[1][2] The most obvious examples of cultural values that assuage death anxiety are those that purport to offer literal immortality (e.g. belief in the afterlife through religion).
For example, values of national identity,[4] posterity,[5] cultural perspectives on sex,[6] and human superiority over animals[6] have been linked to calming death concerns.
[12] Death creates an anxiety in humans; it strikes at unexpected and random moments, and its nature is essentially unknowable, causing people to spend most of their time and energy to explain, forestall, and avoid it.
According to clinical psychiatrist Morton Levitt, Becker replaces the Freudian preoccupation with sexuality with the fear of death as the primary motivation in human behavior.
A 2008 research article in Psychological Review proposes a three-part model for understanding how awareness of death can ironically subvert health-promoting behaviors by redirecting one's focus towards behaviors that build self-esteem instead: Proposition 1 suggests that conscious thoughts about death can instigate health-oriented responses aimed at removing death-related thoughts from current focal attention.
Proposition 2 suggests that the unconscious resonance of death-related cognition promotes self-oriented defenses directed toward maintaining, not one's health, but a sense of meaning and self-esteem.
The last proposition suggests that confrontations with the physical body may undermine symbolic defenses and thus present a previously unrecognized barrier to health promotion activities.
[16]Terror-management theorists regard TMT as compatible with the theory of evolution:[17] Valid fears of dangerous things have an adaptive function that helped facilitate the survival of our ancestors' genes.
TMT posits that humankind used the same intellectual capacities that gave rise to this problem to fashion cultural beliefs and values that provided protection against this potential anxiety.
But during the Upper Paleolithic era, these pragmatic burial practices appear to have become imbued with layers of ritual performance and supernatural beliefs, suggested by the elaborate decoration of bodies with thousands of beads or other markers.
"[18] This reinforces the concept that abstract needs for individual and group self-esteem may continue to be selected for by evolution, even when they sometimes confer risks to physical health and well-being.
[23] Arndt et al. (2009) conducted three studies to examine how peer perceptions and social acceptance of smokers contributes to their quitting, as well as if, and why these people continue smoking for outside reasons, even when faced with thoughts of death and anti-smoking prompts.
Specifically, the researchers found that participants who were prompted with the idea that pale was more socially attractive, along with mortality reminders, tended to lean towards decisions that resulted in more protective measures from the sun.
[25] However, one weakness in their conduction was that the final questionnaire addressed opinions and behavioral questions, as opposed to the participants' level of persuasion regarding the different anti-smoking warning labels.
The introduction of this hypothesis has refined TMT, and led to new avenues of research that formerly could not be assessed due to the lack of an empirically validated way of measuring death-related cognitions.
Also, the differentiation between proximal (conscious, near, and threat-focused) and distal (unconscious, distant, symbolic) defenses that have been derived from DTA studies have been extremely important in understanding how people deal with their terror.
[39] Since its inception, the DTA hypothesis had been rapidly gaining ground in TMT investigations, and as of 2009, has been employed in over 60 published papers, with a total of more than 90 empirical studies.
Moreover, Taubman-Ben-Ari and Noy (2010) examine the idea that a person's level of self-awareness and self-consciousness should be considered in relation to their responses to their anxiety and death cognitions.
Goldenberg and Arndt (2008) state that the TMHM proposes the idea that death, despite its threatening nature, is in fact instrumental and purposeful in the conditioning of one's behavior towards the direction of a longer life.
TMHM explores how people will engage in behaviors, whether positive or negative, even with the heightened awareness of mortality, in the attempt to conform to society's expectations and improve their self-esteem.
As Forsyth (2009) posits, this tragedy made U.S. citizens aware of their mortality, and Bush provided an antidote to these existential concerns by promising to bring justice to the terrorist group responsible for the attacks.
Supporting this, arguments in favor of life after death, and simply being religious, reduce the effects of mortality salience on worldview defense.
[50][52] Proponents of TMT argue that the coalitional psychology theory is a black box explanation that 1) cannot account for the fact that virtually all cultures have a supernatural dimension; 2) does not explain why cultural worldview defense is symbolic, involving allegiance to both specific and general systems of abstract meaning unrelated to specific threats, rather than focused on the specific adaptive threats it supposedly evolved to deal with; and, 3) dismisses TMT's dual process account of the underlying processes that generate MS effects without providing an alternative of any kind or attempting to account for the data relevant to this aspect of the TMT analysis.
Unlike TMT, CP does not view national, political and religious coalitions as imagined communities that represent primarily cultural worldviews (distal defenses).
[53] Since findings on mortality salience and worldview defense were first published, other researchers have claimed that the effects may have been obtained due to reasons other than death itself, such as anxiety, fear, or other aversive stimuli such as pain.
The experimental manipulations in TMT research are likely to elicit a mixture of different types of negative emotions, including fear, anxiety, sadness, and anger.
When people are exposed to mortality salience, both TMT and meaning management theory would predict an increase in pro-culture and pro-esteem activities, but for very different reasons.
[59] TMT theorists agree that uncertainty can be disconcerting in some cases and it may even result in defense responses, but note that they believe the inescapability of death and the possibility of its finality regarding one's existence is most unsettling.
[49] In contrast, there is substantial evidence that, all things being equal, uncertainty and the unknown represent fundamental fears and are only experienced as pleasant when there is sufficient contextual certainty.
In response to the Many Labs 4 paper, Tom Pyszczynski (one of the founding psychologists of TMT), criticized the study for insufficient sample sizes, failure to follow the advice of researchers, and deviation from a preregistered protocol.