Evidence For Terror Management Theory I by Abram Rosenblatt Lyrics
Although it is evident that individual behavior is greatly affected by one's culture, relatively little is known about the forces that promote allegiance to particular cultural worldviews. Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1989, in press) posits that cultural conceptions of reality serve the vital function of buffering the anxiety that results from awareness of human vulnerability and mortality. Consequently, people are highly motivated to maintain faith in the cultural conceptions of reality to which they subscribe and to defend these conceptions against threats. The purpose of the research reported in this article was to test several hypotheses derived from terror management theory concerning reactions to those who uphold and violate cultural worldviews.
Terror management theory is based largely on insights gleaned from Ernest Becker's (1962, 1973, 1975) attempts to synthesize contributions from the various social science disciplines into a coherent conception of human motivation and behavior. According to Becker, sophisticated human intellectual abilities lead to an awareness of human vulnerability and mortality, and this awareness creates the potential for overwhelming terror. As these abilities evolved, cultural worldviews began to emerge. The potential for terror put a press on evolving conceptions of reality such that any worldview that was to survive needed to provide a means of managing this terror. The conception of reality espoused by any given culture is thus the basis of a cultural anxiety-buffer that serves to protect the individual from the anxiety that results from awareness of his or her vulnerability and ultimate mortality.
According to the theory, however, protection from anxiety requires that one achieve a sense of value or self-esteem within the cultural context. This is because the culture promises security only to those who live up to the cultural standards of value. Cultures provide this security in two ways: first, through conceptions of the world as a just place; in a truly just world, bad things would not happen to good people. Second, cultures promise real and symbolic immortality to those who live up to the standards of value; real immortality via religious concepts, and symbolic immortality via permanent contributions to the death-transcending culture. From this perspective, the cultural
anxiety-buffer consists of two components: (a) belief in the validity of a cultural worldview and the standards and values associated with that worldview, and (b) belief that one is meeting or exceeding those standards and values. Thus, the cultural worldview provides a context within which an individual can conceive of him- or herself as a valuable participant in a meaningful world, and thus function with equanimity in the face of his or her ultimate mortality.
Unfortunately, the cultural anxiety-buffer requires continual bolstering and defense against threat. In their daily lives, people are constantly confronted with reminders of the potential for pain, aversive experience, and death. One need only pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to encounter such reminders. In addition, because cultural worldviews are essentially socially constructed fictions, they are always vulnerable to threat by incoming information and require constant social validation. Given that people rely on social consensus to instill confidence in their conceptions of reality (cf. ffestinger, 1954; Kelley, 1967), the diverse array of beliefs, values, and behaviors to which people are exposed make it difficult to sustain faith in any particular worldview or in one's place in it. Terror management theory, therefore, posits that people will respond positively to those who bolster their cultural anxiety-buffers and negatively to those who threaten their cultural anxiety-buffers.
Clearly, people react negatively to those who violate cultural norms and values (e.g., Miller & Anderson, 1979; Schachter, 1951). The research reported in this article was specifically focused on the terror management function of reactions to such deviance. From a terror management perspective, negative reactions to moral transgressors occur because such deviance implicitly threatens the validity of one's own beliefs and values and the cultural conception of reality from which they are derived. When moral principles are not followed, it implies either that
the principles may not be universally valid or that the transgressor is evil. Rather than considering the possibility that the moral principle is invalid, people generally prefer to view transgressors as evil; consequently, it is generally agreed that those who break cultural rules must be punished.
To the extent that negative reactions toward moral transgressors are rooted in the implicit threat to the cultural worldview, it follows that such reactions should be intensified when people are reminded of the issues from which their worldviews serve to protect them. The six experiments reported in this article were designed to assess this proposition. Our general hypothesis was that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they are especially motivated to maintain their cultural anxiety buffer, and thus are especially punitive toward those who violate it and especially benevolent toward those who uphold it.
