On Terror Management Theory

Does TMT tell us anything useful about the effects of death anxiety?

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man. — Ernest Becker, 1973

What if you had a theory that could explain most of human behavior – all the most important parts – using just a few, surely uncontroversial assumptions? Terror Management Theory (TMT) claims to do just that. TMT frequently comes up in discussions of biostasis and life extension. It may be used to explain why life extension is a merely another attempt to deal with our fear of death. Or it may be used to explain why so few people think seriously about life extension or make arrangements for biostasis. The fact that it can be used to argue both of these points illustrates one of my doubts about TMT. Since the theory gets to grip with psychological matters directly affecting our prospects for building support for life extension, we should give it some careful thought.

Recently, in an appreciation for Alan Harrington’s thinking in The Immortalist, I noted his place as a precursor to TMT. Harrington saw the fear of death as the primary motivator behind human behavior and culture. He thinks humans have gone a bit insane because we know that our existence is temporary and doomed. Very unlike TMT, Harrington proposes that overcoming death should be humanity’s central goal. It looks like Harrington has increasingly been recognized as a pioneer in the area, writing even before the more famous Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death. Indeed, he was a direct influence on Becker.

Since this is a longish essay, I will tell you what I am going to tell you. Your eyes cannot help drifting down so you already know that I will start by explaining what Terror Management Theory claims, including its three main hypotheses. Then I will look at a range of objections and challenges including a lack of direct evidence, failure to replicate some aspects, some methodological concerns, a major issue from an evolutionary perspective, alternatives to TMT, and finally some thoughts on how we deal with anxiety and terror, especially anxiety about death.

What is Terror Management Theory?

Terror management theory was developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski and expounded at length in their 2015 book, The Worm at the Core. TMT starts from a foundational idea that humans have an innate drive for self-preservation. This need to preserve the self arises from our mortal nature. Our conceptual awareness leads us to the realization that death is inevitable and largely unpredictable. We are driven to survive but we know we must die. The clash between the realization and the inescapable reality causes terror or anxiety.

We need ways of coping with the existential anxiety and terror that TMT believes is so central. According to TMT, we do it in three central ways: By bolstering our self-esteem, by adopting and adhering to specific worldviews, and by increasing our attachments to others. Humans will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about their mortality. Death anxiety pushes people to adopt worldviews that boost their self-esteem and protect them from a sense of living an insignificant life that will come to an inexorable end. This fear can also be assuaged by identifying themselves with a group. The group can survive when the individual does not. People confirm their group-boosted significance by showing support for the group and by showing prejudice against those who are not in the group. This way they hope to achieve a symbolic immortality.

Ernest Becker’s influence can also be seen in the adoption of his ideas on self-esteem. As the TMT theorists write in a 1986 paper: “the need for self-esteem is uniquely human, and exists because of our capacities for symbolic, temporal, and self-reflective thought.” In TMT self-esteem acts as a buffer against death-related fear. TMT theorizes that when we are faced with the awareness of death we behave in ways that boost our self-esteem. Higher self-esteem helps us manage death anxiety.

TMT consists mainly of three hypotheses, for which there is ample empirical evidence according to proponents: The mortality salience hypothesis; the anxiety-buffer hypothesis; and the death-thought accessibility hypothesis.

Mortality salience: This means the extent to which people are reminded of their mortality. Such reminders bring to mind death-related thoughts. Individuals seek to suppress or manage the resulting distress by attaching to culturally shared beliefs and displaying loyalty, through activities that enhance self-esteem, by expressing stronger religious beliefs, by avoiding threats to the individual’s worldview, or by forming in-group affiliations. These behaviors are all claimed to be implications of the mortality salience hypothesis. After disturbance by death-related thoughts, humans seek to restore their comfort by means of one or more of these defenses.

The anxiety-buffer hypothesis: This says that if we reinforce our anxiety buffer by boosting self-esteem, by attaching more tightly to a culturally shared belief, and so on, our death anxiety should be reduced.

The death-thought accessibility hypothesis: This posits that reminders of mortality increase the accessibility of death-related thoughts. This heightens awareness of death and sets off behaviors aimed at reducing existential anxiety. This may mean reinforcing cultural beliefs or other worldviews that embody meaning and continuity. As the architects of TMT put it: “Culture reduces the terror engendered by awareness of our vulnerability and mortality by providing a shared symbolic conception of reality that imputes order, predictability, significance, and permanence to our lives.”

The main arguments given for TMT, briefly put are these five:

1. Empirical support. Plenty of research supports the theory, we are told, especially experiments showing that reminders of mortality (mortality salience) lead to predictable changes in behavior such as increased adherence to cultural worldviews.

