Human Growth and Development / Unit 17 HGD 2411 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Terror Management Theory
The idea
Terror management theory, proposed by Greenberg and colleagues in nineteen eighty-six, holds that awareness of death is a source of deep anxiety, and that people manage it by clinging to cultural worldviews and self-esteem, which offer meaning and a sense of symbolic continuity. The central prediction concerns mortality salience: when people are reminded of their own death, they should defend their cultural values more strongly and show more bias against outgroups. Many early experiments reported such effects, and one study found European Americans showed them more than Asian Americans. The evidence has since weakened. In Many Labs 4, seventeen laboratories with about fifteen hundred participants tried to replicate a classic mortality-salience finding, some with the original authors helping to design the study, and could not replicate it under any conditions. A Bayesian reanalysis of those data found evidence against the effect across most analyses.
In practice
Participants asked to write about their own death, then to rate an essay praising their country and one criticizing it, with the replication labs finding no stronger defence of country than in the control condition.
Where people slip
The misconception to avoid is treating mortality salience as a settled effect. A large preregistered replication could not reproduce a classic finding, which suggests the original was a false positive or depends on conditions not yet understood. That does not show that death is unimportant to people; death anxiety is real, and cultures and religions do shape it. It shows how a theory's most famous experimental prediction can fail when tested at scale. For the exam, know the theory's claim, mortality salience and worldview defence, and know that its central effect has not replicated reliably.
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