Experiment I
In our first experiment, we assessed reactions to a moral transgressor after subjects' own mortality was briefly made salient. More specifically, we asked municipal court judges to set bond for an alleged prostitute, on the basis of the type of information they typically use to make such judgments. The charge of prostitution was chosen because it emphasized the moral nature of the alleged crime. Immediately before receiving information about the case in question, mortality was made salient to half of the judges by asking them to fill out a brief open-ended questionnaire concerned with their thoughts and feelings about the prospect of their own death. Municipal court judges were
used as subjects both to enhance the external validity of the findings and to assess whether our hypothesized effect would occur using individuals trained to arrive at decisions based on the rational evaluation of factual information according to the law.
Judges in the mortality-salient condition assigned the defendant a much higher bond than did judges in the control condition (Ms = $455 and $50, respectively). The major finding of Experiment 1 was that, as predicted, reminding subjects of their mortality led them to recommend
higher bonds for an accused prostitute. According to terror management theory, moral principles are part of the cultural anxiety-buffer that protects individuals from anxiety concerning their vulnerability and mortality. Transgressions against these standards implicitly threaten the integrity of the anxietybuffer and thus engender negative reactions toward the transgressor. Inducing subjects to think about their mortality presumably increased their need for faith in their values, and thus increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor. An obvious alternative explanation for these results is that judges in the mortality-salience condition were simply put in a
bad mood and that bad mood predisposed the judges to treat the defendant harshly (cf. Veitch & Griffitt, 1976). This explanation is rendered unlikely, however, by the lack of significant differences between groups on any of the MAACL subscales. Nonetheless, one of the goals of Experiment 2 was to assess this alternative.
Experiment II
A second purpose of this experiment was to further examine the mood alternative. If the results of Experiment 1 resulted simply from a negative mood state created by the mortality salience manipulation, it follows that subjects' tendency to react negatively toward others would not be limited to those who had violated cultural norms but would extend to any target. To assess this possibility, we asked subjects in this experiment to evaluate the experimenter, who had not violated any social or cultural rules. If Experiment 1's findings resulted from a simple
association of the target with a negative mood state, then subjects should derogate the experimenter as well as the hypothetical defendant; indeed, they might derogate the experimenter more because she gave them the death questionnaire.
The primary analyses were 2 (mortality salience) X 2 (attitude toward prostitution) ANOVAS.3 As in Experiment 1, a highly significant main effect of mortality salience emerged on the bond measure, F( 1,47) = 8.77, p < .003, such that the bond allotted the prostitute was higher in the mortality-salient condition than in the control condition (Ms = $283 and $ 132, respectively). More important, the predicted Attitude Toward Prostitution X Mortality Salience interaction was also found, F( 1,47) = 6.28, .p < .02. As can be seen in Table 1, subjects with unfavorable attitudes toward prostitution assigned the prostitutes a significantly higher bond when mortality was salient than when it
was not, t(23) = 3.77, p < .001; mortality-salient-unfavorable attitude subjects also assigned a harsher bond than did mortality-salient-favorable-attitude subjects, t(26) = 3.27, p < .01. Mortality salience had no reliable effect on the bond recommendations of subjects with relatively favorable attitudes toward prostitution.
Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 's results and extended them in two important ways. First, the findings show that increasing the salience of mortality does not lead subjects to derogate just any target. Although mortality salience led to harsher bond assessments for the prostitute, it had no effect on evaluations of the experimenter. This, of course, is consistent with the notion that heightened awareness of mortality leads to greater need to defend the cultural anxiety-buffer. This finding, along with the absence of effects of mortality salience on the post manipulation mood measures, further reduces the plausibility of mood as an alternative explanation. In addition, as terror management theory suggests, mortality salience increased punishment of the transgressor only among subjects who believed that the target's behavior was truly immoral. The bond assessments of subjects with relatively positive attitudes toward prostitution were not affected by mortality salience because they did not see the prostitute's behavior as a violation of important values.
