chapter 8. Precious Time: The Role of Time and Temporal Thought in Managing Death Awareness
• Chapter 9. Terror Management Is for the Birds and the Bees: An Existential Perspective on the Threat Associated With Human Corporeality
• Chapter 10. An Attachment Perspective on Managing Death Concerns
• Chapter 11. Terror Management Theory and Religious Belief
• Chapter 12. Secular Cultural Worldviews
• Chapter 13. Terror Management Theory: A Theory of Psychological Well-Being
• Chapter 14. The Terror Management of Meaning and Growth: How Mortality Salience Affects Growth-Oriented Processes and the Meaningfulness of Life
• Chapter 15. Existential Neuroscience: A Review and Brain Model of Coping With Death Awareness
• Chapter 16. Physical Health Under the Shadow of Mortality: The Terror Management Health Model
• Chapter 17. Aging and Coping With Mortality: Understanding Attitudes About Aging and Age-Related Differences in Coping With Death
• Chapter 18. Terror Management Theory and Psychological Disorder: Ineffective Anxiety-Buffer Functioning as a Transdiagnostic Vulnerability Factor for Psychopathology
• Chapter 19. The Cycle of Intergroup Conflict: Terror Management in the Face of Terrorism and War
• Chapter 20. Consumer Culture as Worldview Defense: A Terror Management Perspective
• Chapter 21. Legal Applications of Terror Management Theory
• Chapter 22. Applying Terror Management Theory to Art, Film, and Media: A Theoretical and Empirical Review
• Chapter 23. The Terror Management Underpinnings of Risky Behavior
• Chapter 24. Meaning-Making, Communication, and Terror Management Processes
• Index