Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015), 288 pp., $28.00.

FOR THE heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops,” Karl Ove Knausgaard writes at the beginning of My Struggle. Death is the inescapable fate that awaits every human being. An immediate threat of death—from a terminal illness, an attacker, an oncoming minivan—can provoke panic, paralysis, rage or resistance. But what of Knausgaard’s removed, even abstract, contemplation of human mortality? What is the significance, the effect on us, of this sheer fact of our mortality and of the act of contemplating it?

Does this ontological exercise disturb, depress or even devastate us? Or does it merely leave a fleeting impression, like the tides or the color of leaves in autumn? Three psychologists, Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, think that the contemplation of our eventual death has a profound effect on us—that it is the basis of religious belief, of our quest for wealth, fame and physical beauty, that it is the root of our fascination with celebrities and death-defying heroes, and our intolerance of other ethnicities, nationalities, religions and political philosophies, as well as of our desire to reproduce ourselves through children and immortalize ourselves through enduring social, physical and artistic creations.

Well before these psychologists had developed their views, philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, William James and Martin Heidegger (to name a few), the psychoanalyst Otto Rank and the anthropologist Ernest Becker had speculated about how large the realization of mortality looms in our lives. What distinguishes Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski is that they have attempted to devise psychological experiments to demonstrate how the fear of death directly affects our beliefs and behavior. They recount these experiments and put forth a theory of what they show in a new book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.

It’s not an easy read. The prose is perfectly clear and free of technical jargon. But the subject is the most unpleasant imaginable. When the authors tried to convince one publishing house to put out their book, an editor asked them if they could minimize the use of the word “death” throughout the text. As I read the book myself, I kept misplacing it, sometimes for days at a time. But I took their experience selling the book and mine reading it as evidence that they were on to something.

SOLOMON, GREENBERG and Pyszczynski met as graduate students in psychology at the University of Kansas in the mid-1970s. They discovered that they shared an interest in Becker’s work, and particularly in his last book, The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. (I knew Becker slightly and admired his work when he taught at Berkeley.) A decade later, they prepared a paper for a psychological journal on Becker’s work, but the editor rejected it. “I have no doubt that this paper would be of no interest to any psychologist, living or dead,” the editor of American Psychologist wrote them. The editor advised them that no one would take their ideas seriously unless they could present experimental evidence to back them up. Over the last thirty years, the three psychologists, and a growing group of followers, have devised scores of experiments to explore the influence of the fear of death.

The psychologists wanted to study what they (awkwardly) termed “terror management”—terror referring to the abstract fear of death. In their experiments, they instructed subjects to think or write about their own mortality. They would then ask them questions or ask them to perform tasks, and would compare their responses with those of a control group that had been instructed to think about something neutral or pleasurable or about an anxiety-producing event (a forthcoming exam, for example) that didn’t directly involve thoughts of death. In these experiments, they found that the subjects who thought about their own death were subsequently more inclined to endorse harsh moral judgments and to express a decided preference for their own nationality, religion and nation (even while being critical of or condemning other nationalities, religions and nations). They were also more likely to express a belief in God and religion, as well as a preference for charismatic rather than pragmatic politicians.

The psychologists performed their first experiment in 1989 with municipal court judges in Tucson. They hypothesized that the fear of death would make judges more likely to impose stiffer punishments. To begin, they instructed some of the judges to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” After an interval in which the judges returned to their chambers, they asked them to impose a bond on a prostitute who had been arrested for solicitation. The judges imposed an average of $455. Other judges, who were not asked to contemplate their own mortality, imposed an average bond of $50, which was then the actual average in Tucson.

The psychologists found a similar pattern when they had students compare the presentations of two professors, one of whom was very supportive of the American political system and the other very critical. Those who thought about their mortality were much more inclined to favor the pro-American presentation. Some of the psychologists’ most suggestive experiments were done in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, which they assumed had functioned like a mortality reminder.

In October 2003, the three psychologists, together with five colleagues, assembled ninety-seven undergraduates at Rutgers to participate in what the students thought was a study of the relationship between personality and politics. One group was given the mortality exercises. The other wasn’t. Then both groups read an essay expressing a “highly favorable opinion of the measures taken by President George W. Bush with regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict.” It called for Americans “to stand behind our President and not be distracted by citizens who are less than patriotic.” While members of the control group viewed the statement unfavorably, those who did the mortality exercises supported it.