General Discussion
Taken together, the six studies reported in this article provide consistent support for terror management theory hypotheses concerning reactions to those who deviate from cultural standards. In all six experiments, subjects who were reminded of their mortality consistently recommended harsher treatment of a moral transgressor. Experiment 1 showed that even municipal court judges with a great deal of legal training succumb to this effect. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect does not appear to reflect a general bias toward negative evaluations of others; mortality salience had no effect whatsoever on evaluations of the experimenter. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that mortality salience increased negative reactions to deviant persons only among those who hold negative attitudes toward the particular type of deviance in question. Thus it appears that it is the individual's own unique version of the cultural worldview that must be defended against threat. Experiment 3 replicated the effect of mortality salience on reactions to deviant persons and also demonstrated that mortality salience increases the tendency to respond positively toward individuals who uphold cultural values.
Experiment 4 demonstrated that the effects of our mortality salience manipulation do not parallel those produced by a self awareness manipulation and do not simply reflect an amplification of responses to any affectively significant stimulus. Experiment 5 demonstrated that the mortality-salience manipulation does not produce measurable increases in physiological arousal (as assessed by pulse rate, pulse volume, and skin conductance) and that variations in physiological arousal do not appear to mediate the effect of mortality salience on responses to moral transgressors. Experiment 5 also showed that the no-questionnaire control condition used in the prior four experiments is equivalent to a more parallel control condition in which subjects were asked to write about eating. Finally, Experiment 6 replicated the mortality-salience effect with a different mortality-salience treatment and a different control group.
According to terror management theory, the beliefs and values that make up an individual's cultural worldview serve the vital function of buffering the anxiety that results from awareness of human vulnerability and mortality. The theory posits that the cultural worldview espoused by any given individual is a fragile construction that needs persistent social validation if the individual is to maintain faith in it. Those who deviate from cultural standards are responded to with disdain because such behavior threatens the values that underlie the individual's
source of security. Similarly, those who uphold cultural values are admired because such behavior validates the individual's values.
The present finding that reminding subjects of their mortality intensifies such reactions supports the proposition that the cultural worldview serves to protect individuals from anxiety concerning death. Theoretically, reminding subjects of their mortality increases their need for the protection from anxiety that their cultural worldview provides. Consequently, mortality salience leads to more negative reactions toward those who undermine the cultural worldview and more positive reactions toward those who uphold it.
The basic finding that mortality salience increases rejection of moral transgressors is consistent with the proposition that moral principles are part of the configuration of beliefs and values that protect the individual from anxiety concerning his or her mortality. For many people, moral principles are embedded in a more general system of religious beliefs that very explicitly provides hope of transcending death and insignificance. In addition to their explicit link to religious beliefs, moral principles are part of the more general set of cultural standards against which people compare themselves to assess their value. Thus, moral principles facilitate the individual's efforts to conceive of him- or herself as a valued contributor to something meaningful and permanent (the culture).
Interestingly, across all six experiments, there was no hint that the effects of mortality salience depend on physiological arousal or the conscious experience of anxiety. This largely rules out alternative explanations based on the arousal-based amplification of dominant responses (cf. Paulhus & Levitt, 1987). These findings raise the question, however, of why no signs of affect or arousal were detected in response to our mortalitysalience manipulation, in spite of its consistent effects on evaluations of those who impinge on the cultural worldview.
Although the terror may on occasion rise to consciousness in muted form, most of the anxiety people experience results from threats to either the worldview or self-esteem components of the cultural anxiety-buffer that protects them from the underlying existential terror. By bolstering and defending these two components, people can bypass the conscious experience of emotion that reminders of mortality would otherwise create. As Greenwald (1989) has recently argued (from a very different perspective), defensive reactions may sometimes occur so quickly and effectively that the subjective experience of anxiety is completely circumvented. Although the present findings provide
strong support for hypotheses derived from terror management theory, there is clearly a need for investigation of the precise intrapsychic mechanisms by which terror management occurs.
