#existentialism #psychology # [[Epistemic status]] #shower-thought #to-digest # Changelog ```dataview TABLE WITHOUT ID file.mtime AS "Last Modified" FROM [[#]] SORT file.mtime DESC LIMIT 3 ``` # Related > [!NOTE]- Related > [[Transference - Wikipedia]] > [[Neuroticism - Wikipedia]] > [[The Denial of Death]] > [[The Denial of Death-2]] > [[Self-actualization]] > [[Esteem]] # TODO > [!TODO] TODO > connect denial of life with [[Philosophy/Rationality/Models/Antifragility|Antifragility]] # Ernest Becker ## [[The Denial of Death]] >The premise of _The Denial of Death_ is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic [survival mechanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_mechanism "Survival mechanism"). ## Denial of life makes your [[Philosophy/Rationality/Models/Antifragility|fragile]] ## Meaning is necessary for survival machines to spread the genes No meaning, no [[Evolution|evolution]]. ![[DALL·E 2022-06-18 07.28.59 - Man stuck within a survival machine, unable to discover the beauty of the universe, oil on canvas.png]] ## [[Art]] >Like the schizophrenic, creative and artistic individuals deny both physical reality and culturally-endorsed immortality projects, expressing a need to create their own reality. The primary difference is that creative individuals have talents that allow them to create and express a reality that others may appreciate, rather than simply constructing an internal, mental reality ![[DALL·E 2022-06-19 11.27.54 - The hedonistic race pursued by men, the exhausting thirst for status and power, by Picasso..png]] ## Homosexuality >This brilliant speculation enables us to understand some of the ideal motives for homosexuality, not only of the Greeks, but of especially individualized and creative persons like Michelangelo. For such a one, apparently, homosexuality has nothing to do with the sex organs of the beloved but rather represents a struggle to create one’s own rebirth in the “closest possible likeness,” which, as Rank says, is obviously to be found in one’s own sex. In terms of our discussion we can see that this attempt represents the complete causa-sui project: **to create all by oneself a spiritual, intellectual, and physically similar replica of oneself: the perfectly individualized self-perpetuation or immortality symbol**. >~ [[Ernest Becker]] Homosexuality seen by Greeks and others such as Michelangelo as a mean to create a replica of oneself, which is not possible across different sexes because of natural differences in psychology ## [[Neurosis]] ![[Neurosis]] ## [[Immortality]] [[Immortality]] imply that the fear of death caused from a non natural event is highly increased. ![[Immortality]] ## [[Transference]] [[Transference]] a behaviour copied from within family relationships to other relationships - a kind of generalisation of [[Policy]] function ![[Transference]] # Links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjj4_bA7LtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuJhD5TkX-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7GZrgWKj9o # Notes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ&t=684s Episode #162 ... The Creation of Meaning - The Denial of Death A protagonist in the Creation of Meaning series is a person who believes that we're living in what seems to be a disinterested universe, and yet is starving at an existential level. We all know who I'm talking about, and while these are not funny problems to be having, they are at least pretty ironic problems to be having given the circumstances here. But we're not going to think like that, and maybe philosophy can help us find a solution. We've seen the ambiguity of Simone de Bevoir, the value, pluralism, and affirmation of Nietzsche, the obedience to a spiritual quest in the work of Kirkegaard, and now we're going to hear from someone who's approaching this process from a more scientific perspective. Today, we're going to look at Ernest Becker's later work, and in particular his book called the Denial of Death. We'll ask the question of why we even care about creating a system of meaning in the first place. Becker explains that human beings are dualistic entities, meaning that they are biological entities and symbolic entities. This dualistic relationship creates a problem that every human being experiences. Becker says we're capable of doing some pretty incredible things, but we're also capable of getting flattened by a Mormon on a bicycle, getting stuck in an elevator, or starving to death. Human beings cannot function in the world while also having an awareness of their death constantly haunting them up in their minds. Ernest Becker describes the state of terror every person finds themselves in when they become aware of their own mortality. Becker says that people experience terror because they have emerged from nothing to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression. People fear death because they fear what death will say about their lives, and the things they did or didn't do while they were here on this planet. Becker believes that when faced with the reality of death, people will find something to make them feel better. There are thousands of ways we live in denial about our death. Becker argues that organized religion is a method people use to escape the fear of insignificance and impermanence that may come along with their death. Ernest Becker says that people who face the terror of impermanence and insignificance respond by engaging in a defiant creation of meaning, which he calls a hero's journey. A person creates a system of values and a set of projects to try and immortalize themselves within human culture. This is why people create great works of art, why people run marathons, why people do anything other than sit around and get cheeto fingers. Becker would be a fan of this self-aware self-realized