Mortality salience is the awareness that one's death is inevitable.
The term derives from terror management theory, which proposes the so-called mortality salience hypothesis: mortality salience causes existential anxiety that may be buffered by one's cultural worldview and/or a sense of self-esteem.
Mortality salience engages the conflict humans have to face both their instinct to avoid death completely, and their intellectual knowledge that avoiding death is ultimately futile. According to terror management theory, when human beings begin to contemplate their mortality and their vulnerability to death, feelings of terror emerge because of the simple fact that humans want to avoid their inevitable death. [1] Mortality salience comes into effect because humans contribute all of their actions to either avoiding death or distracting themselves from contemplating it. Thus, terror management theory asserts that almost all human activity is driven by the fear of death.
Most research done on terror management theory revolves around the mortality salience paradigm. It has been found that religious people as well as religious fundamentalists are less vulnerable to mortality salience manipulations, and so religious believers engage in cultural worldview defense to a lesser extent than nonreligious people. [2]
Mortality salience is highly manipulated by one's self-esteem. People with low self-esteem are more apt to experience the effects of mortality salience, whereas people with high self-esteem are better able to cope with the idea that their death is uncontrollable. As an article states, "according to terror management theory, increased self-esteem should enhance the functioning of the cultural anxiety buffer and thereby provide protection against death concerns". [3]
Mortality salience has the potential to cause worldview defense, a psychological mechanism that strengthens people's connection with their in-group as a defense mechanism. Studies also show that mortality salience can lead people to feel more inclined to punish what they believe to be minor moral transgressions. One such study divided a group of judges into two groups—one that was asked to reflect upon their mortality, and one group that was not. The judges were then asked to set a bond for an alleged prostitute. The group that had reflected on mortality set an average bond of $455, while the control group's average bond was $50. [4] What prompted the increase is unclear, only the correlation was demonstrated. Possible interpretations include cultural beliefs about maintaining moral codes leading to a successful afterlife as promised in religions incentivizing the punishment of moral transgressions, or that the increased punishments could simply represent a desire to be more impactful on the world before death, some other cause, or multiple.
Another study found that mortality salience could cause an increase in support for martyrdom and military intervention. It found that students who reflected on their mortality preferred people who supported martyrdom, and indicated they might consider martyrdom themselves. They also found that, especially among politically conservative students, mortality salience increased support for military intervention, but not among students who were politically liberal. [5]
A study tested "the hypothesis that mortality salience intensifies gender differences in reactions to sexual and emotional infidelity". In the study, participants were asked to work through packets containing mortality salience manipulation questions. In the results, they found that "sex is more relevant to the self-esteem of men than women and being in a committed relationship is relatively more important to women than for men". Therefore, when linking mortality salience to gender, emotion, and sex, men are more likely to suffer from sexual infidelity, and women are more likely to suffer from emotional infidelity. The results of this study showed that there is a logistic regression revealing a significant three-way interaction between gender, sex value, and mortality salience for the item pitting "passionate sex" against "emotional attachment". [6]
Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it ."
Jealousy generally refers to the thoughts or feelings of insecurity, fear, and concern over a relative lack of possessions or safety.
A worldview or a world-view or Weltanschauung is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge, culture, and point of view. A worldview can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.
Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.
Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
Infidelity is a violation of a couple's emotional and/or sexual exclusivity that commonly results in feelings of anger, sexual jealousy, and rivalry.
In-group favoritism, sometimes known as in-group–out-group bias, in-group bias, intergroup bias, or in-group preference, is a pattern of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members. This can be expressed in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways.
The Denial of Death is a 1973 book by American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker which discusses the psychological and philosophical implications of how people and cultures have reacted to the concept of death. The author argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death.
Terror management theory (TMT) is both a social and evolutionary psychology theory originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski and codified in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015). It proposes that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, which is managed through a combination of escapism and cultural beliefs that act to counter biological reality with more significant and enduring forms of meaning and value—-basically countering the personal insignificance represented by death with the significance provided by symbolic culture.
Sheldon Solomon is an American social psychologist. He is a professor of psychology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Solomon is best known for developing terror management theory, along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. This theory is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality.
Neuroticism is a personality trait associated with negative emotions. It is one of the Big Five traits. Individuals with high scores on neuroticism are more likely than average to experience such feelings as anxiety, worry, fear, anger, frustration, envy, jealousy, pessimism, guilt, depressed mood, and loneliness. Such people are thought to respond worse to stressors and are more likely to interpret ordinary situations, such as minor frustrations, as appearing hopelessly difficult. Their behavioral responses may include procrastination, substance use, and other maladaptive behaviors, which may aid in relieving negative emotions and generating positive ones.
Jeff Greenberg is a social psychology professor at the University of Arizona. He is notable for coining the concept of Terror Management Theory, with two of his colleagues, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski.
