How We Manage Our Fears of Death

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Terror management theory (TMT) is a prominent theory within death studies and is born out of the belief that as humans we are wired with a drive for continued existence and enduring value (George & Park, 2014). When juxtaposed against our understanding that we won’t exist forever, conditions are ripe for terror and dread to potentially fill the void (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986).

We manage this disconcerting anxiety in two ways: We subscribe to a particular cultural worldview—a set of shared beliefs and values within an ingroup that provides order and meaning to us—and we also bolster our self-esteem, which is contingent on how well we believe we’ve adhered to the cultural worldviews we’ve adopted (George & Park, 2014).

Terror management theory allows us to suspend the disbelief of death and buy into the notion that some valued part of us will live on forever, even after we die. We might believe that we’ll literally carry on in an afterlife like heaven, symbolically seek to create a legacy through our children, or make a meaningful dent in the world in some way that will continue to exist beyond our time (Burke, Martens & Faucher, 2010).

Mortality Salience­

Mortality salience—the level of awareness we possess that we’re vulnerable to inevitable death (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Simon, & Breus, 1994)—evolved out of TMT to help conceptualize our behavior while we try to overcome our fears of mortality in the face of a deep need to stay alive (Mikulincer, & Florian, 2000). Studies consistently show that the act of pondering our demise causes us to cling more fiercely to our worldviews—whatever they might be—because they are the very constructs that help keep the terror of death at bay (Castano et al., 2011).

When the idea of death is made salient, study participants “double down” on their beliefs and value behaviors that align with their worldviews, while often disparaging others for presenting views that don’t match what they believe to be true (Castano et al., 2011).

Judges reminded of their mortality set an average bond of $455 in a hypothetical prostitution case, for example, compared to an average bond of $50 for the judges in a control group; by punishing others who violated their worldview beliefs, they reinforced their own worldviews to alleviate the tension caused by death priming (Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1997).

Flashing the word "death" on a computer screen to American research participants, for mere fractions of a second, turned them against an author who criticized the U.S. (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015).

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Individuals interviewed in front of a funeral home had a more supportive of view charities than people who weren’t as interested in making donations interviewed a few blocks out of the range of the mortality prompt (Jonas, Schimel, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2002).

Subtle reminders of death—like seeing an ambulance drive by, watching someone die onscreen, or even seeing wrinkles in the mirror—cause us to distance ourselves from our physicality (avoiding sex and other bodily activities that on some deep level signal that we’re so susceptibly perishable) and we turn up the dial on our symbolic value, like making our achievements, intellect and virtues shine (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015).

Buffering the fear of death

Interestingly, there are ways to buffer ourselves from the angst of mortality salience. Heightened self-esteem reduces one’s worldview defense and has a protective quality against death concerns, as does the feeling of being powerful (Belmi & Pfeffer, 2016). Additionally, Juhl and Routledge’s (2016) research shows that people with high perceptions of meaning in life and people who define themselves as socially connected find themselves exempt from mortality salience anxieties, with no changes to their well-being (as measured by satisfaction with life and subjective vitality).

Encouraging individuals to reflect on their mortality awareness with openness, mindfulness and curiosity has also been shown to have a mediating effect on the guard they put up (Boyd, Morris & Goldenberg, 2017).

Experiencing mortality salience in the right context can ignite moral benefits like increasing tolerance of others and increasing one’s desire to be their best self (Oren, Shani & Poria, 2019); studies show that people (predominantly women) act in more prosocial ways in the week following death prompts (Belmi & Pfeffer, 2016).

Being primed with thoughts of death made study participants more likely to donate money into the future– a powerful demonstration of how inclined we are to want to leave a legacy that lets us live beyond the boundaries of our lifespans (Wade-Benzoni, Tost, Hernandez, & Larrick, 2012).

Reflecting on one’s own death also enhanced the levels of gratitude in study participants, as well as their appreciation of the simple pleasures in life (Frias, Watkins, Webber, & Froh, 2011).

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Death reflection

Cozzolino (2006) notes that the typical mortality salience manipulations subjected to research participants represent death in a subliminal, generic, and abstract fashion—many steps removed from a true experience that might actually mimic a near-death experience. An alternative to mortality salience for death priming is a practice called death reflection, which has been found to be a more powerful and experiential way to get people in touch with their own death (Cozzolino, 2006).

Imagining oneself in the midst of an apartment fire—in vivid, graphic detail—elicits different death reactions than playing morbid word games or visiting funeral homes.

The implications of how we are primed to think about death are weighty: Research reveals that when we are exposed to our mortality as an abstract concept (as through traditional mortality salience experiments), we seek support in abstract ways—like bolstering our worldviews and religious and social affiliations. When we are exposed to our mortality in a specific and personal fashion (via death reflection) we derive support from internal resources—like construing goals, finding ways to meet our own needs, and seeking intrinsic growth (Cozzolino, 2006).

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Furthering this logic, we’re motivated in different ways depending on whether we’ve triggered our abstract (traditional mortality salience) or specific (death reflection) information processing systems; under the auspice that we take action on things that have the potential to make our goals a reality (Carver & Scheier, 1990), we act in rather constrained ways that succumb to the norms of society when prompted by the abstraction of mortality salience (like driving by the cemetery), and we act in intrinsic, self-determined (Deci & Ryan, 1985) ways when prompted by existentially specific information, like forming plans that draw on our strengths and talents to achieve the goals we want for ourselves—not what our external worldview requires of us to fit in (Cozzolino, 2006).

Death reflection leads to unselfish, intrinsic behaviors (Cozzolino, Staples, Meyers, & Samboceti, 2004). These insights help put TMT and mortality salience research in perspective, and help shape future interventions intended to help people grow from reflecting on the inevitability of death.