Practice Dying
A Summary of Terror Management Theory
As the philosopher Plato lay on his deathbed, he was asked to summarize his life’s work in a sentence. “Practice dying,” came his haunting reply. Centuries later, Montaigne wrote that “to philosophize is to learn to die.”
One of the most interesting bodies of research I have exhumed in my psychological reading is that surrounding a concept called terror management theory (TMT). As I learned, TMT was originally inspired by the work of Ernest Becker, who noted that humans have a unique relationship with death: not only do we inevitably die, we also have the ability to understand this fact.
On the plus side, this understanding theoretically gives us the ability to plan more intelligently, to manage risks, and make better choices in our lives. On the other hand, however, it also holds the potential to inspire existential terror at the thought of our one and only precious lives ending. Unfortunately, it is this latter potential which is more often realized.
As Becker writes in The Denial of Death, “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.” According to TMT, the idea of death is terrifying enough that it can significantly affect our attitudes and behavior—often in ways that are personally and socially detrimental. While Becker’s initial theory was an educated guess, modern TMT is based on decades of careful research.
In a typical TMT experiment, participants in a “mortality salience” condition complete a survey that, among many other unrelated questions, asks them to “Please describe the emotions or feelings you have when you think of your own death” and to “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die.” (Participants in a control condition are given the same survey, except with parallel questions about something other than death: experiencing dental pain, taking a final exam, etc.)
Then participants complete another survey, which serves as a delay between the death prompt and the actual task, so that thoughts of death are no longer conscious, but still highly accessible. Finally, participants engage in a supposedly unrelated task: analyzing court cases, evaluating the authors of essays they are asked to read, reporting their preferences, or something else.
Before I reveal the results of some of the most interesting TMT studies, put yourself in the shoes of someone in the mortality salience condition. You’ve answered two questions about your death, but they were buried in a survey with many unrelated questions, which was followed by another unrelated survey. You thought briefly about death five or ten minutes ago, but you are now having no conscious thoughts about death. What do you think? Are you completely, rationally yourself in that moment?
“Of course I am!” I can hear you say. (And in saying that, I’m right there with you!) But the research suggests—nay, insists—that we are both dead wrong. In that moment, despite the fact that consciously, we feel completely fine—in fact, when the delay task is a mood survey it shows we feel the same in the mortality salience condition as in the control condition—we are instead deeply, profoundly affected, incapable of acting as we normally would.
Take a study of American municipal court judges, who have sworn to uphold the pursuit of truth and justice. The judges were asked to set bail for a woman charged with prostitution. While judges in a control condition set bail at $50 on average, the average bail set by judges who were induced to a mortality salience condition was $455. Simply answering two questions about death among many others led the judges to set bail nine times higher!
A similar effect was found in American college students, but only those whose worldview included the judgment that prostitution is immoral. On the flip side, college students in a mortality salience condition recommended a significantly higher reward for a hero who upheld cultural values by reporting to the police that her neighbor was a wanted mugger ($3,476 for the mortality salience condition compared to $1,112 for the control condition).
While these results may seem unbelievable, they are right in line with terror management theorizing, which proposes that one of the primary ways we unconsciously deal with the existential terror of death is worldview defense. Knowing that physical immortality is impossible, we seek what Robert Jay Lifton calls symbolic immortality by becoming part of something that will live on after us. In this case, it is a culture, or worldview.
The problem with this is that even our culture or worldview is not guaranteed to live on forever. So while we are alive, we do everything we can to defend our worldview and give it the best chance of living on. We do so especially when we are reminded of our death. Thus, the TMT explanation for these results is that when confronted with our mortality, we become more defensive of our worldview, adoring heroes and deploring transgressors even more than we usually do. This is exactly what we observe.
In addition, while mortality salience leads us to defend our worldview in the pursuit of symbolic immortality, it also leads us believe that we have a better chance of symbolic immortality than we actually do by overestimating the degree to which others agree with us. In one study, participants in Germany and Colorado who held minority positions on issues of immigration reform and education policy estimated greater acceptance of their unpopular positions when they were interviewed while standing in front of a funeral parlor than when they were interviewed 100 meters down the sidewalk where their mortality wasn’t clearly in view.
Defending our worldview and assuming consensus for our view wouldn’t be a problem if we all shared a consensual worldview that was absolutely flawless. But of course we know that’s not the case. Even more troubling, then, is what happens when we are reminded of our mortality and presented with other worldviews. According to TMT, as subconsciously terrified worldview defenders, we find the existence of different worldviews threatening to our symbolic immortality, as they have the potential to displace our own worldview and terminate our influence once and for all. And while this may sound like crazy, unchecked theorizing, it is well supported by empirical evidence.
