Terror Management Theory: Mortality Salience

Abstract

Terror management theory (TMT) describes how humans cope with the existential terror aroused by mortality salience—the awareness that all creatures must die—juxtaposed with the instinct to survive. Proximal defenses such as denial and repression relieve this terror in the short run, but these thoughts can remain activated outside conscious awareness. Distal defenses, which come into play to address unconscious mortality salience, include worldview defense and bolstering self‐esteem. Experimental manipulations to increase death‐thought accessibility include having people write a paragraph about their own death. The operation of distal defenses can be observed after a delay involving a distracting cognitive task. These distal defenses include: favoring people in one's ingroup, denigrating people in the outgroup, and expressing one's national identity. By defending one's worldview and self‐esteem, these defenses relieve existential terror through symbolic immortality. TMT has been studied extensively in the context of health communication, because it is thought that many fear‐inducing health messages implicitly or explicitly engage thoughts of death. The terror management health model has been developed to describe the application of TMT to health contexts. TMT has also been studied in the political arena, because worldview defense is often defined as expressions of one's political ideology. The ways in which people defend their ideology is of interest to political scientists. The theory has been criticized because the role of emotion (fear and anxiety) has been unclear, and its conception of survival instinct is at odds with current thinking in evolutionary theory.