2. Explanatory power. TMT offers explanations for various human behaviors, from prejudice to religion to authoritarianism.

3. Cross-cultural applicability. TMT is said to apply across diverse cultures.

4. Insight into social and political behavior. TMT claims to explain why, when someone’s sense of meaning or cultural identity is threatened, they defend their worldview, cling to ideologies, and engage in conflict.

5. Evolutionary perspective – TMT aligns with the idea that managing death anxiety could have adaptive value.

Objections, challenges, questions

Plenty of reasons exist to doubt the validity, accuracy, and scope of TMT. I will limit myself to briefly noting the following issues: A lack of direct evidence, failure to replicate, evolutionary criticisms, alternative explanations, methodological problems, flawed basic assumptions, and excessive emphasis on death to the exclusion of other factors.

Lack of direct evidence: TMT relies on indirect measures and inferences about underlying processes. How do you measure the effects of mortality salience when death-related thoughts are often subconscious? Are the observed behavioral changes caused by death anxiety or could they be explained by other types of stress or anxiety?

According to Mark Leary and Lisa Schreindorfer, “TMT posits that people are buffered against existential anxiety by two different components: a cultural worldview and a sense of personal value (i.e., self-esteem).” The evidence for the first of these two aspects of the theory is much stronger than for the second.” Even if TMT gives a parsimonious explanation of mortality salience effects, it is “a giant leap to conclude that the other phenomena discussed by P et. al. – cognitive consistency, belief in a just world, self-presentation, and so on – also reflect efforts to manage existential terror.” They find “much less direct support for the claim that self-esteem plays a central role in buffering people against death-related fears.” TMT may predict that that self-esteem is associated with lower anxiety but other approaches can make the same prediction, for instance efficacy theory, and sociometer theory, without mentioning death.

Failure to replicate: Many Labs 4 (the fourth in a series of collaborative tests of replicability) made a large-scale attempt to replicate published findings. Psychologists in 21 labs across the U.S. carried out the original experiment among a total of 2,200 participants. The study was unable to replicate the mortality salience effect on worldview defense under any conditions. Treger, Benan, and Timko conducted five separate studies across five unique samples:

However, despite using standard procedures, we were unable to replicate basic patterns of the dependent variable in the MS conditions. We also pooled all responses into two meta-analyses, one examining all dependent variables and one focusing on the anti-national essay; yet the effect sizes in these analyses did not significantly differ from zero… Age did not moderate the effects despite 68% of participants having been between 17–27 years old. When using age as a moderator, the impacts of MS attenuated and even reversed (e.g., greater levels of egalitarian attitudes emerged) in samples of older adults.

Age should change the magnitude of the effect. Older people should have more fear of death.

The researchers had difficulty in detecting a relation between death-related thoughts and trait self-esteem. TMT suggests that people with high self-esteem should be less bothered by thoughts about death. Their sense of personal values buffers them against existential terror. “Yet we found trait self-esteem to be unrelated to self-reported anxiety after participants wrote about their own deaths, although trait self-esteem was strongly negatively correlated with anxiety when participants wrote about being rejected.” You can find a summary of some other experimental challenges to TMT in a paper I discuss below on evolutionary considerations.

Some TMT critics acknowledge that there is a large amount of evidence that mortality salience manipulations can cause people to increase their commitment to certain worldviews but see evidence for other TMT hypotheses as much weaker. Even where the evidence is strong, alternative explanations may provide a better account of the same results.

Methodological concerns: Some argue that the experimental designs used to support TMT are flawed and that the results can be interpreted in multiple ways. They believe that the evidence for TMT is not robust enough to support its broad claims. The experimental designs and measures may not be adequate to test the theory's predictions accurately.

Evolutionary criticisms

One of the arguments for TMT is that managing death anxiety could have adaptive value. I find this immediately implausible. How could suppressing fear and anxiety about death help survival? Evolutionary psychology reveals critical flaws in TMT. This topic deserves an essay to itself but I will attempt to convey the main points succinctly.

Pyszczynski, Greenberg, and Solomon claim that their TMT theory is an evolutionary theory. Rather than being grounding in current understandings of evolution by natural selection, TMT is clearly grounded in outdated psychoanalytic theories from a century ago. Starting in the 1960s, developments in evolutionary biology changed our understanding of natural selection and what it implies about the development of the human mind. Two crucial early works are: Hamilton, W. D. (1964), “The evolution of social behavior,” and Williams, G. C. (1966),  Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought.