In late September 2004, the psychologists, along with two colleagues from Rutgers, tested whether mortality exercises influenced whom voters would support in the upcoming presidential election. They conducted the study among 131 Rutgers undergraduates who said they were registered and planned to vote in November. The control group that completed a personality survey but did not do the mortality exercises favored Democrat John Kerry by four to one. That fit the pattern of student support at Rutgers. But the students who did the mortality exercises favored Bush by more than two to one.

AS OTHER psychologists tried to reproduce their results, Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski made an important discovery. A German psychologist had his subjects pass judgment on prostitutes immediately after dwelling on their own death, and he found that their responses were no different from those of subjects who had not had to think about their own death. There was an important difference, however, between this experiment and the one in Tucson. Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski had interposed a diversionary interval between the reminders of mortality and passing judgment on the prostitutes. And in subsequent experiments, they found that this interval was necessary for the mortality reminders to shape their subjects’ responses.

As a result, they drew a distinction between proximal and distal responses to mortality reminders. When people are reminded of their mortality, they might immediately respond, “Everyone has to die, but I have a long way to go,” or simply dismiss the thought as irrelevant to the present. That’s a proximal response, and it can blot out the immediate effect of a mortality reminder. But mortality reminders can linger on the edge of consciousness without the subject being aware of them, the way a passing thought during the day can linger and eventually provoke a dream at night. The mortality reminder can produce what the psychologists call a “distal defense,” which has no apparent logical connection to the mortality reminder. It can consist of a harsh moral judgment, or support for a charismatic politician.

In The Worm at the Core, Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski propose a theory to explain why mortality reminders can unconsciously trigger judgments like this. According to the psychologists, facing the realization that one’s life will inevitably end can produce terror and anxiety, but human beings keep these feelings at bay by imagining that they are valuable participants in a family, community, society or nation that provides either literal immortality (through the promise of eternal life) or symbolic immortality (though bearing children or making a lasting contribution to society). They accept a certain worldview that promises either literal or symbolic immortality. In the psychologists’ experiments, subjects faced with mortality reminders reaffirm their support for prevailing ideals of family, society and nation, and resist more strenuously any challenges they perceive to these specific ideals.

The psychologists are making an assumption that is difficult to prove. They have to assume that at some point in our lives—probably in our early years—we face, and recoil from, the realization that we will eventually die, and that we then resort to what the psychologists call “worldview defenses.” The authors cite the findings of British psychologist Sylvia Anthony, who found in interviews with mothers and children that children between the ages of eight and twelve do worry about death. I can remember that myself. The psychologists also cite different kinds of neurotic and psychotic mental illnesses, when early fears of death reemerge with a vengeance.

Within a community, society or nation, different worldviews are developed collectively as defenses against this elemental fear of death. They vary from the most literal defense—a worldview that unites church, state and family around the promise of immortality—to the most complex and layered symbolic defenses that involve the promise of wealth, fame or other kinds of status. Young people absorb and adopt these worldview defenses as they grow up. But they still react differently to mortality reminders. How they react is dependent, the psychologists argue, upon their level of self-esteem.

Individuals’ self-esteem flows from their confidence that, in accordance with prevailing worldviews, they are achieving or are equipped to achieve (by intelligence, status, appearance or wealth) literal or symbolic immortality. “Self-esteem,” the psychologists write, “enables each of us to believe we are enduring, significant beings rather than material creatures destined to be obliterated.” And the psychologists have designed experiments to show that a person’s susceptibility to fear of death, and to mounting strong worldview defenses, is determined by the degree to which they feel self-esteem.

In these experiments, the psychologists first devise procedures that will either lower or raise subjects’ self-esteem (for instance, they have them take tests, and then inform them they have scored high or low on an IQ test, or are perfectly fitted or completely unsuited for their chosen careers). They then have them take word-association tests that compare the speed of their response to words that connote death with the speed of their response to words that are either neutral or connote pain. Or they have them complete words like “coff _ _,” which could yield either “coffee” or “coffin.” These tests have confirmed that lowering self-esteem allows death-related thoughts to predominate, while raising self-esteem wards them off.

THE PSCYHOLOGISTS’ theory has very broad implications for understanding social groups, nations and individuals. It would suggest that people with higher self-esteem are more likely to display tolerance toward people holding beliefs other than their own and that people who feel low self-esteem are more susceptible to racial, national or religious appeals that demonize “the other”—whether they be Jews, African Americans, illegal immigrants, Arabs or Uighurs. In communities whose members suffer from being unable to fulfill the demands of the prevailing worldviews, it is common to find outlaw and gang cultures, which promise alternative paths to symbolic immortality.

