It’s the season of spooks, scary costumes, haunted houses and another installment of the Final Destination franchise. While Halloween is famous for prompting thoughts of mortality, Dr. Matt Vess, associate head of graduate studies and social psychology professor at Texas A&M University, thinks about it all the time.
Vess studies Terror Management Theory, the idea that people manage anxiety associated with personal mortality by investing faith in cultural systems of meaning and value such as religion, nationalism or personal values such as achievements and sense of ambition. Some believe that it’s a way to distract ourselves from our unique human capacity to grasp that we will all die someday.
“The idea is that these systems of meaning and value provide a pathway to an understanding of immortality,” Vess said.
Vess’s research dives into existential concerns such as personal identity, meaning and morality. As an undergraduate at Ohio University, he was drawn to the intersection of psychology and science, where Terror Management Theory intersects with existential philosophy and research methodology. Scholars in this field spend years studying what most people avoid: thinking about death.
A Deeper Look into Terror Management Theory
In the early years of his career, Vess focused on understanding how the way people reflect on their own inevitable death, tends to influence people’s belief systems which bolsters their meaning of life.
“It’s often found that people who have clear and coherent beliefs on how the world operates and how things relate to one another, as well as people with secure self-esteem, seem to be protected when they think about death, meaning that when they think about death, their meaning doesn’t diminish,” Vess said. “This supports the Terror Management Theory view that investing faith in systems of meaning and value to the extent that those sources of security remain stable, helps relatively protect from the existential threat associated with knowing you are mortal.”
This theory shows that people who feel grounded in their beliefs and confident in themselves tend to handle thoughts of death better than those who struggle with low self-esteem and who lack a system of meaningful values. But the question, “How do we live knowing we are going to die” isn’t that simple.
“From the theoretical perspective, the idea is that although we know death is inevitable and we can reflect on the idea, most people aren’t living their days saying, ‘I know I’m going to die in the future’,” Vess said. “Most of us are engaged in life and aren’t concerned about these thoughts. Instead, from a theoretical framework, we invest ourselves in these belief systems that provide meaning and value so that we don’t have to focus on our mortality.”
Still, human beings face constant reminders of the uncontrollable nature of death. These reminders cause us to place even more trust in our faith systems that protect us from the worry of inevitable death.
“We might encounter news stories or information that reminds us of mortality,” Vess said. “When we encounter these reminders, we respond by placing more faith in the belief systems that we utilize to defend against these reminders,” Vess said.
How Terror Management Theory Plays out in Research
Through a research perspective and laboratory setting, Vess tests these ideas by observing how participants perform when faced with thoughts about their own mortality and then comparing their reactions to people asked to think about other anxiety-provoking events unrelated to death. The dependent variable would then be to expose the participant to an individual attacking their belief system and observe how the person responds.
“What we see is that the people who are thinking about death respond with an enhanced derogation of the person attacking them,” Vess said. “It’s a way that we bolster the validity of our beliefs.”
Vess’s most recent work continues to explore questions about meaning, with most of his work focusing on how people experience their authentic self. But the thread of mortality weaves into every research project.
“One of my graduate students, Joseph Maffly-Kipp, who graduated about two years ago, found that when people experiencing depression reflected on their own mortality, they tended to show a stronger belief in certain irrational ideas, suggesting that those beliefs may serve an existential purpose by helping them find meaning,” Vess said.
Overall, research shows that people don't regularly contemplate their own death because we are able to embed ourselves in beliefs that protect us — if those meaning-providing belief systems are available and stable.
“Where we start to see problems is where those meaning-providing systems of beliefs come under threat, or maybe we aren’t able to invest in them as much, and that is where you can start to see things like psychological dysfunctions starting to emerge," Vess said.
The broad goal of social psychology is to explore, understand and explain how people think, feel and act across social situations. With Terror Management Theory, researchers have the same goal.
“We are trying to better understand and explain human social behavior by investigating the ways that people’s need to resolve existential concerns about death, both consciously and unconsciously, affect the ways that people think, feel and act,” Vess said. “Such understanding might then be integrated into translational efforts focused on promoting more positive outcomes, both for the individual and for society more broadly.”
The College of Arts and Sciences presents a great space for the exploration of these ideas due to its diverse range of disciplines, including cultural anthropology, biology, evolutionary theory, psychology and sociology.
To Learn More
“Terror Management Theory is a social psychological theory, but the ideas were generated by people who weren’t social psychologists,” Vess said. “The idea that culture, meaning systems and self-esteem protect people from concerns about death was actually proposed by a cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker.”
Vess recommends Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, and the Earnest Becker Foundation as places to start for those who wish to better understand these ideas. Vess and a colleague also edited a book, Handbook of Terror Management Theory, which explores research and ideas.
“There are thousands of articles to explore,” Vess said. “The theory has been applied in many different ways, including to situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, where people’s existential concerns were heightened by the experience.”