Freud’s bizarre claims about a death instinct and boys wanting to have sex with their mothers came from his misunderstanding of evolution. Freud’s unscientific psychology fed into Becker’s view which then shaped Terror Management Theory. The authors of TMT even make some highly Freudian claims about the connection between pee and poop in childhood and death terror. “When you pee or poop, the wetness disappears into soft dryness.”

In the paper linked above, Kirkpatrick and Navarrete argue that we should not accept the claim that humans have a survival instinct or innate fear of death. Even if we did have such an instinct, such a fear would not have provided a significant survival advantage to our ancestors. Although that fear is implausible as an adaptation, an evolutionary perspective can help us understand and reinterpret TMT’s empirical findings. They argue that these results “are better explained as by-products of a psychological system of coalitional computation that evolved for a variety of functions, including defense against other humans, that is activated by certain kinds of death-related thoughts.” As we will see, other explanations are also available and have advantages.

Kirkpatrick and Navarrete focus on four major tenets of TMT.

The first tenet is the claim that humans (and other species) possess a survival instinct. They argue that “such an instinct would be superfluous at best and maladaptive at worst.” This can only be understood by first grasping Hamilton’s concept of inclusive fitness. Evolution does not operate on the criterion of survival of individuals nor of groups. It is “interested” in replicable information.

Whatever increases the probability that genes are passed on will be what is fit for a particular environment. This explains why parents of many species incur enormous costs to themselves to ensure the survival and safety of their offspring. In species based around colonies, such as ants and bees, caste systems dominate and individuals readily sacrifice themselves for the colony. Some have even given up the ability to reproduce.

An individual survival instinct would therefore be maladaptive. A survival instinct would also be unnecessary and unhelpful. A psychological structure that told us to “avoid death” would lack guidance on how not to die. In reality, “each species’ evolved psychology comprises numerous, functionally specialized mechanisms for avoiding particular kinds of dangers specific to the ecology of a given species, as well as mechanisms for other behaviors.”

The second tenet in question is that fear of death is paralyzing and incapacitating. TMT advocates claim that we suppress death anxiety before it becomes conscious. This is baffling from a natural selection perspective. Anxiety and fear promote survival! That is why they evolved. Even if there is a self-preservation instinct, that provides no reason to believe in a mechanism that minimizes the perceived severity of threats to survival. The opposite is true.

A system that reduces mortality concerns before they reach conscious awareness would reduce or abolish the drive to avoid such dangers. As Leary and Schreindorfer put it: “Anxiety promotes survival because it causes the organism to avoid behaviors that put it at excessive risk. It tends to stop behavior allowing for consideration of the danger associated with it.” If the capacity for anxiety promotes survival, why and how would an organism evolve mechanisms that make it less afraid of death? It makes far more sense to say that people have evolved to be motivated to secure their survival and safety rather than merely making them – falsely – feel safe.

Why would we evolve in such a way as to find thoughts of death paralyzing or incapacitating? Certainly, such thoughts are troubling but so are many other concerns for which no TMT-like mechanism evolved. The same logic behind the TMT argument should lead to terror of being without a mate, especially as the window for childbearing approached and passed. Rather than reacting to the threat of death by being paralyzed, it is surely more likely that we would be strongly motivated to avoid the threat. Even if we accept a self-preservation instinct, TMT fails to demonstrate how terror management process could develop from it.

The third tenet says that the adaptation produced by natural selection to solve this adaptive problem was an anxiety-reducing terror-management system. But why would such a complicated and unreliable system evolve whose outcomes were dangerous when evolution could have developed a simpler and more reliable psychological system to deal with the root problem directly? It is unlikely that natural selection would lead to a system that reduced the fear or anxiety produced by another evolved system.

The fourth tenet is the leading role of worldview defense as a terror-management adaptation. One problem with this is the observation that many worldviews fail to prevent death anxiety. Christian groups that believe in Hell are increasing death anxiety, not decreasing it. Other worldviews around the world tell us pain, suffering, and death will visit people regardless of how well they adhere to their worldview. Worldviews can be comforting but also raise tough questions and project unpleasant futures. This extends well beyond formal religions and can be seen in secular apocalyptic views commonly found in environmentalist groups. Fundamentalist environmentalist or AI doomerism can be as frightening as fundamentalist Christianity.

If you ask people whether they would prefer to live forever in isolation, never to see another person, or to die in comfort surrounded by friends, most will choose the latter. (This has been tested.) As we life extensionists know, many people say they would prefer to die than to “live forever.” If living forever meant the mythic form of immortality where you are unable to die, many of us might agree.

