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

Social Research, Winter, 2004 by Tom Pyszczynski

The central thesis of our analysis is that the 9/11 terrorist attacks also were an attack on Americans' psychological equanimity. The bombings themselves were a dramatic reminder of our vulnerability and mortality, and the repeated televised depictions of the planes crashing into the trade center towers, imagining what the thousands of victims trapped inside the building must have experienced, the video footage of people leaping from the building to their deaths, the plume of smoke and the horrified survivors, and the heart-wrenching testimony from the victims' loved ones all forced us to confront the reality of death and the fact that this could happen to any of us, at any time, almost anywhere. In addition, the attacks on the World Trade Center, a major symbol of American economic power, and on the Pentagon, a major symbol of American military might, and the aborted attack on the White, the seat of American government, struck to the heart of American culture and shattered the myth that such events simply "can't happen here." They also served us with a powerful reminder that there are many people in the world who hate Americans and the American way of life. That the perpetrators of the attack committed these acts of violence as retribution for a myriad of complaints against American foreign policy and the American way of life, and that they did this in the name of their god, made the threat to our cultural anxiety-buffer all the more devastating.

Support for the point that the terrorist attacks brought thoughts of death closer to consciousness was provided by a study in which participants were subliminally presented with the letters WTC (for World Trade Center), the numbers 911, or a neutral string of three digits. The subliminal WTC and 911 primes led to a significant increase in the accessibility of death-related thoughts on a wordstem completion task (Landau et al., 2004a). Another study demonstrated that self-esteem moderated how the attacks influenced the accessibility of death-related thoughts in the month after the attack (Landau et al., 2004b). Whereas high self-esteem individuals showed high levels of death thought accessibility in the week after the attack, this dropped and remained low two, three, and four weeks after the attack. Low self-esteem individuals, however, who would be expected to be less well-protected against existential fear, showed high levels of death thought accessibility one week after the attack that dropped the second week but then dramatically increased both the third and fourth week after the attack. TMT posits that a lack of self-esteem makes one vulnerable to existential fear, and although low self-esteem individuals seemed to actively suppress death-related thoughts shortly after the attack, this suppression seems to have been lifted so that very high levels of death access were observed for up to a month after the attack.

This dramatic reminder of our vulnerability and mortality, coupled with the hateful attack on American culture, left us reeling. The parallels between what we have found in our laboratory studies among people reminded of death whose cultural anxiety buffer is threatened and what was observed on a mass scale throughout the United States and much of the world were startling. Very briefly, Americans responded with greatly heightened anxiety and efforts to protect themselves (as found in studies of reactions to conscious thoughts of death). But more dramatically, Americans also behaved in ways reflective of the more symbolic terror management defenses of clinging to one's worldview and shoring up one's self-esteem.