But, Solomon says, the researchers later repeated that study with students, and found that only those who thought prostitution was “morally reprehensible” opted to set a harsher bail. The logic goes that those students wanted to uphold their values, and punish transgressors. Since then, more studies have shown this tendency: When mortality's on their minds, people prefer others in their (cultural/racial/national/religious) group to those outside it. This dynamic has manifested in silly ways―in one study liberals were more likely to make conservatives eat a gross hot sauce after a death reminder and vice versa―and in more serious ones―reminders of mortality have been shown to make people more likely to stereotype others.
While wanting to promote your own worldviews can mean putting others' down, that isn't the only way people seek to feel like part of something greater than themselves―searching for that symbolic immortality. Looming mortality can also lead people to help others, donate to charity, and want to invest in caring families and relationships. (And studies have backed up that people do these things when reminded of death.)
These reactions have also been observed outside the lab, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when death was likely top of mind for many Americans for quite a while. Comparisons of survey answers before and two months after 9/11 found increases in kindness, love, hope, spirituality, gratitude, leadership, and teamwork, which persisted (though to a slightly lesser degree) 10 months after the attacks. But Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski point out in their book that there was also a lot of fear and derogation by Americans of the “other” after 9/11, specifically Muslim and Arab others.
“It’s not the case that awareness of mortality and the ensuing terror-management process is an inherently negative one that causes prejudice and closed-mindedness and hostility but instead it appears to be simply rather a neutral process,” Vail says. “It’s one that motivates people to indiscriminately uphold and defend their cultural worldviews.”
How you manage your terror, then, depends on what’s already important to you―and that’s what you’ll turn to when confronted with mortality. In one study, empathetic people were more likely to forgive transgressions after a death reminder; in another, fundamentalist religious people were more compassionate after thinking of their own mortality―but only when compassionate values were framed in a religious context, such as excerpts from the Bible or Koran.
* * *
Terror-management theory contends that there’s something different about our fear of death, compared to other fears. Every other threat is survivable, after all. And in research, thinking about death has produced just as strong of an effect whether the alternative was something neutral, or another threat like rejection or pain. So a fear of death is not just like a fear of rejection, except more.
Except Steven Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, doesn’t think death is necessarily such a unique threat. In 2006, he and fellow researchers Travis Proulx and Kathleen Vohs developed the Meaning Maintenance Model, which says yes, thinking about death can inspire these attitudes and behaviors, but for a different reason. Death, according to their theory, is a threat to the way we understand the world, similar to uncertainty, being rejected by a friend, or even―Heine’s example―finding a red queen of spades in a deck of cards. All these things interrupt what Heine calls “meaning frameworks―understandings of how the world works. When we think about the fact that we’re going to die, it calls all of those assumptions into question. All these things I’m trying to do, I won’t be able to succeed, my relationships will be severed, the way I think I fit into the world, ultimately I no longer will. This is bothersome.”
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