Alternatives to TMT

It is not as if TMT were the only theory available. Critics argue that these alternative theories provide more parsimonious and empirically supported explanations for the behaviors that TMT attributes to death anxiety. TMT’s singular focus on death anxiety is unnecessary and the same behaviors can be explained by other well-established psychological theories. Some of the alternatives:

Self-Esteem Theory: This theory suggests that people's need for self-esteem and positive self-regard drives many of the behaviors that TMT attributes to death anxiety. According to this view, the desire to maintain a positive self-image and avoid negative self-evaluations is a more parsimonious explanation for these behaviors.

Social Identity Theory: This theory posits that people's social identities and group memberships play a crucial role in shaping their behaviors and attitudes. Critics argue that the behaviors observed in TMT experiments can be better explained by people's need to maintain a positive social identity and defend their group against threats.

Coalitional Psychology: This theory focuses on the evolutionary advantages of forming coalitions and alliances for defense and survival. Critics argue that the behaviors TMT attributes to death anxiety can be better explained by the need to form and maintain social bonds and coalitions.

Epistemic Theory: This theory suggests that people's need for cognitive closure and meaning maintenance drives many of the behaviors observed in TMT experiments. According to this view, people are motivated to reduce uncertainty and maintain a sense of meaning and coherence in their lives, which can explain the same behaviors without invoking death anxiety.

Domain-General Theories: These theories propose that the behaviors observed in TMT experiments are not specific to death anxiety but are instead part of broader psychological processes. For example, the need to manage anxiety and maintain psychological equanimity can explain these behaviors without invoking the fear of death.

If we consider the full range of human concerns we can see that TMT places too much importance on death anxiety compared to other existential concerns. Many people fear things other than death more: fear of insanity and mental breakdown; fear of repeating an early unbearable trauma; fear of complete isolation or alienation; fear of being overpowered psychologically or physically; fear of being alone; fear of separation from loved ones; fear of immortality or having one’s life prolonged against one’s wishes, and so on. When Becker replaces the Freudian preoccupation with sexuality with the fear of death as the primary motivation in human behavior he did psychology no favors.

In pursuit of a broadly explanatory theory, TMT advocates have made implausible inferences and have oversimplified complex human motivations and behaviors. Striving for self-esteem, achievement, or social approval may be driven by immediate social and environmental pressures more than or instead of existential fear. In a study by Leary and Schreindorfer they “found that self-esteem was correlated with certain facets of death-related fears, but it was related more strongly to fears about dealing with pain and uncertainty rather than with non-existence, as TMT predicts.”

I also find it odd that TMT says self-esteem provides a buffer against death-related anxiety. If you have self-esteem you are going to be more unhappy about death, not less. You have more to lose. The more valuable a participant in a meaningful universe you think yourself to be, the worse death is! This is closely related to the sour grapes phenomenon where people disparage things they believe are unattainable. “If I’m going to die, then life isn’t much good anyway.” “Death gives meaning to life, so it’s a good thing that I will die!”

Telltales signs of political motivation

The above objections seem to me entirely compelling. There are others that I have not covered, such as the charge that TMT may not effectively account for cultural differences in death attitudes. I mentioned this briefly with respect to the diversity of religious beliefs. Some cultures are much more collectivist and the fear of social exclusion or dishonor may play a larger role in shaping behavior than fear of death itself. For a theory that claims to explain so much, there is also the uncomfortable fact that TMT has had negligible effect on clinical psychology.

I have one more issue with TMT, as I have come across it. On its own, it is hardly a knockdown argument. Instead, to me, it is more of a warning sign. For instance, in a Psychology Today article on TMT, we are told:

A core element of Terror Management Theory is that humans will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about their mortality. This may be one reason it’s so difficult for societies to take action on global warming. Individuals may derive some psychological comfort from the denial of climate change, but counterintuitively, doing so could jeopardize the survival of the species.

Surprise! The leftist-dominated psychologists find TMT a handy way to dismiss those who do not believe global warming is about to destroy us all. Another article supplies another leftish comment using TMT as an excuse: “Through cultural worldviews that appreciate others like them but reject others that are not like them, leaders can exploit their followers and even lead them to rise up against others that do not agree with them, in wars, conflicts, or events like January 6^th, where a small group of like-minded citizens stormed Congress.” Others use TMT to explain what is wrong with “consumerism.”

This makes me suspicious. I have not seen the same issue in evolutionary psychology outside of TMT although maybe I just have not read enough.

How we deal with anxiety and terror

TMT insists that we deal with this supposed death terror by building our self-esteem and by attaching ourselves more tightly to a particular culture. TMT apparently accepts death as inevitable and fear of death as unavoidable. Alan Harrington, of course, did not accept death and he pointed out diverse ways in which we deal with any death anxiety we might feel.

