What are we so afraid of? A terror management theory perspective on the politics of fear

Social Research, Winter, 2004 by Tom Pyszczynski

FEAR AND ANXIETY ARE TWO OF THE MOST INTOLERABLE EMOTIONS WE humans are capable of experiencing. People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite their best efforts, these feelings do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down. Ever since Freud's seminal theorizing, psychologists have been fascinated with the role that fear and anxiety play in both normal everyday behavior and serious individual and social pathologies. This article will focus on a theory, and the very large body of research that supports it, that suggests that fear and anxiety are inherent aspects of the human condition. But although all animals--including humans--experience fear when they are faced with clear and present dangers to their survival, only humans experience anxiety, a more diffuse form of fear in which it is not always obvious just what it is we are afraid of. It is becoming increasingly clear that this core anxiety inherent in the human condition plays a role in just about everything we do.

I am not suggesting that anxiety is the only psychological process that needs to be understood if we want to understand why people do the things they do. But a complete and well-rounded understanding of the human condition requires that we comprehend the roots of this anxiety and how it affects us in ways that we have no way of becoming aware of through simple introspection. Because the source of this anxiety is usually obscure, kept hidden from our awareness, it is extremely difficult to control its effects. This lack of awareness of the source of our fear and our resulting inability to introspectively observe the way it affects us make it an effective a force with which politicians, religious leaders, and just about everyone else can manipulate us.

TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY

About 20 years ago, I, along with my colleagues, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg, stumbled across a couple of books written by the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becket: The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), and the Denial of Death (1973). At that time we had just finished our doctorates in experimental social psychology and were becoming jaded with the highly fragmented state of our field; it seemed that social psychologists were so wrapped up in studying the microcomponents of very specific aspects of people's thoughts and behavior that they were missing the forest because they were engrossed in the details of the leaves on the trees. Becker's goal was to integrate and combine what he saw as the best and most enduring insights that had come out of the human sciences and humanities over the years--ideas from Darwin, Freud, Rank, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, G. H. Mead, and many others. What fascinated us about these books was that Becker had some ideas about why some of the motives that we social psychologists took for granted exist--what they do for us, what functions they serve. So we took Becker's ideas and combined them with the ideas that had been coming out of experimental laboratories in social, cognitive, clinical, and developmental psychology and brought in a good measure of the newly emerging field of evolutionary psychology. We then came up with what we referred to as Terror Management Theory (TMT) (see Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon, 1986; Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, 1991; Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg, 2003). The basic goal of TMT was to answer some very basic questions about the human condition: 1) Why do people need self-esteem and go to such great lengths to get it?; 2) Why do people need to believe that, out of all the different ways of conceiving reality, their conception is the one that just happens to bear a one-to-one relation with the truth?; and 3) Why do people have such a hard time getting along with each other, especially those who are different from themselves?

THE BASICS OF TMT

TMT starts with a consideration of how human beings are both similar to, and different from, all other animals. We start with the assumption that, like all other animals, humans are born with a very basic evolved proclivity to stay alive and that fear, and all the biological structures of the brain that produce it, evolved, at least initially, to keep the animal alive. This, of course, is highly adaptive, in that it facilitates survival, and an animal that does not stay alive very long has little chances of reproducing and passing on its genes. But as our species evolved, it developed a wide range of other adaptations that helped us survive and reproduce, the most important being a set of highly sophisticated intellectual abilities that enable us to: a) think and communicate with symbols, which of course is the basis for language, b) project ourselves in time and imagine a future including events that have never happened before, and c) reflect back on ourselves, and take ourselves as an object of our own attention--self-awareness. These are all very adaptive abilities that play central roles in the system through which humans regulate their behavior--usually referred to as the self (cf. Carver and Scheier, 1998). These abilities made it possible for us to survive and prosper in a far wider range of environments than any other animal has ever done, and accomplish all that we humans have done that no other species ever has been capable of doing. However, these unique intellectual abilities also created a major problem: they made us aware that, although we are biologically programmed to stay alive and avoid things that would cut our life short, the one absolute certainty in life is that we must die. We are also forced to realize that death can come at any time for any number of reasons, none of which are particularly pleasant--a predator, natural disaster, another hostile human, and an incredible range of diseases and natural processes, ranging from heart attacks and cancer to AIDS. If we are "lucky" we realize that our bodies will just wear out and we will slowly fade away as we gradually lose our most basic functions. Not a very pretty picture.