Terror management theory is an extremely broad perspective with implications for diverse areas of traditional social psychological inquiry. Because of the wide variety of hypotheses that can be derived from the theory, the present research must be viewed as just a first step in testing it. We believe that one of the most appealing aspects of the theory is the broad range of testable hypotheses that it can be used to generate. In fact, we have already gathered substantial evidence concerning two other sets of hypotheses.
Terror management theory is based largely on insights gleaned from Ernest Becker's (1962, 1973, 1975) attempts to synthesize contributions from the various social science disciplines into a coherent conception of human motivation and behavior. According to Becker, sophisticated human intellectual abilities lead to an awareness of human vulnerability and mortality, and this awareness creates the potential for overwhelming terror. As these abilities evolved, cultural worldviews began to emerge. The potential for terror put a press on evolving conceptions of reality such that any worldview that was to survive needed to provide a means of managing this terror. The conception of reality espoused by any given culture is thus the basis of a cultural anxiety-buffer that serves to protect the individual from the anxiety that results from awareness of his or her vulnerability and ultimate mortality.
According to the theory, however, protection from anxiety requires that one achieve a sense of value or self-esteem within the cultural context. This is because the culture promises security only to those who live up to the cultural standards of value. Cultures provide this security in two ways: first, through conceptions of the world as a just place; in a truly just world, bad things would not happen to good people. Second, cultures promise real and symbolic immortality to those who live up to the standards of value; real immortality via religious concepts, and symbolic immortality via permanent contributions to the death-transcending culture. From this perspective, the cultural
anxiety-buffer consists of two components: (a) belief in the validity of a cultural worldview and the standards and values associated with that worldview, and (b) belief that one is meeting or exceeding those standards and values. Thus, the cultural worldview provides a context within which an individual can conceive of him- or herself as a valuable participant in a meaningful world, and thus function with equanimity in the face of his or her ultimate mortality.
Unfortunately, the cultural anxiety-buffer requires continual bolstering and defense against threat. In their daily lives, people are constantly confronted with reminders of the potential for pain, aversive experience, and death. One need only pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to encounter such reminders. In addition, because cultural worldviews are essentially socially constructed fictions, they are always vulnerable to threat by incoming information and require constant social validation. Given that people rely on social consensus to instill confidence in their conceptions of reality (cf. ffestinger, 1954; Kelley, 1967), the diverse array of beliefs, values, and behaviors to which people are exposed make it difficult to sustain faith in any particular worldview or in one's place in it. Terror management theory, therefore, posits that people will respond positively to those who bolster their cultural anxiety-buffers and negatively to those who threaten their cultural anxiety-buffers.
Clearly, people react negatively to those who violate cultural norms and values (e.g., Miller & Anderson, 1979; Schachter, 1951). The research reported in this article was specifically focused on the terror management function of reactions to such deviance. From a terror management perspective, negative reactions to moral transgressors occur because such deviance implicitly threatens the validity of one's own beliefs and values and the cultural conception of reality from which they are derived. When moral principles are not followed, it implies either that
the principles may not be universally valid or that the transgressor is evil. Rather than considering the possibility that the moral principle is invalid, people generally prefer to view transgressors as evil; consequently, it is generally agreed that those who break cultural rules must be punished.
To the extent that negative reactions toward moral transgressors are rooted in the implicit threat to the cultural worldview, it follows that such reactions should be intensified when people are reminded of the issues from which their worldviews serve to protect them. The six experiments reported in this article were designed to assess this proposition. Our general hypothesis was that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they are especially motivated to maintain their cultural anxiety buffer, and thus are especially punitive toward those who violate it and especially benevolent toward those who uphold it.
Experiment I
In our first experiment, we assessed reactions to a moral transgressor after subjects' own mortality was briefly made salient. More specifically, we asked municipal court judges to set bond for an alleged prostitute, on the basis of the type of information they typically use to make such judgments. The charge of prostitution was chosen because it emphasized the moral nature of the alleged crime. Immediately before receiving information about the case in question, mortality was made salient to half of the judges by asking them to fill out a brief open-ended questionnaire concerned with their thoughts and feelings about the prospect of their own death. Municipal court judges were
used as subjects both to enhance the external validity of the findings and to assess whether our hypothesized effect would occur using individuals trained to arrive at decisions based on the rational evaluation of factual information according to the law.