version of this defiant creation of meaning that we've been engaged in, and he wouldn't be ashamed of using similar words to what other existentialist philosophers have used in their work. Becker's theory of denial of death can be used to explain how human culture is a conglomeration of millions of different immortality projects all working together, and how society works by providing people with ready-made pre-molded societal roles. Becker says that we learn to identify ourselves with the categories that our culture gives us to work with, and that these categories make us feel significant and permanent because they allow us to attach ourselves to cultural ideals. Being a mime answers a lot of questions I might otherwise have about my existence, and makes me feel like I'm part of something bigger than just me. Becker would like to be clear that we need illusions, because without them we wouldn't be able to function, society wouldn't be able to continue, and most of us would live in a state of constant neurotic terror. Culture is an illusion created by people afraid of their own insignificance and impermanence. If you're too smart for everyone, nothing will ever feel meaningful to you. Becker would have seen this coming, because he talks about how having a good Bs detector can lead you to see through the illusions and narratives that underlie every single one of these cultural hero journeys that somebody might engage in. You are a dancing monkey who has decided to live by a set of constructed illusions. Use your overflowing intelligence to build a sturdy shelter for yourself that will last over the years. When your culture is all that you've ever known, it's easy to miss how similar the function of religion and the function of culture really are. Culture gives people a stable identity to hold on to, just like religion gives people a purpose. Religion and culture both give people hope of an afterlife, and both scratch the same itch at the root of human existence. Western society, since Newton, is still as religious as any other, because it believes that science, money, and goods make men count for more than any other animal. Becker is not being unnecessarily hostile towards the process of culture, and would no doubt say that we should encourage more people to find a purpose for their life by immersing themselves in a culture and then providing a service that makes society better for the people around them. Becker is trying to show us that we all have a latent fear of death, and that by showing us this fear, we can maybe learn to live alongside it. If you approach the study of human beings from a place of complete enlightenment-era scientific value neutrality, you might miss out on something very important about our existence. There is a part of us that is undeniably religious. The protagonists of this Creation and Meaning series may find it hard to connect the things they do in their life to anything that's meaningful and enduring. Ernest Becker suggests that a totally value neutral, scientific approach towards understanding human behavior may have been harmful. --- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7GZrgWKj9o&t=2s When I was five years old, I realized that death was going to happen to me. To this day, I feel shudders of terror when I recall that moment. Ernest Becker argued that humans have a profound fear of death, and that we spend most of our lives trying to explain, forestall, or avoid the inevitability of our own death. Sheldon Solomon has spent 30 years studying this fear. Throughout human history, theologians, philosophers, and even people sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere have tried to characterize the essence of what it means to be a human being. And one way that people have been characterized is as homo sapiens. Human beings are also called homo ludens, homo faber, homo aestheticus, and homo narratization. I think they are all useful heuristic devices that draw our attention to different aspects of our humanity. We propose a new designation for humans, homo mortalis, based on Alexander Smith's idea that it is the knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. Charles Darwin assumed that human beings share with all forms of life a basic biological predisposition towards survival, in the service of self-preservation, as well as reproduction. But he turned around and said that human beings are uniquely different because we can imagine things that do not yet exist. Da Vinci and Michelangelo were doodling in their notebooks in the 1500s and people denounced them as crazy. Yet today we routinely transport ourselves by what was originally denounced as the doodlings of a mad man. Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish existential philosopher, said that we are so smart that we actually come to realize that we exist. If I could see you, I would ask you if you were aware that you were listening to me. Kierkegaard made the point that humans are the only ones who can render themselves the object of their own subjective inquiry, and if you grant him those two theoretical assertions, living things like to stay alive and people are so smart that we know that we are here, we can keep going. Kierkegaard says that it is awe-inspiring to be alive and that some of our finest moments are the result of the spontaneous exuberance that we experience just from the fact that we're here. The last sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses is the longest sentence in the history of literature, and it starts and ends with the same word, "YES". Kierkegaard says that it is great to be alive, but it is also dreadful, because you will someday die. Kierkegaard pointed out that it's not just the fact that you will someday die that's discombobulating, but the fact that you can die at any moment for reasons that you