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Terror management theory (TMT; Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski 1991) was derived from the work of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (1924-1974), who in such books as The Birth and Death of Meaning (1962), The Denial of Death (1973), and Escape from Evil (1975) argued that the uniquely human awareness of death underlies a substantial proportion of human behavior. TMT posits that although human beings share with all life-forms a biological propensity toward survival, humans are unique in their awareness of the inevitability of death, that death can occur at any time, and that we are corporeal creatures no more important or enduring than barnacles, beets, and beavers. To assuage the potentially paralyzing terror engendered by this knowledge, humans embed themselves in cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs shared by individuals in groups that provide a sense of meaning and significance and promises of symbolic and literal immortality to those who adhere to the standards of value prescribed by their culture.
While cultures vary considerably, they share the same defensive psychological function: to provide meaning and value and in so doing bestow psychological equanimity in the face of death. All cultural worldviews can ultimately be viewed as shared fictions, in the sense that none of them are likely to be literally true, and their existence is generally sustained by social consensus. Individuals surrounded by people believing the same things as themselves can be quite confident of the veracity of their beliefs. However, when one encounters people with different beliefs, this is posited to pose a challenge to one’s death-denying belief systems; TMT proposes that this challenge is a primary reason that people are generally quite uncomfortable around, and hostile toward, those who are different. Additionally, because no symbolic cultural construction can actually overcome the physical reality of death, residual anxiety might well be unconsciously projected onto other groups of individuals as scapegoats, who are designated all-encompassing repositories of evil. Thus, responses to people with different beliefs might be to scapegoat them or berate them, or try to convert them to one’s own system of beliefs. In some instances, these dynamics might well lead to terrorism, war, and killing.
Empirical support for TMT (see Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski [2004] for a recent review) has been obtained in over two hundred experiments, primarily by demonstrating that reminders of death (mortality salience) instigate cultural worldview defense. For example, after a mortality salience induction, Christian participants reminded of death liked fellow Christians more and Jewish people less, Germans sat further away from a Turkish person and closer to a fellow German, and people were more physically aggressive toward someone with different political beliefs. Research conducted after September 11, 2001, demonstrated that reminders of death or the events of 9/11 increased Americans’ support for President George W. Bush and his policies in Iraq and conservative Americans’ support for the use of nuclear and chemical weapons in preemptive military strikes. Additionally, Iranians reminded of death were more supportive of suicide bombers and more willing to engage in martyrdom actions.
Most recently, TMT theorists have been devising ways to minimize or eliminate the adverse effects of death denial while exploring how confrontations with mortality can elicit what is most noble in the human animal.
Bibliography:
- Solomon, Sheldon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. 1991. A Terror Management Theory of Social Behavior: The Psychological Functions of Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,vol. 24, ed. Mark Zanna, 93–159. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
- Solomon, Sheldon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. 2004. The Cultural Animal: Twenty Years of Terror Management Theory and Research. In Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, eds. Jeff Greenberg, Sander L. Koole, and Tom Pyszczynski, 13–34. New York: Guilford Press.
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