The awareness of mortality can have various effects on individuals and is influenced by religion and worldview. Terror Management Theory suggests that fear of mortality motivates human activity, leading to the reinforcement of core beliefs as a psychological defense mechanism against death. Social psychology experiments have tested mortality salience and its effects on reinforcing worldviews.
Mortality relevance is a term used to describe an individual’s awareness that they will one day die. This awareness can have a wide range of different effects on different people and is strongly influenced by one’s religion and other aspects of one’s worldview. Social psychologists often study the importance of mortality and how it affects how people interact with each other. Awareness and contemplation of one’s own mortality has been shown to influence everything from political views to the views of members of different religious and ethnic groups. Some theories of social psychology suggest that almost all human action is in some way motivated by direct or indirect awareness of one’s own mortality.
Terror Management Theory, or TMT, is a theory in social psychology that is based on the idea that fear of mortality motivates nearly all human activity. Human beings are placed in a position of tremendous conflict because they possess both the instinct to try to avoid death at all costs and the intellectual capacity to recognize that attempts to avoid death will ultimately be futile. The relevance of mortality drives humans consciously or unconsciously to devote all their actions to avoiding death or to distract themselves from thinking about mortality.
In many cases, an individual’s worldview, which contains political, religious, and other beliefs, provides a defense against the immediacy of mortality. Attacking these viewpoints, then, can cause a kind of vicarious relevance of mortality, as defenses against the importance of mortality are to some extent broken down. This can motivate an individual to attempt to strengthen his or her world view against potential attacks, often to irrational extremes.
Even if one’s worldview is not somewhat attacked, the importance of mortality has been shown to cause people to fall back on their core beliefs for support. People who are reminded of their own mortality tend to take their political, religious, or other views to more extreme extremes. The strength of one’s worldview is used as a psychological defense mechanism against death.
Many social psychology experiments have been used to test the effects of mortality salience. Such tests usually begin with researchers asking test subjects to complete a task that reminds them of mortality. A test subject may, for example, be asked to write a short story about their own death. After the test subject completes the task, thereby developing a certain level of mortality relevance, they are asked to complete another task, such as expressing political opinions. Comparisons between control groups and groups of individuals forced to contemplate their own mortality indicated that awareness of mortality tends to cause one to reinforce one’s particular worldview.
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