could never anticipate or control. The Elephant Man film is a great film, and the point that Becker makes is that if we only thought about our biological selves, we would never be able to get up in the morning. Becker says that human beings developed culture to try to minimize the terror of death. Culture consists of beliefs about the nature of reality that we share with our fellow human beings. In his book The Birth and Death of Meaning, Becker argues that culture gives us meaning and value by giving us an explanation of the origin of the universe, prescriptions for how we're supposed to behave while we're here, and hope of immortality. We may know that we're not gonna be here forever, but we're comforted nonetheless by the prospect that some vestige of our existence will persist over time. We need to believe that life is meaningful, otherwise we may experience depression. Who among us hasn't dreamed of winning an Olympic gold medal, a Nobel Prize, and managing a hedge fund at the same time? Culture helps us feel valuable by providing us with social roles with associated standards of conduct. Human beings are so smart that we realize that we exist. We manage this existential terror by embedding ourselves in a culturally constructed belief system that gives us a sense that we're persons of value in a world of meaning. Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, "The Denial of Death", but was roundly denounced in academic circles. Tom, Jeff and I discovered Becker's ideas and started traveling all over North America and Europe to give talks about them. We wrote a paper about these ideas, sent it to our flagship journal, The American Psychologist, and six months later we got a rejection. The reviewer said that these ideas were of no interest to any psychologist alive or dead. I'd like to talk about some areas of inquiry that I think we can't understand without recourse to these ideas, and then I'll also give you a sense of how we've done our studies to determine why I think these ideas are true. Ernest Becker suggests that people can't get along with other human beings because their beliefs about the nature of reality serve to minimize death anxiety. If we accept the validity of an alternative conception of reality, we expose ourselves to the very anxiety our beliefs were built to diminish. If you lose faith in your own beliefs about reality and you run into somebody who is different, you're gonna experience anxiety about your own death. If I believe that God created the Earth in six days, and I run into somebody in the Borneo of the South Pacific who believes that Earth was gestated out of a giant coconut tree, I will denigrate and belittle them and try to convince them to adopt my beliefs. If we believe Ernest Becker, then we cannot understand man's inhumanity to man. Jeff and Tom and I had an accident. We were sitting around one day, bowling, and a thought struck us: if Becker is right, then what would happen if we reminded some people of their own mortality? We've done hundreds of experiments to measure how people's culturally constructed beliefs affect their attitude and behavior towards others. We've reminded people of their mortality, shown them gory images of car accidents and autopsies, and interviewed people outside the lab. We flash the word death at people while they read stuff on a computer. In a study at the University of Arizona, people who were reminded of their mortality rated their fellow Christians higher and their fellow Jewish people lower. They also sat closer to fellow Germans and further away from people who appeared to look like Turkish immigrants. After being reminded of their mortality, Iranians were more supportive of suicide bombing and quite willing to consider becoming a suicide bomber. Americans were also more supportive of the preemptive use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons against countries who pose no direct threat to us. George Bernard Shaw said that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretenses of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud. Max Weber, a German sociologist, said that in times of historical upheaval people often become attracted to a certain kind of leader, a charismatic leader. And after the events of September 11th, 2001, George W. Bush had one of the highest approval ratings. The events of September 11th, 2001, may have posed an existential threat to the American public, leading them to elect a president who promised to rid the world of evildoers. We did a bunch of experiments in 2003 and 2004 where we reminded people of death and then asked them if they supported President Bush's policies in Iraq. We found that people who were reminded of death were more enthusiastic about President Bush's policies. Americans reminded of their mortality were more likely to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and this is ominous for democracy. Our concerns about death alienate us from nature and contribute to the degradation of the physical environment. When we are reminded of death, people become uncomfortable with their own bodies and don't like things that would normally be extraordinarily pleasurable, even sexual activity. A team of Dutch psychologists reminded people of their mortality and found that under controlled conditions they liked forests more than neighborhoods, but when first reminded of their mortality they didn't like forests and now they like the burbs with the symmetrical bushes. Human beings in Western society are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the desire for money and stuff. When reminded of their mortality, people say they want to have more money and to have more fancy, luxury items. Polish researchers found that people drew bigger coins and paper money after being reminded of their mortality, and that people who