Tom Pyszczynski is an American social psychologist. He is notable, together with Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon, for founding the field of Terror Management Theory (TMT). TMT is a theory that is based on the writings of Ernest Becker, along with other existential thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, and Heidegger. At the heart of TMT is the notion that human beings have a unique capacity for self-awareness, which makes them realize that death is inevitable. This realization, which conflicts with people's instinctive need for self-preservation, gives rise to a potential for existential anxiety, or terror, that is greater than that in other animals. To manage this potential for terror, people have constructed cultural worldviews, which assure people of either a literal form of afterlife or a symbolic form of death transcendence. When people live up to the standards implied by their cultural worldviews, they attain a sense of positive self-esteem. Thus, TMT suggests that one major psychological function of self-esteem lies in protecting people against existential anxiety. TMT was explicitly formulated to be open to empirical testing. Indeed, since TMT was first conceived in the 1980s, the theory has inspired hundreds of experiments that were designed to test core ideas of TMT. For instance, in support of TMT, many experiments have shown that reminding people of their own mortality leads people to defend their cultural worldviews more vigorously. For instance, people who are briefly reminded of death are more dismissive of someone who criticizes their culture.
Self-esteem can be defined as how favorably individuals evaluate themselves. According to Leary, self-esteem is the relationship between one's real self and one's ideal self, feeding off of favorable behaviors. It refers to an individual's sense of their value or worth, or the extent to which a person values, approves of, appreciates, prizes, or likes themselves. Self-esteem is generally considered the evaluative component of the self-concept, a broader representation of the self that includes cognitive and behavioral aspects as well as evaluative or affective ones. There are several different proposals as to the functions of self-esteem. One proposal is that it satisfies the inherent need to feel good about oneself. Another is that it serves to minimize social rejection. Self-esteem is also known as a way for a person to remain dominant in relationships. Self-esteem is known to protect people from potential fear that arises from the prospect of death. Motivating individuals towards their goals, high self-esteem fosters effective coping, while low self-esteem tends to result in avoidance.
Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one's own death, and is also known as thanatophobia. Individuals affected by this kind of anxiety experience challenges and adversities in many aspects of their lives. Death anxiety is different from necrophobia, which refers to an irrational or disproportionate fear of dead bodies or of anything associated with death. Death anxiety has been found to affect people of differing demographic groups as well, such as men versus women, young versus old, etc. Different cultures can manifest aspects of death anxiety in differing degrees.
Anxiety buffer disruption theory (ABDT) is an application of terror management theory to explain an individual's reaction to a traumatic event, which leads to post traumatic stress disorder. Terror management theory posits that humans, unlike any other organism, are uniquely aware that death is the inevitable outcome of life. When thoughts of death are made salient, such as when a terrorist attack carries those thoughts into the level of consciousness, humans are subject to debilitating anxiety unless it can be "buffered." Humans respond to the anxiety and dread mortality salience produces by clinging to their cultural worldview, through self-esteem and also close personal relationships. Cultural worldviews, with their cultural norms, religious beliefs and moral values infuse life with meaning. They give life a feeling of normalcy and also a feeling of control. There is no way to definitely prove one's cultural worldview, there they are fragile human constructs and must be maintained. Clinging to a cultural worldview and self-esteem buffer the anxiety connected to thoughts of mortality. When thoughts of death are salient, humans are drawn to their cultural world view which "stipulates appropriate social requirements, and standards for valued conduct, while instilling one's life with meaning, order and permanence."
In social psychology, shattered assumptions theory proposes that experiencing traumatic events can change how victims and survivors view themselves and the world. Specifically, the theory – published by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in 1992 – concerns the effect that negative events have on three inherent assumptions: overall benevolence of the world, meaningfulness of the world, and self worth. These fundamental beliefs are the bedrock of our conceptual system and are the assumptions we are least aware of and least likely to challenge. They constitute our "assumptive world," defined as "a strongly held set of assumptions about the world and the self which is confidently maintained and used as a means of recognizing, planning, and acting" by C. M. Parkes. According to Janoff-Bulman, traumatic life events shatter these core assumptions, and coping involves rebuilding a viable assumptive world.
Existential isolation is the subjective feeling that every human life experience is essentially unique and can be understood only by themselves, creating a gap between a person and other individuals, as well as the rest of the world. Existential isolation falls under existentialism. It was addressed by Martin Heidegger in his book Being and Time (1927) and further explored by Irvin Yalom in his book Existential Psychotherapy (1980). Yalom defined existential isolation as one of three forms of isolation, the other two being intra- and interpersonal isolation. Unlike the other forms, one cannot overcome existential isolation as the gap that separates individuals existentially can never be closed. While every person can experience existential isolation, not everyone might actually feel existentially isolated. Those who do may feel a weaker connection to other individuals and question their beliefs and understanding of the world as they lack social validation.
The Scrooge effect is a psychological phenomenon that describes a noticeable behavioural change in individuals towards increased generosity and altruism following encounters with mortality or existential dread. It emphasizes that the realization of mortality motivates individuals to embrace cultural values and engage in activities that provide significance and transcendence beyond the concept of death. Corresponding to the terror management theory, the Scrooge effect proposes that existential apprehension can stimulate positive shifts in behavior. Individuals may prioritize acts of kindness and philanthropy as coping mechanisms to grapple with mortality and reaffirm their sense of purpose. Empirical studies suggest that personal adversities such as severe illness, financial adversity, or the bereavement of a loved one can instigate pro-social conduct, fostering sentiments of generosity and empathy. The Scrooge effect offers a conceptual framework within psychology to examine the determinants influencing altruistic behaviors and the underlying mechanisms driving transformative experiences.
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