In one study, Christian students were asked to form impressions of other Christian students and of Jewish students. While the Christians in the control condition were commendably tolerant, evaluating Christian and Jewish students equally, Christians in the mortality salience condition were not. Christians reminded of their mortality gave especially positive evaluations of Christians and especially negative evaluations of Jewish students on multiple measures, including a general interpersonal attraction scale, and scales of stereotypical and non-stereotypical traits.
Additional research has shown that this effect is not limited to religious differences—it also applies to other differences in worldview. In another study, mortality salience led Americans to give especially positive evaluations of someone who offered praise for the American worldview, and especially negative evaluations of someone who criticized this worldview.
One study took it even further, and found that mortality salience actually encourages physical aggression toward worldview-threatening others. People who identified as moderately liberal and moderately conservative were first induced to a mortality salience condition with the standard questions, or to a control condition with questions about taking an exam. Next, they were asked to read an essay which derogated either liberals or conservatives. Finally, in a supposedly unrelated task in second, bogus study about “personality and food preferences,” the participants were asked to scoop out an amount of hot sauce to give the author of the essay—someone who they were told did not like spicy foods—to taste.
Those in the control condition dished out a similar amount of hot sauce for authors who threatened and supported their worldviews, but those in the mortality salience condition chose to give a worldview-threatening author twice as much hot sauce as a worldview-supporting author: 26 grams (about one shot) for the threat compared to 12 grams for the supporter!
Given that solving the essential problems we face in the world today will require increased international and intercultural cooperation and reconciliation of different worldviews, this tendency for mortality salience to entrench us in our own worldviews, distance ourselves from different others, and even show aggression toward those who do not share our views, is quite troubling.
While we have seen mortality salience deepen the divide between Us and Them, it turns out that these effects aren’t limited to human-human interactions. Reminders of our mortality can also change the way we interact with the world, deepening the divide between Humans and Nature. In a recent study, a mortality salience prompt led participants to show increased preference for an essay arguing that humans are unique over an essay arguing that humans are similar to other animals. In another study, participants who were reminded of their mortality rated cultivated landscapes as more beautiful, and natural landscapes as less beautiful, than control participants. (To be clear, all groups rated the natural landscapes as more beautiful than the cultivated ones, but the relative preference for natural over cultivated landscapes decreased significantly in the mortality salience condition.)
In addition to entrenching us in our worldview, and deepening the divide between Us and Them and Humans and Nature, research has shown that mortality salience can also prompt us to increase our desire for material wealth, and in turn, our physical impact on the environment. In two recent experiments, Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon clearly demonstrated that our mortality is at least one of the major root causes of materialism. In their first experiment, participants were asked to think about their financial expectations fifteen years in the future. Participants in the mortality salience condition expected to have higher salaries, more expensive homes, and larger investment portfolios, and to spend more on travel, clothing, entertainment, and leisure activities than control participants. In their second study, which involved a forest management game, participants in the mortality salience condition bid to cut down 27% more acres of forest than those in the control condition (62 acres vs. 49 acres, out of a possible 100 acres). Furthermore, a survey about the participants’ intentions demonstrated that the increased desire to cut down the forest was not the result of increased concern that other companies would cut more acres (i.e. “fear”), but was instead the result of an increased desire to make more profit than the other companies (i.e. “greed”).
If worldview defensiveness, distancing between Us and Them and Humans and Nature, and materialism are not enough, however, mortality salience has an additional effect that a student of Earth Systems finds troubling. On a planet where the human population of seven billion is already stressing the natural systems on which we ultimately depend to the point of disaster, reminders about our mortality significantly increase our desire to have children. In a recent study, simply asking two questions about death led participants to want an extra child! In the control condition, men wanted 2.00 children on average, and in the mortality salience condition, men wanted 2.78. The effect was the similar for women, 2.05 to 2.75, but only after they were primed to think that having children was compatible with having a career. For reference, an average of two children per couple will lead to population stabilization at nine billion people by 2050, and an average of three children will lead to exponential population growth on a path toward a doubling of population to 14 billion by 2050, and a ten-fold increase in population to 70 billion in 2150. Anything less than an average of two children will result in a smaller (and more easily sustained) population in the future. Thus, reminders of death essentially led these study participants to shift their vote from stabilization of the human population to exponential growth thereof, from nine billion people to fourteen billion people in 2050!