This theory offers a plausible alternative to Freud’s explanation for the irrational passions that fuel social violence and wars. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud attributes much of violence and war to a death instinct or drive, but the psychologists attribute it to worldview defenses created by the fear of death. While peoples and nations can go to war over scarce resources, they can also go to war over rival belief systems. “Our longing to transcend death inflames violence toward each other,” the psychologists write. Likewise, as Becker had written in The Birth and Death of Meaning, “One culture is always a potential menace to another because it is a living example that life can go on heroically within a value framework totally alien to one’s own.”

It’s hard to demonstrate this, but the psychologists have devised experiments that suggest that mortality reminders can inflame people’s hostility toward views other than their own. Through questionnaires, they divided subjects into liberals and conservatives, and paired each person off with someone whom they were told held views opposed to their own. They were told that the study was about food habits, but that before their partners could sample foods they had to ingest an overly spicy salsa sauce that the subjects would measure out in a cup and give to them. Subjects who did not have mortality reminders gave their partners small doses of the sauce, while those who were reminded of their mortality filled their cups to the brim.

The psychologists’ theory, echoing Becker as well as Rank, also attempts to explain the age-old differentiation between soul or mind and body. The body is a reminder of our mortality. “Our bodies and animality are threatening reminders that we are physical creatures who will die,” the psychologists write. “To manage our terror of death we have to be much more than that...so we transform our bodies into cultural symbols of beauty and power. We hide bodily activities [such as defecation] or turn them into cultural rituals.” The psychologists actually tested these ideas in various experiments—for instance, measuring how far subjects sat from a woman whom they believed was breast-feeding after the subjects had written essays about death.

In his later works, Freud attributed sexual ambivalence to a fusion of the sexual instinct with e externalized death instinct. By contrast, the psychologists attribute it to the conjunction of desire with feelings of repulsion toward the body created by fear of mortality. “Because men find females sexually alluring,” they write, “they blame women for their own lustful urges, derogating and abusing them for reminding them of their own corporeal nature.” To try to demonstrate this, they had male subjects write essays about their death and then about times they lusted after a woman. Afterward, they had them mete out punishment in a court case where a man brutally assaulted his girlfriend. The subjects who had been reminded of their own death and lust meted out much milder punishments than the control group.

FINALLY, THE psychologists use their theory to reinterpret neuroses and psychoses. They argue that the fear of death lies at the bottom of phobias and obsessions, which serve to substitute the overriding fear of heights, spiders or dirt (for example) for an all-encompassing fear of death. The psychologists found that among people already afraid of spiders, those who were reminded of their mortality became much more afraid than those who were not reminded. They further explain schizophrenia as being based on a persistent fear of death to which the schizophrenic responds by creating worldviews of personal grandeur or persecution and depression as a failure of self-esteem to buffer fears of death.

Unlike Becker, the psychologists don’t entirely replace Freud’s theory of instinctuality and drives. Freud’s great contribution was in attempting to describe the interaction between the animal aspects of human nature and the special role of consciousness and volition. From thence came his understanding of the role of the unconscious and of repression and resistance. The psychologists believe there is a sexual drive and also an instinct for self-preservation. But, following the lead of Rank and Becker, the psychologists have sought to provide experimental evidence for an existential aspect to human behavior and belief rooted in human beings’ special awareness of their mortality.

Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski can’t be said to have demonstrated in the most specific detail how the contemplation of mortality affects belief and action. Their experiments are suggestive rather than conclusive. Psychology is not physics. But what they have shown is that there is some connection between fears about mortality and people’s moral, cultural and political attitudes. That is a major contribution. If widely accepted, it could, perhaps, lead to measures that would reduce the polarization and demonization that remain so integral to politics in the United States and elsewhere.

If their work has a fault, it is that they cannot resist attempting to turn their analysis into therapeutic advice for individuals. They advocate “genuine” rather than “false esteem” and suggest that people with the genuine article “accept change as it comes and don’t spend a lot of time comparing themselves to others.” In a concluding section, they express their hope that humanity will “come to terms with death” and call for humans to “really grasp that being mortal, while terrifying, can also make our lives sublime by infusing us with courage, compassion, and concern for future generations.”

This kind of silly self-help advice flies in the face of their own grim analysis of the human condition. The fact is that we will not survive our deaths. The worldview defenses we construct are what Becker calls “vital lies.” They serve an important and constructive purpose, but they are illusions and delusions that allow us to keep our minds off the realization that after we die, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, “nothing besides remains.”

John B. Judis is a senior writer at National Journal and the author of Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Image: Flickr/SebastianDooris