Harrington cites other “opiates of the masses” such as psychiatric treatment, drunkenness, group action to live as part of an immortal collective, blotting out the world with sex or drugs, and burying yourself in work or family. These “are all varieties of self-hypnosis. Without exception they aim to cover up our condition rather than change it.” Most people do not believe there is any way to change our condition. For them, one or more of these responses may be understandable. Complete acceptance and serenity in the face of extinction is not easy.

In Harrington’s view we each favor one of four styles of consciousness in the face of death:

1. The way of standing out against the laws of creation and decay.

2. The way of retracting the self, yielding up one’s being to the management of others, or sharing it with others, settling for collective immortality.

3. The way of deliberately dulling one’s awareness of things…. Seeking safety in the familiar.

4. The way of trying to bypass death through the gentle diffusion or violent shattering of the self.

TMT ignores 1, focuses exclusively on 2, and ignores 3 and 4. (At least in what I have read.) TMT’s cultural view is largely based on Western Christianity. Some eastern religions advocate letting go of worldly attachments. This is presented as a form of ultimate freedom. To me it looks like pretending life is not worth appreciating and holding on to.

Do people who are dying fear death more or less? Some research suggests that people who believe they are close to death fear it much less than others. Those who are closest to death appear to be more positive about it than those further from death. I do not know if that research has been replicated but it seems plausible enough. As death approaches we may allow ourselves to accept or cling to beliefs that make death easier to bear. Some people find religion in their last days and months. (My mother had never been religious in her 90+ years but apparently accepted some kind of Christianity in her final months.)

Aside from this tendency, the growing acceptance – and even welcoming of – the end is completely understandable. Terminal people are typically exhausted, in pain, and unable to enjoy even the basics of life. They know they will never get better, never resume the life they had. The prospect of ceasing to exist is not so bad. Whereas TMT sees people’s fear of death as paramount, fear of pain, suffering, and uselessness can be more powerful.

Despite accepting religion near the end of her life, my mother (who had been partially paralyzed by a stroke several years before) wanted to die. Eventually, she refused food and water to hasten the end. Imagining myself in her place and without a commitment to biostasis, I can see making the same decision. But how many healthy and active old people are eager to die?

How should we feel about death?

I do not want to lean too heavily on the “should” in the question. Different people with differing philosophies may reasonably think and feel a variety of ways. Rather than there being a single way we all should feel about death, it is more sensible to identify ways of responding to the prospect of death than are more or less reasonable.

It makes sense to condition our feelings about the ultimate end depending on how we expect it to come – how far in the future we expect to die and how. A death in a few months from aggressive cancer is hugely different from death possibly coming at some time in the next centuries or millennia, not from aging or disease but from accident, perhaps happening in pursuit of a grand adventure. Setting aside the requirements for biostasis, I would rather go quickly and without much time to think about it and to bemoan the life that was ending.

What would I think in those last moments? I do not know, although when I had a major car crash a decade ago, I remember seeing the concrete wall of the freeway approaching as my car swerved toward it and thinking. “Well, this is it.” I can thank the modern miracle of engineering, the airbag, for the outcome: My car was totaled but I walked away with one minor bruise.

We also reasonably say that it makes no sense to fear the state of death – being dead. I agree with the ancient philosophers who argued that death is not a state to be feared. This is not to say that it is unreasonable to fear your end. Death ends all experience, all achievement, all exploration, all relationships.

Personal death is a supremely strange thing. We cannot imagine it. We cannot imagine what it is like to not exist. We can imagine our senses failing, our bodies giving out, being blind, deaf, and mute. But that is not death. When we try to think about being dead we probably imagine an infinite space of darkness in which we float, bored out of our minds. But we will have no mind. We will not be. It makes no sense to fear being dead. It makes sense to fear being paralyzed, blind, deaf, or helpless. We tend to confuse the two.

We can imagine all the wonderful things we will not experience – the people we will not meet, the books we will not read, the places we will not explore, the knowledge we will not acquire – but that is not fear of death; it is fear of missing out: FOMO. We can imagine other people’s memory of us fading to nothing over time. But it not the state of being dead that we are unhappy about. We can try to imagine nonexistence but we will necessarily always fail. It is infinitely harder than imaging what it would be like to be a bat. It cannot be done.

Terror Management Theory seems not to address this, taking “fear of death” as a single thing.

This is not a cheerful topic. But as advocates for life extension and biostasis we need to be clear in our thinking. If we can help people understand that what is bad about death is not being dead, it is all the good things in life that we will never experience, then we may help weaken the defense mechanisms that deter most people from facing the end and taking the only possible means around it.