Terror-management theory exists because one day, some 30-odd years ago, Sheldon Solomon was perusing the library at Skidmore College, where he’s a professor of psychology, and he happened to pick up The Birth and Death of Meaning, by Ernest Becker. “This is nothing to be proud of, but the cover is white with green splotches on it, and I was like ‘Ooh, what an interesting color,’” Solomon says. “Then I liked that it was a short book with big print. Again, nothing to be proud of, but true. And that’s why I reached for it.”
Once he opened the book, though, Solomon was taken by its central question―Why do people do what they do?―and how it was presented, without “turgid academic jargon,” he says. Becker offered an answer to that question: People do a lot of the things that they do to quell their fear of death. So Solomon and two of his friends from grad school, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, set out to test that idea empirically.
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The only antidote to death is immortality. And so, terror-management theory holds, when faced with the idea of death, people turn to things they believe will give them immortality, literal or otherwise. The hope of true immortality can be found in religion’s promises of heaven or reincarnation, or in some of science’s more dubious life-extension promises (Just freeze your dead body! They’ll wake it up later!).
More often though, it’s the hope of symbolic immortality that calms the frightened rabbits of death-fearing hearts―the idea that people are a part of something that will last longer than they do. Their culture, their country, their family, their work. When thinking of death, people cling more intensely to the institutions they're a part of, and the worldviews they hold.
What that actually means in terms of behavior, is trickier. The research shows that what people do when they’re feeling aware of their mortality depends on the person, the situation she’s in, and whether she’s focusing on death or it’s just in the back of her mind. (The TMT literature, which details a wide range of effects, is now fairly substantial. A 2010 metareview found 238 TMT studies, and this page on the University of Missouri website lists nearly 600, though it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012).
When death is in the front of your mind―when you pass by a cemetery, when someone you know is sick (or when, in a lab, a researcher has just asked you about it)―the tendency, according to TMT, is to want to push those thoughts away. You might suppress the thoughts, distract yourself with something else, or comfort yourself with the idea that your death is a long way away, and anyway, you’re definitely going to go to the gym tomorrow.
A couple of studies have shown that conscious thoughts of death do increase health intentions, for exercise and medical screenings, though whether people actually follow through on those intentions is unclear. Promising yourself you’ll eat better may just be a strategy to get death off your mind.
When death is on people’s conscious minds, “they can wield logic to deal with it,” Vail says. “This would be similar to your mom saying, ‘Put on your seatbelt, you don’t want to die.’ So you think about that and recognize, yes, she’s right, you don’t want to bite it on the way to the grocery store, so you put on your seatbelt.”
According to Solomon, even young children use versions of these same strategies. His new book, written with Greenberg and Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, cites the story of 5-year-old Richard, from a series of interviews the psychologist Sylvia Anthony conducted in the 60s and 70s:
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