This article appeared in the New Scientist magazine in August. Please do not quote or copy material without the permission of the editors of the periodical.

Death defying

New Scientist vol 183 issue 2462 - 28 August 2004, page 40

We are the only animal that knows we are going to die. How we cope with that knowledge could change our world, says Kate Douglas

"NOT to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true." Philip Larkin's evocation of death in his poem Aubade is bleak, even chilling. But Larkin was notoriously gloomy: ask a bunch of psychology students to imagine being dead and you'll get a rather different perspective. "It will suck" or "I'll just rot" are typical responses. It's not just that scientists are less articulate than poets. The truth is that most of us do not experience the all-pervading existential angst that haunted Larkin. Far from being terrified by the prospect of annihilation, most of the time we go about our daily lives as though it will never happen.

And that is very strange. Here we are, the only animals on the planet capable of anticipating the day when we will no longer exist, yet mostly we ignore this insight. Why are we not constantly paralysed with fear? Many have never even considered this question. But some psychologists argue that the fear of death does in fact take centre stage in most of our thoughts and behaviours. The thought of death is so terrifying, they say, that our minds have evolved mechanisms to repress this fear and these are at the root of how we construct our societies, how we treat others, and the way we see ourselves.

This idea underpins a school of thought called terror management theory. TMT claims to explain our reactions to events that threaten the veneer of permanence and meaning that we put on the world. It makes sense of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001: the immediate hike in sales of star-spangled banners, the increase in xenophobia and the way Americans rallied behind a president who until then had been seen by many as failing. More importantly, say TMT advocates, being able to predict how people respond when brought face to face with their own mortality should allow us to cultivate our nobler instincts such as tolerance, altruism and creativity, and curb more sinister ones such as prejudice, hatred and aggression.

The idea was born one day, two decades ago, as three long-time friends, Sheldon Solomon, Tom Pyszczynski and Jeff Greenberg, contemplated The Denial of Death, a 1974 Pulitzer prizewinning book by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. The three psychologists wondered why we humans expend so much energy bolstering our self-esteem by defending ourselves against personal attacks, and why we put so much faith in our particular world view, such as our religion or beliefs about what is important in life. Becker seemed to provide an answer: these are the mechanisms, he argued, by which we buffer ourselves against fear of death.

Could he be on to something? Greenberg, who is at the University of Arizona, Tucson; Solomon, from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Pyszczynski, from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, decided the idea was worth testing. Their first experiment was designed to test how being made aware of our mortality affects subsequent behaviour towards someone who violates aspects of our world view. To do this they asked a group of municipal court judges to write a few sentences about what they thought would happen to them when they died, and how this made them feel. The judges then had to set bond, or bail price, for a hypothetical woman accused of prostitution. A second group of judges also had to set bond for the same woman, but without being made to think about their death beforehand. The difference was remarkable. The average bond set by the first group was $455, while the controls asked for just $50. Thinking about death clearly made the judges less forgiving of someone whose behaviour did not fit with their world view.

Next, to investigate the connection between fear of death and self-esteem, the trio gave two groups of volunteers bogus feedback from a personality test. Individuals in the first group were portrayed in a glowing light, whereas those in the second had slightly less positive feedback. Half of each group were then shown film clips showing images of death while the other half viewed neutral footage. When the researchers tested anxiety levels by asking subjects how they felt, they found that boosting people's self-esteem allowed them to watch the death-related film clips without feeling any more anxious than people watching the neutral footage. Without the boost, the death-related images aroused considerably more anxiety than the neutral ones. "What self-esteem is doing is convincing us that we are significant beings," Greenberg says. "By being more than just animals we persuade ourselves that we are not subject to the natural laws of decay and death."

Solomon, Pyszczynski and Greenberg were convinced they were onto something. They argued that recreating the universe as a place full of order and meaning helps us cope with the terror that knowledge of our own death would otherwise bring. A world view that includes concepts such as the soul, reincarnation and an afterlife offers literal immortality. It also provides symbolic immortality through association with entities including nations, groups and causes that are larger and longer-lasting than ourselves, and through tangible reflections of our existence, such as children, money and culturally valued achievements. We in turn derive self-esteem from living up to the values and standards of our particular conception of reality.

Initially these ideas were met with scepticism, but since the first paper was published in 1985, more than 200 studies have been carried out, all suggesting that we respond to reminders of our death in predictable ways.

Many of the experiments show just how pervasive is the link between reminders of death, or "mortality salience", and our reactions to people who do or do not share our particular world view. Holly McGregor at the University of Arizona and colleagues found that following mortality salience, people were more likely to administer large quantities of chilli sauce to a chilli-hating third party who did not hold the same political views as themselves than to someone whose politics matched their own. By contrast, volunteers who were not asked to contemplate death beforehand gave around the same amount of sauce to both groups. Likewise, Greenberg and others found that Christian subjects rated other Christians more positively than Jews following mortality salience. And researchers from the University of Mainz in Germany showed that German students sat closer to a fellow German and further away from a Turk after contemplating their own death.

Other studies indicate that reminders of death increase people's conformity to cultural norms - traits or behaviours that are sanctioned by their particular group. In one study Greenberg found that people valued charity more highly if they were interviewed next to a funeral home than elsewhere on the street. In another, the researchers presented American subjects with two problems that could best be solved in the first case by sifting black dye through the American flag and in the second by hammering a nail with a crucifix. People forced to contemplate their death took much longer to solve the problems and Solomon, Pyszczynski and Greenberg believe that this is because death thoughts made people uneasy about using these American and Christian icons in inappropriate ways.

