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

Social Research, Winter, 2004 by Tom Pyszczynski

DEATH AND NATIONALISM

One of our earliest and most widely replicated findings is that reminders of death increase nationalism and other forms of group identification, making people more accepting of those who are similar to themselves and more hostile toward those who are different. For example, in a very early study we found that reminding people of death led them to react more positively toward a person who praised America and more negatively toward a person who criticized America (Greenberg et al., 1990). Similar patterns have been found all over the world. When subtly reminded of death, Germans sit closer to fellow Germans and farther away from Turks (Ochsman and Mathay, 1994) and, more recently, show an increased preference for the deutsche mark over the euro (Jonas and Greenberg, in press); Dutch citizens exaggerate how badly the Dutch national soccer team will beat the rival German team (Dechesne et al., 2000); Israelis are more accepting of fellow Israelis and rejecting of Russian Jews who have immigrated to Israel (Florian and Mikulincer, 1998); Italians view Italian identity as more "real," reflecting bigger differences between Italians and people from other countries (Castano et al., 2002); and Scots are more discriminating in judging pictures as either Scottish or English, viewing fewer faces of Englishmen as Scottish (Castano, Yzerbet, and Palladino, 2004). These findings all come from highly controlled laboratory experiments.

Recently a group of researchers from the Dutch Royal Military Academy collaborated with Mark Dechesne of the University of Groningen to apply these ideas to understand some problems they were having with multinational troops serving on a peace-keeping mission in Kabul, Afghanistan. The problem was that although Dutch and German troops have been working well together for over 10 years on various joint missions, when they got to Kabul, positive relations seemed to be breaking down and old national rivalries seemed to be coming to the surface. The members of the Dutch group reasoned that the ongoing threat of death that the soldiers faced in Kabul might lie at the root of this conflict. In their view, although the vast majority of citizens of Kabul appreciate their work in building hospital and schools, every now and then members of a small minority will throw a hand grenade at the soldiers or shoot at them. They found that the higher the soldiers scored on a fear of death scale, the more negative their attitudes toward working with soldiers from other European countries. This is very exciting work, in that it shows us that the findings from our labs studies do generalize to real life situations where life is on the line. This seems likely to be a major factor for the soldiers from all the countries deployed in Iraq, and we think TMT could shed some useful light on their stress and how they cope with it.

THE AFTERMATH OF 9/11

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Word Trade Center and Pentagon were without doubt one of the most fear-inducing events to ever occur on American soil. In the days and weeks after the attack, it became increasing clear that TMT might have a lot to tell us, both about why Americans reacted the way they did to the attacks and what might be motivating those responsible. We addressed these issues in the book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Greenberg, 2003). This section provides a brief overview of our analysis of the motivational forces that 9/11 set in motion among Americans and describes some recent research that supports the validity of this analysis.