Terror Management Theory
In social and evolutionary psychology, Terror Management Theory (TMT) refers to the concept that humans live our lives carrying the burden of a conflict that informs much of what we do: we’re biologically driven to stay alive, but we’re also aware that death is inevitable and unpredictable.
This theory posits that in order to cope with the psychological burden of this knowledge, we do things that allow us to feel like we’re achieving a sort of immortality, and we do things that allow us to ignore or forget that we face this eventual outcome.
Throwing our mental weight behind nationalistic ideologies, then, is one way for us to feel like we’re part of something larger than ourselves—that the countries and governments of which we’re a part are potentially immortal, even if our bodies are not—and religions often serve a similar purpose by offering immortality in another form (some type of “heaven”) or by offering the solace of a larger life-death cycle of which we’re a part, even after our physical demise.
Our many and varied conceptions of “legacy” may also fall under this header, as having one’s name on a building or one’s lessons imprinted in the minds of the next generation may provide one with a sense of leaving something behind instead of just disappearing one day, leaving no long-lasting mark on the world.
This may partially explain why many people feel the need to defend their ideologies, even going so far as to attack those who question them: that belief and our adherence to it may be the only thing keeping us from facing the reality of death without the psychological buffer of implied immortality. Anyone attacking that concept is thus attacking our sense of safety.
The term for wanting to feel like we each have some kind of value, some kind of long-lasting worth, is “self-esteem.”
It’s thought that having maintainable levels of self-esteem may help us stave off the cognitive dissonance we otherwise face when we realize that not only will we someday die, but because our end is the same as that of every other living creature—we die, cats die, trees die, tardigrades die, bacteria die—we’re in some ways no more special or important than they are. Which can be an uncomfortable thought when part of what gets us through the day is the assumption that what we do with our time, with however many years we get, matters.
People in cultures around the world and throughout history have used tangible symbols—small trinkets, artworks, or pieces of jewelry often called memento mori—to remind themselves of the inevitability of death. The idea is that being reminded of their own finitude will allow them to appreciate the time they have more fully, rather than getting lost in all the escapism and philosophical drum-beating to which they might otherwise lose that time as they attempt to ward off thinking about their eventual demise.
There’s a sub-theory of the main TMT theory, called the Terror Management Health Model (TMHM) that explores how a periodic, intentional, conscious awareness of our own mortality could be beneficial in terms of our behaviors and our psychological well-being.
Especially when appropriately guided toward productive action, causing people to think about their own eventual demise can incentivize them to make healthier decisions; ostensibly to push that demise back a little further.
Some TMHM research has focused on breast self-exams (BSE) for women—which involves checking for lumps that may indicate breast cancer or some other health issue—and how appropriately priming women who are about to do a BSE with a reminder of their finitude actually seems to result in more careful and thorough self-examinations.
Data from at least one of these studies also showed that the women who were thus primed reported feeling more empowered by the knowledge that they had some degree of control over their health: if they did things properly, they could play a role in what amounts to extending the duration of their own lives.
There’s a chance that some of the fundamental suppositions of TMT are flawed and we’re misattributing the responses we’ve noted or are working from bad or biased data.
This is one of the many psychological theories that has suffered replication failures, which doesn’t mean it’s not real, but does mean that some of the supporting data we thought we had now looks flimsier than it did a decade ago.
That said, it does seem possible that our relationship with the knowledge of our own mortality could influence countless aspects of who we are and how we live our lives, from our habits and professions to our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the intellectual and social tribes of which we’re a part.
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