To be honest, if you asked me to list the five biggest problems in the world today, I don’t think I could do much better than: worldview defensiveness, Us vs. Them, Humans vs. Nature, materialism, and population growth, which are all worsened by mortality salience. To me, these impacts of mortality salience, brief reminders about death that have slipped into unconsciousness, are truly astonishing. So what are we to do about this pressing issue?
The solution is one that may seem counterintuitive: to solve the problem of mortality salience, we actually need to make mortality more salient. Research by Philip Cozzolino and his colleagues suggest that while fleeting reminders of our mortality bring with them the undesirable impacts discussed above, deeper contemplation of our mortality can actually have the opposite effect. Based on research showing that people who have gone through a near-death experience or other traumatic event often experience positive life changes after the event (“post-traumatic growth”), the researchers developed a new kind of manipulation called a “death reflection” designed to lead participants through the essential trajectory of post-traumatic growth without causing any actual trauma.
In the death reflection condition of their studies, participants were asked to read and imagine themselves experiencing a vividly detailed scenario in which they burned to death before answering the following questions: “1. Please describe in detail the thoughts and emotions you felt while imagining the scenario. 2. If you did experience this event, how do you think you would handle the final moments? 3. Again imagining it did happen to you, describe the life that led up to that point. 4. How do you feel your family would react if it did happen to you?” Each of these questions was designed to address an essential aspect of successful cases of post-traumatic growth in the literature, i.e., concreteness (1, 2), life review (3), and perspective-taking (4).
In order to test the impacts of this manipulation, researchers began by classifying participants as having a high extrinsic value orientation (they reported being motivated more by money, fame, and beauty) or low extrinsic value orientation (they reported being motivated more by self-acceptance, relationships, and common good). Then the participants completed the death reflection exercise and an additional questionnaire. Finally, they were asked to take what they thought was a fair amount of raffle tickets from an envelope as their compensation.
In the death reflection condition, participants with a high extrinsic value orientation took half as many tickets as control participants with a high extrinsic value orientation, and while high extrinsic value orientation participants took more than twice as many tickets as low extrinsic value orientation participants in the control condition, they took exactly the same number as the low extrinsic value participants in the death reflection condition. At least in terms of their tendency to take tickets, the death reflection turned high extrinsic value orientation people into low extrinsic value orientation people! While we previously saw that mortality salience leads to increased materialism, we see that death reflection has the opposite effect.
As Cozzolino and his colleagues note, it seems Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was on to something when she wrote, “if all of us would make an all-out effort to contemplate our own death, to deal with our anxieties surrounding the concept of our death, and to help others familiarize themselves with these thoughts, perhaps there could be less destructiveness around us.”
While this death reflection study tested the intervention’s ability to mitigate the effects of mortality salience on only one of the five major issues that we discussed above, there is also evidence to suggest that it will help with the remaining issues as well. Studies have shown that mortality salience effects are unconscious defenses against the terror of death. When people are consciously thinking about death, these effects disappear.
Of course, while deeper contemplation of our death is an effective way to mitigate mortality salience effects, it would be quite the task if we had to imagine ourselves dying before every major decision we make to ensure the highest degree of rationality. Fortunately, the latest research suggests a more attractive alternative: we can also mitigate these effects by carefully contemplating life.
In a series of seven studies conducted by Christopher Niemiec and his colleagues, they found that participants who reported approaching their lives more mindfully were significantly less affected by mortality salience manipulations than those who reported approaching their lives less mindfully. (This was measured by asking participants to rate themselves with respect to fifteen statements like “I find myself preoccupied with the future or the past” and “I find myself doing things without paying attention.”)
In one experiment, like the one in the bail-setting study above, less mindful participants in the mortality salience condition made significantly harsher judgments of social transgressions than those in the control condition, but more mindful participants did not. In another experiment, like the one in the pro-America/anti-America study above, less mindful Americans showed significant worldview defense, but more mindful Americans did not. In a third experiment, Caucasians were asked to analyze a case of race-based workplace discrimination. Less mindful Caucasians in the mortality salience condition judged a White racist more leniently than a Black racist, but more mindful Caucasians did not.
What these experiments suggest is that mindfulness is an equally effective—and significantly more attractive—buffer for the existential terror of mortality salience than the other buffers we have seen, i.e. worldview defense, distancing from others and from nature, materialism, and desiring more children.
By becoming more mindful, and helping others become more mindful, it seems likely that we will be able to mitigate the effects of mortality salience on worldview defense, Us vs. Them, Humans vs. Nature, materialism, and population growth, five of the greatest challenges we face today.
