THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYdescribe what they think will happen to their body when they die – leads
them to want to make themselves more attractive (a form of self-
esteem boost), for example through planning to get a sun tan. Mortality
reminders also cause us to cling more strongly to our own worldview. A
study in which US participants were prompted to think about their own
deaths found they subsequently showed increased bias in favour of a job
candidate who expressed pro-American views in an interview.
Also supporting the terror-management theory was a clever 2007 study
by Nathan DeWall and Roy Baumeister in which they asked students to
complete word-stems such as “jo_”. DeWall and Baumeister found that
those students who’d just been asked to think about their own mortality
were far more likely to complete the stems to form positive words
(such as “joy”) than neutral words (like “jog”) than were students who’d
spent time thinking about a painful visit to the dentist. The researchers
said this was another example of how reminders of death trigger an
automatic buffer-system that searches for happy thoughts.
The findings from terror-management theory have some curious
implications for real life. Think about the actions of terrorists who seek
to subdue and coerce civilian populations by spreading fear of death.
Ironically, they may end up doing just the opposite. In 2009, Inbal
Gurari, who was then based at Washington University in St Louis, told
52 Jewish Israelis about recent terrorist attacks that had taken place in
their country, and asked them to indicate how many times over the last
six months they’d been near to where those attacks occurred. The idea
was to make them think about how close to danger they’d been. Crucially,
participants who did this before their self-esteem was measured subse-
quently showed enhanced self-esteem compared with participants who
had their self-esteem measured first, before thinking about the attacks.
The findings also match the way populations have been seen to respond
in real life after terrorist attacks. Just think back to the days and weeks
after 9/11 – the American flag was flown, religious attendance rocketed
and government approval-ratings soared.
Morality
Another argument proposed for religion’s purpose is that it provides us
with morality, a collective understanding of what is right and wrong. As
with the idea that religion relieves existential angst, this argument has
intuitive appeal, but is likely to be wrong. A growing body of evidence
suggests that human morality is to some extent hard-wired. According to