“He swam up and down in his bath [and] he played with the possibility of never dying: ‘I don’t want to be dead, ever; I don’t want to die.’ … After his mother told 5-year-old Richard that he wouldn’t die for a long time, the little boy smiled and said, ‘That’s all right. I’ve been worried, and now I can get happy.’ Then he said he would like to dream about ‘going shopping and buying things.’”
Classic distraction move, Richard. Though at times, our own coping mechanisms may not be much more sophisticated. “Americans are arguably the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower,” Solomon says.
But shopping excursions can only distract you so much. Even once you stop actively thinking about it, death is still prominent in your nonconscious mind. “One metaphor is the file drawer,” Vail says. “You pull out a file and read it, then you get distracted, now you’re thinking about dinner. You put [the file] back in the drawer, you pull out dinner, now you’re looking it dinner, but whatever you were thinking about previously is now on the top of the file. It’s the closest thing to your conscious awareness.”
This is when, the research shows, people's attitudes and behaviors are most affected―when you’ve recently been reminded of death, but it’s moved to the back of your mind.
Unfortunately, a lot of what death brings out when it's sitting at the top of the file drawer is not humanity’s most sterling qualities. If people feel motivated to uphold their own cultures and worldviews in the face of death, it stands to reason that they might be less friendly toward other worldviews and the people who hold them.
“Americans are the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower.”
The very first terror-management study involved “22 municipal-court judges in Tucson, Arizona,” according to The Worm at the Core. The judges were tasked with setting bail for alleged prostitutes, but first they were asked to take a survey. Some of them just answered personality questions, but some were also asked two questions about death: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you,” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” The standard bail at the time was $50, set by judges who didn’t take the survey. The ones who did take the survey set the bail an average of nine times higher.
“The results showed that the judges who thought about their own mortality reacted by trying to do the right thing as prescribed by their culture,” the book reads. “Accordingly, they upheld the law more vigorously than their colleagues who were not reminded of death.”
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