An evolutionary argument for unconscious personal death unawareness

Abstract

There is strong experimental evidence that reminders of personal death influence individuals’ attitudes and behaviours. However, there is less support for the typically underlying hypothesis of ‘death denial’, which holds that terror resulting from the awareness of personal mortality is addressed through a variety of psychological and cultural defences. This paper suggests it is evolutionarily more plausible that humans are unconsciously unaware of their own deaths, which would mitigate death-related anxiety without the need for costly and complex defences. While some aspects of the argument are necessarily speculative, problems with the death denial model, as well as relevant aspects of literature on consciousness and self-awareness, positive illusions and self-deception, support the possibility of unconscious death unawareness. The cognitive requirements of human calculated reciprocity also suggest a potentially adaptive function for personal death unawareness, as well as a maladaptive effect related to human tendencies to enter into reciprocal contracts involving afterlife rewards.