As graduate students at the University of Kansas in the late 1970s Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and I were interested in understanding the psychological underpinnings of prejudice and ethnic conflict as well as the nature and function of self-esteem. In 1980, I accidentally stumbled across the work of the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, who in books such as The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), The Denial of Death (1973), and Escape From Evil (1975) argued that the uniquely human awareness of death, and the denial thereof, guides and directs a substantial proportion of human behavior. According to Becker, culture consists of humanly created (albeit quite unconsciously) beliefs about the nature of reality shared by individuals in groups to reduce or eliminate the potentially overwhelming terror engendered by the awareness of death by providing a sense of meaning and value that in turn confers the possibility of literal and/or symbolic immortality. Terror management theory resulted from our efforts to translate Becker’s ideas into a formal theory that could be subjected to empirical scrutiny.

  Would you give us a brief explanation of terror management and mortality salience? How do they relate to each other?

According to terror management theory, people "manage" the potential terror associated with death through a dual-component anxiety-buffer consisting of a cultural worldview (beliefs about the nature of reality that provide a sense that the universe is meaningful, orderly, and stable and that provisions for immortality) and self-esteem (the perception that one is living up to the standards of value associated with the social role inhabited by individuals in the context of their culture, and hence rendering them eligible for safety and security in this life and immortality thereafter).

Thus, while cultures vary considerably, they share the same defensive psychological function in common: to provide meaning and value and in so doing bestow psychological equanimity in the face of death. All cultural worldviews are ultimately shared fictions, in the sense that none of them are likely to be literally true, and their existence is generally sustained by social consensus. When everyone around us believes the same thing, we can be quite confident of the veracity of our beliefs.

But, and here's the rub, when we do encounter people with different beliefs, this poses a challenge to our death-denying belief systems, which is why people are generally quite uncomfortable around, and hostile towards, those who are different. Additionally, because no symbolic cultural construction can actually overcome the physical reality of death, residual anxiety is unconsciously projected onto other groups of individuals as scapegoats, who are designated all-encompassing repositories of evil, the eradication of which would make earth as it is in heaven. We then typically respond to people with different beliefs or scapegoats by berating them, trying to convert them to our system of beliefs, and/or just killing them and in so doing assert that "my God is stronger than your God and we'll kick your ass to prove it."

In order to test terror management theory, we designed what we call the mortality salience paradigm, which basically entails asking people to think about their own death (e.g., by asking them to respond to some questions about dying, or by subliminal exposure to death-related words, or being interviewed in front of a funeral parlor) and then asking them to make judgments about people or events that either bolster or threaten important aspects of the individual’s cultural worldviews. We hypothesize that to the extent that culture serves a death-denying function, then making mortality salient should increase affection and altruistic behavior toward those who share or uphold cherished cultural beliefs, as well as increase hostility and disdain to those who disagree with cherished beliefs, or merely hold different ones.

Our research has shown that people respond differently to conscious and non-conscious concerns about death. Conscious and explicit contemplation of death results in instrumental efforts to avoid fatal encounters and maladaptive behaviors (e.g., Americans staying away from airports and large buildings after 9/11, quitting smoking, getting more exercise, staying out of the sun to avoid contracting skin cancer). However, non-conscious or not-quite-conscious (when thoughts of death are highly accessible but not the subject of focal attention) produces efforts to bolster confidence in one’s cultural worldview and/or increase self-esteem. For example, Christian participants reminded of death liked fellow Christians more and Jewish people less; Germans sat further away from a Turkish person and closer to a fellow German after a mortality salience induction; and following a reminder of death, people were more physically aggressive toward someone with different political beliefs.

Absolutely; in our 2003 book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, we argued that events like 9/11, the anthrax scare, and tsunamis and hurricanes are "natural" mortality salience inductions. Not surprisingly then, after 9/11, Americans took great pains to avoid situations where terrorist acts might occur, and became very patriotic in the malignant sense of unquestioning allegiance to American values and unbridled contempt for anything or anyone remotely Islamic.

Additionally, research we conducted after 9/11 demonstrated that reminders of death or the events of 9/11 increased Americans’ support for President George W. Bush and his policies in Iraq, and conservative Americans, after a mortality salience induction, became more supportive of the use of nuclear and chemical weapons in preemptive military strikes. We’ve also found that Iranians reminded of death were more supportive of suicide bombers and more willing to engage in martyrdom actions.

Good question; and one that we’ve not studied directly, although other work we’ve done suggests that any event that conjures up concerns about one’s own mortality will produce the kinds of worldview defensive behaviors described above.

  What are the main social implications of terror management theory?

Approximately 300 published experiments by independent researchers in at least 13 countries have shown that intimations of mortality affect a wide range of human behavior, including prejudice, aggression, romantic relationships, sexuality, appeal of charismatic leaders, guilt, creativity, and engaging in risky behaviors in pursuit of self-esteem. The main social implication of terror management theory is any effort to understand the motivational underpinnings of human behavior will be insufficient without explicitly recognizing the pervasive influence of uniquely human concerns about death.

  Are you still researching terror management? Where do you see this research going in 5 years? In 10 years?

Yes. Our current work continues to explore how fear of death influences allegiance to malignantly charismatic leaders and fosters aggressive inclinations toward those who are different. We are also studying how fear of death contributes to a host of different forms of psychopathology, including dissociative responses to traumatic events. We’re also trying to develop ways to minimize or eliminate the adverse effects of death denial and explore how confrontations with mortality can bring out what is most noble in the human animal.