Judges in the mortality-salient condition assigned the defendant a much higher bond than did judges in the control condition (Ms = $455 and $50, respectively). The major finding of Experiment 1 was that, as predicted, reminding subjects of their mortality led them to recommend
higher bonds for an accused prostitute. According to terror management theory, moral principles are part of the cultural anxiety-buffer that protects individuals from anxiety concerning their vulnerability and mortality. Transgressions against these standards implicitly threaten the integrity of the anxietybuffer and thus engender negative reactions toward the transgressor. Inducing subjects to think about their mortality presumably increased their need for faith in their values, and thus increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor. An obvious alternative explanation for these results is that judges in the mortality-salience condition were simply put in a
bad mood and that bad mood predisposed the judges to treat the defendant harshly (cf. Veitch & Griffitt, 1976). This explanation is rendered unlikely, however, by the lack of significant differences between groups on any of the MAACL subscales. Nonetheless, one of the goals of Experiment 2 was to assess this alternative.
Experiment II
A second purpose of this experiment was to further examine the mood alternative. If the results of Experiment 1 resulted simply from a negative mood state created by the mortality salience manipulation, it follows that subjects' tendency to react negatively toward others would not be limited to those who had violated cultural norms but would extend to any target. To assess this possibility, we asked subjects in this experiment to evaluate the experimenter, who had not violated any social or cultural rules. If Experiment 1's findings resulted from a simple
association of the target with a negative mood state, then subjects should derogate the experimenter as well as the hypothetical defendant; indeed, they might derogate the experimenter more because she gave them the death questionnaire.
The primary analyses were 2 (mortality salience) X 2 (attitude toward prostitution) ANOVAS.3 As in Experiment 1, a highly significant main effect of mortality salience emerged on the bond measure, F( 1,47) = 8.77, p < .003, such that the bond allotted the prostitute was higher in the mortality-salient condition than in the control condition (Ms = $283 and $ 132, respectively). More important, the predicted Attitude Toward Prostitution X Mortality Salience interaction was also found, F( 1,47) = 6.28, .p < .02. As can be seen in Table 1, subjects with unfavorable attitudes toward prostitution assigned the prostitutes a significantly higher bond when mortality was salient than when it
was not, t(23) = 3.77, p < .001; mortality-salient-unfavorable attitude subjects also assigned a harsher bond than did mortality-salient-favorable-attitude subjects, t(26) = 3.27, p < .01. Mortality salience had no reliable effect on the bond recommendations of subjects with relatively favorable attitudes toward prostitution.
Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 's results and extended them in two important ways. First, the findings show that increasing the salience of mortality does not lead subjects to derogate just any target. Although mortality salience led to harsher bond assessments for the prostitute, it had no effect on evaluations of the experimenter. This, of course, is consistent with the notion that heightened awareness of mortality leads to greater need to defend the cultural anxiety-buffer. This finding, along with the absence of effects of mortality salience on the post manipulation mood measures, further reduces the plausibility of mood as an alternative explanation. In addition, as terror management theory suggests, mortality salience increased punishment of the transgressor only among subjects who believed that the target's behavior was truly immoral. The bond assessments of subjects with relatively positive attitudes toward prostitution were not affected by mortality salience because they did not see the prostitute's behavior as a violation of important values.