Other studies have shown that reminders of death have the effect of making people strive to bolster their self-esteem: people who prided themselves on being good drivers tended to drive more boldly and those who valued their appearance focused on improving it. The experimental evidence leaves little doubt that we are affected by our own mortality - at least when we are forced to confront it.

Where TMT becomes contentious is in its insistence that fear of death is at the root of virtually all our thoughts and actions. How can it be, when most people say they rarely to think about death?

In an attempt to solve this conundrum, Solomon, Pyszczynski and Greenberg have been trying to figure out the mental processes involved. Working with Jamie Arndt from the University of Missouri-Columbia, they found that immediately after mortality salience, subjects do not show physiological signs of anxiety and claim not to feel worried. "The first thing that happens is there is an active suppression process that appears to be geared towards blotting out the conscious awareness of death," says Solomon. In the few minutes that follow, thoughts associated with death become unconsciously accessible. People become more likely to associate word prompts with death-related words: "coff-" with coffin rather than coffee, for example. Finally, after about 10 to 15 minutes, subjects react with the predictable sorts of responses that bolster their self-esteem and reaffirm their world view, which in turn seems to suppress the unconscious death thoughts.

So, the mental defences that allow us to overcome our fear of death take two distinct forms, the TMT theorists say. Conscious thoughts of death are actively suppressed, and unconscious ones result in the responses seen in the experiments. This distinction is important for the theory, they say, because it explains how the mostly unconscious, ever-present knowledge of mortality influences our behaviour in so many ways and yet we are still able to get on with our lives without experiencing paralysing fear.

But TMT goes even further, arguing that the knowledge of our own mortality is so potentially debilitating that once our ancestors gained it, they would have been compelled to drastically alter their world to cope. Nobody knows exactly when the insight occurred, though it is likely to have emerged from increasingly sophisticated brains that were at least capable of self-awareness and conceiving a past, present and future. TMT advocates argue that the realisation of mortality led to the development of spiritual systems, group orientation, culturally valued artefacts and achievements, and all the other trappings of culture through which we can transcend our earthly bonds. "Just about anything that defines us as uniquely human either emerged directly or subsequently was co-opted to help us deal with that problem," says Solomon.

It is comments like these that have raised the hackles of some evolutionary anthropologists. They don't doubt the results of the experiments, but dispute their interpretation. The most vocal opposition comes from Carlos David Navarrete and Daniel Fessler of the University of California, Los Angeles, who point out that evolutionary theory can already explain our rich cultural life and our tendency to close ranks when we feel threatened. We are ultra-social animals, they say, who learn from those around us, and whose survival depends on being good team players who can identify and conform with the practices and values of our particular group. They argue that it is not in our nature to be terrified by thoughts of death. Instead, like any animal, we experience fear when faced with specific threats such as snakes, heights or men wielding axes. Fear has evolved for a purpose - it primes our bodies to respond to immediate danger - which makes nonsense of the notion that we have evolved mental mechanisms to suppress fear and anxiety generally. "From an evolutionary perspective this is quite implausible," says Navarrete.

Conformism rules

To add weight to their arguments, Navarrete and Fessler have done a series of experiments. They wanted to test the prediction of evolutionary theory that we are likely to identify most strongly with our own group in situations where being part of a team is beneficial for survival. So, as well as asking people to contemplate their mortality, the anthropologists got them to think about being socially isolated, having personal property stolen and needing support for a community project. Sure enough, thinking about these situations elicited the same responses as thinking about mortality, with subjects reacting more favourably to members of their own group and disparaging outsiders. What's more, when they carried out the same experiments in Costa Rica the only situation that did not lead to these responses was mortality salience.

Navarrete concludes that there is no special link between death thoughts and our tendency to defend our particular world view. Instead, he says, what the TMT advocates are seeing is an example of individuals seeking to build coalitions in a situation where group membership could help survival. And the fact that Costa Ricans do not react in this way to death thoughts indicates that the human instinct to rally to the group is primed by different situations in different cultures. Navarrete and Fessler hope that publication of their findings will lead to a more informed debate in TMT circles. "These people are brilliant experimentalists," says Fessler, "but they don't understand evolution."

Another evolutionary theorist, Nicholas Humphrey from the London School of Economics, points out that if coming to understand our mortality really was debilitating, natural selection would have acted quickly to suppress the fear at source. The TMT findings are intriguing and need explanation, he says, but perhaps the story could be stood on its head. "It's not that nature created us to feel existential anxiety and culture cured it; rather nature seems to have designed us not to feel it, but culture does its level best to create it." Like Navarrete and Fessler, Humphrey points out that priests and other figures of authority often try to instil fear as a means of control.

Sure, some people in positions of power exploit our existential anxiety, Greenberg admits. "But if the potential for anxiety wasn't already there this wouldn't work!" Nor are he and his colleagues fazed by the finding that people affiliate with their particular group when faced with problems where being part of a coalition can help. It doesn't explain why a reminder of mortality should elicit this response, they argue.

Where does all this leave TMT? The underlying theory may be in dispute, but nobody doubts that we do react in interesting ways when confronted with death. And being able to predict people's behaviour in these situations has practical implications in a world where war, violence and terrorism are commonplace. Such threats may increase prejudice and insularity, but other experiments show that if you first remind people of the positive values of their social group, mortality salience can encourage traits such as tolerance, fairness and generosity. If nothing else, simply knowing that certain responses are inevitable in the wake of another 9/11 could help maintain political stability.

Kate Douglas