Terror Management Theory: what it is and how it explains fear of death

The Terror Management Theory explains the fear of death and its psychological causes.

Human beings can experience fears of different elements, and one of the most recurrent is the fear of death.

There are different theories to try to explain the psychological mechanisms behind this reaction. One of the most novel is the terror management theory. We are going to deepen in this model in order to understand better its explanation towards this phenomenon.

What is the Terror Management Theory?

The terror management theory is a model created to try to give answer to the psychological uneasiness that the thought on the end of the life provokes in many people..

The foundation of this theory is the conflicting relationship between two parties. On the one hand, the natural instinct of conservation that both human beings and other animals have.

On the other hand, the conscious perception that we are mortal and therefore at some point life will end. Not only that, but we generally cannot know when it will happen, which increases this discomfort. Two conditions about death are therefore combined: that it is inevitable and also that the time when it will come cannot be predicted.

According to the theory of terror management, this situation generates in many subjects an intense fear, which has to be managed in some way. One of the ways to do this is simply mental avoidance, which would mean occupying the mind with other matters that are more pleasant for the person.

But there is another another way of escape very extended among great part of the population, which are cultural constructions, frequently based on religious beliefs.The idea is to have an immortal life after the earthly life. This is a measure that alleviates the anxiety caused by the fear of dying, since there is the hope that, somehow, this is not the end of life.

However, the theory of terror management explains that religion is only one of the mechanisms that people can use to reduce the panic caused by the prospect of dying at some point. There are other cultural constructs whose effect at the psychological level goes in the same direction as the idea of an afterlife..

These elements would be related to the idea of transcending in some way, not as an immortal being, but as part of something greater, be it a family, a nation, an organization or simply the human species. It would be, therefore, a symbolic immortality, based on the fact of being a participant in some act or idea that can be remembered historically.

The origin of this psychological theory

As important as it is to know what the terror management theory consists of, is to know its origin. This proposal, which falls within the social and evolutionary areas of psychology, is the product of the work of authors Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski.. Originally, these psychologists brought the idea to light in the book entitled The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, published in 2015.

However, it should be noted that the idea around which the terror management theory revolves is not new, far from it. One of the most recent works from which this model would be drinking, is The Denial of Death, by the American anthropologist, Ernest Becker.

Becker affirms that, in reality, most of the behaviors that any person engages in throughout his or her life have as their ultimate goal either to try to postpone a death that is, in reality, inevitable, or to avoid having this thought, which generates anxiety and fear, in his or her head.

It is precisely this fear of dying, as the theory of terror management later states, which drives human beings to try to give meaning, not only to death, but also to life.. This anxiety provokes, for example, the appearance of these religious ideas, but also laws, symbols and other cultural elements, all aimed at trying to reduce panic to the idea of non-existence after death.

All these concepts work at the collective level, but we must not forget another of the fundamental elements, which both for Becker and for the theory of terror management works, in this case, at the individual level, to placate the fear of dying, and that is none other than each person's own self-esteem.

In that sense, a good self-esteem would help to dissipate the feeling of anxiety that death can cause us. That is why, someone with high self-esteem will probably have more resources to face the idea of the fear of dying than a person with low self-esteem.. For Becker, in fact, self-esteem is a synonym of heroism.

In short, for author Ernest Becker, death, and more specifically the fear of death, is the engine that drives human behavior, and is therefore the main motivation for action.

Terror management theory and evolution

Another interesting question that has been analyzed in the terror management theory is the relationship between the fear of death and the evolutionary development of our species. We might ask whether this anxiety about mortality is in some way adaptive.. The truth is that fear of any potentially aversive stimulus is, in fact, a form of adaptation.

Avoiding elements that can harm us in one way or another is a way to increase the probability of survival. But the fear of death does not exactly fit into this concept, since it is clear that, no matter how much we fear death, ultimately we will never be able to avoid it.

Therefore, according to terror management theory, it would not seem that this fear is a form of adaptation but rather an effect produced by reaching a level of rationality in which we are aware of the inevitability of the end of life. In this sense, the increase in rationality itself would be the adaptive element, and the fear of death a consequence of it..

Faced with this new fear, which is not present in less evolved species, human beings have created a whole series of mechanisms and cultural constructs, which we have already seen, in order to try to placate it. Therefore, we could say that both the fear of death and the elements created to fight it, have the same origin, which would be that level of reasoning unique to our species.

The simple act of burying the dead could have a pragmatic origin, due to the fact of avoiding diseases or the attraction of scavenger animals.. But there is evidence that both our species and that of the extinct Neanderthals saw in these rites a way to prepare the deceased for an extraterrestrial life, since they placed food and other elements next to the mortal remains.

Critics

However, not all authors agree with the approach taken by the terror management theory. Some of these critics claim that human behavior is adapted to avoid specific situations that can potentially cause death, so the adaptation would be to each of those particular scenariosand would not be a generality in which people unconsciously avoid death.

Another criticism of this model is the generalization that terror management theory makes about the fear of death as the greatest or most general fear in most human beings. These authors claim that in different studies, many participants have chosen various situations instead of death as their greatest fear.

Some researchers have proposed as an alternative to this model, the idea that death is not really feared, but that it is the uncertainty generated in the face of death that is causing the anxiety.that would be causing the anxiety in many people. In this sense, they argue that uncertainty is normally only tolerated when there is a context that attenuates it, such as a wrapped gift received for a holiday.

Sin embargo, cuando esta incertidumbre tiene un contexto que no invita a pensar en lo agradable del mismo, no será algo que la persona, por lo general, vaya a tolerar adecuadamente. Estas son algunas de las críticas que la teoría de manejo del terror ha recibido.

Referencias bibliográficas:

• Becker, E. (1997). The denial of death. Free Press Paperbacks.
• Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. Public self and private self. Springer.
• Greenberg, J., Arndt, J. (2011). Terror management theory. Handbook of theories of social psychology.
• Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. (2004). The cultural animal: Twenty years of terror management theory and research. Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology. Guilford Press.
• Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The worm at the core: On the role of death in life. Random House.