General Discussion
Taken together, the six studies reported in this article provide consistent support for terror management theory hypotheses concerning reactions to those who deviate from cultural standards. In all six experiments, subjects who were reminded of their mortality consistently recommended harsher treatment of a moral transgressor. Experiment 1 showed that even municipal court judges with a great deal of legal training succumb to this effect. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect does not appear to reflect a general bias toward negative evaluations of others; mortality salience had no effect whatsoever on evaluations of the experimenter. Experiment 2 also demonstrated that mortality salience increased negative reactions to deviant persons only among those who hold negative attitudes toward the particular type of deviance in question. Thus it appears that it is the individual's own unique version of the cultural worldview that must be defended against threat. Experiment 3 replicated the effect of mortality salience on reactions to deviant persons and also demonstrated that mortality salience increases the tendency to respond positively toward individuals who uphold cultural values.
Experiment 4 demonstrated that the effects of our mortality salience manipulation do not parallel those produced by a self awareness manipulation and do not simply reflect an amplification of responses to any affectively significant stimulus. Experiment 5 demonstrated that the mortality-salience manipulation does not produce measurable increases in physiological arousal (as assessed by pulse rate, pulse volume, and skin conductance) and that variations in physiological arousal do not appear to mediate the effect of mortality salience on responses to moral transgressors. Experiment 5 also showed that the no-questionnaire control condition used in the prior four experiments is equivalent to a more parallel control condition in which subjects were asked to write about eating. Finally, Experiment 6 replicated the mortality-salience effect with a different mortality-salience treatment and a different control group.
According to terror management theory, the beliefs and values that make up an individual's cultural worldview serve the vital function of buffering the anxiety that results from awareness of human vulnerability and mortality. The theory posits that the cultural worldview espoused by any given individual is a fragile construction that needs persistent social validation if the individual is to maintain faith in it. Those who deviate from cultural standards are responded to with disdain because such behavior threatens the values that underlie the individual's
source of security. Similarly, those who uphold cultural values are admired because such behavior validates the individual's values.
The present finding that reminding subjects of their mortality intensifies such reactions supports the proposition that the cultural worldview serves to protect individuals from anxiety concerning death. Theoretically, reminding subjects of their mortality increases their need for the protection from anxiety that their cultural worldview provides. Consequently, mortality salience leads to more negative reactions toward those who undermine the cultural worldview and more positive reactions toward those who uphold it.
The basic finding that mortality salience increases rejection of moral transgressors is consistent with the proposition that moral principles are part of the configuration of beliefs and values that protect the individual from anxiety concerning his or her mortality. For many people, moral principles are embedded in a more general system of religious beliefs that very explicitly provides hope of transcending death and insignificance. In addition to their explicit link to religious beliefs, moral principles are part of the more general set of cultural standards against which people compare themselves to assess their value. Thus, moral principles facilitate the individual's efforts to conceive of him- or herself as a valued contributor to something meaningful and permanent (the culture).
Interestingly, across all six experiments, there was no hint that the effects of mortality salience depend on physiological arousal or the conscious experience of anxiety. This largely rules out alternative explanations based on the arousal-based amplification of dominant responses (cf. Paulhus & Levitt, 1987). These findings raise the question, however, of why no signs of affect or arousal were detected in response to our mortalitysalience manipulation, in spite of its consistent effects on evaluations of those who impinge on the cultural worldview.
Although the terror may on occasion rise to consciousness in muted form, most of the anxiety people experience results from threats to either the worldview or self-esteem components of the cultural anxiety-buffer that protects them from the underlying existential terror. By bolstering and defending these two components, people can bypass the conscious experience of emotion that reminders of mortality would otherwise create. As Greenwald (1989) has recently argued (from a very different perspective), defensive reactions may sometimes occur so quickly and effectively that the subjective experience of anxiety is completely circumvented. Although the present findings provide
strong support for hypotheses derived from terror management theory, there is clearly a need for investigation of the precise intrapsychic mechanisms by which terror management occurs.
Terror management theory is an extremely broad perspective with implications for diverse areas of traditional social psychological inquiry. Because of the wide variety of hypotheses that can be derived from the theory, the present research must be viewed as just a first step in testing it. We believe that one of the most appealing aspects of the theory is the broad range of testable hypotheses that it can be used to generate. In fact, we have already gathered substantial evidence concerning two other sets of hypotheses.