just got to count money reported having less death and anxiety. America is currently a Petri dish of psychopathology, with 12% of the population depressed and a third of the population addicted to drugs and alcohol. We need to consider the values that our children are taught to embrace. The American dream is highly unlikely to be achieved in the United States. If you embrace the American dream and you're 40 years old in a polyester suit selling three pound burritos on the second shift at the drive through at Taco Bell, well then that's your fault. I was the last generation of Americans where it was okay to be average, and I fear for the youth today because they are being held accountable for standards that are just not realistically attainable, and this is a recipe for psychological despair. I'm tempted to stop, but I don't want to leave you with that thought. Let's end on a more propitious note, by recognizing that human beings can use their ingenuity to reduce the destructive potential of their existential fears. I think it's important to note that death anxiety is not itself the problem. The problem is when we repress death anxiety and it comes back to bear malignant fruit. Erik Erikson said that when parents have the courage to die, their children will have the faith to live, and I think that we can all contribute to making the world a better place. We asked municipal court judges in Tucson, Arizona whether or not they thought about death when setting bond for an alleged prostitute. When they were reminded of their mortality, the bond was nine times higher, $455. Lisa's silly joke: next time you get a parking ticket, pray that the judge hasn't driven past a cemetery on the way to sentencing you. There's been more than one study that shows that legal decisions are routinely altered by momentary conditions that include death reminders. We should talk afterwards because we think there's other things going on and people aren't so sure when the psychological crap hits the fan. Vera, an atheist, wants to know if religion has anything to do with death denial. Buddhists are good people, but in Burma, they treat others badly. Atheists are worse than agnostics, because they are convinced of things they can't know, and so they are just as vicious as their theistic counterparts. When atheists are reminded of their mortality, they say they believe in God less, but unconsciously they become more religious just like religious people. So I don't buy the arguments of the Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins of the world. We are studying people who work in health care settings, like nurses, surgeons, and first responders, and we don't know yet if death reminders have predictable effects. We have not studied people who trend towards suicide, because we can't see a way to do that in an ethical fashion. However, we do have a chapter in our book about suicide that argues that most people who commit suicide believe that there is something better. Most primitive cultures, including shamanist and animist cultures, are tolerant of other religions, but they still see them as inferior to their own. This is because they see other religions as less than human. Good question, though, since you're saying that death anxiety is an inherent part of our humanity. Have you looked at children to see if their perspective is different than adults? We have a chapter in our book on how children become aware of death. Some research suggests that children as young as nine hate Russian immigrants in Israel and love Jewish people. By age 9, the effects that I spoke about tonight are already manifested in kids. But I don't know if the effects happen at the same time for all people, or if there's a developmental trajectory that can shed light on that. Death reminders can persist for hours or days in the lab, but we're bombarded with death-related imagery on a relatively regular basis, which raises the question of how much it affects us. We are doing research on how attitudes about abortion have been impacted by death anxiety. So far, we have found that Americans reminded of their mortality hate Muslims, object to a mosque being built in their neighborhood, and object to immigrants moving into their neighborhood. People don't seem to care about environmental issues, even after the Inconvenient Truth was released. They have a million excuses about why they aren't going to help the environment, and they don't want to take the blame. Some people are resistant to the idea of global warming because of death anxiety, but this isn't the only factor. Conservatives are more likely to admit that global warming is real if the problem can be solved through market forces. I don't know if parents exhibit less fear anxiety than do non-parents, but I do know that when parents are reminded of their mortality, they say they want to have more kids, and they say they want to have them sooner. People who have had near death experiences report lower death anxiety, but when reminded of death, they become the most hateful of people who are different. So we are studying people who have had near death experiences, and measuring unconscious death anxiety. Near death experiences, we're looking at that now. There are a number of compelling examples of death reminders eliciting bad behavior, culminating in some current events regarding politics. We're now trying to figure out if we can leverage some of the same psychological phenomenon to bring out the best in us, rather than just delineate the psychological underpinnings of the most unsavory characteristics of human behavior. When Lisa said that you realized it, when you were five, her epiphany was when her grandmother died. Lisa was eight years old and realized that her mom was gonna grow old and make chocolate pudding for her. When I first read Ernest Becker, I was like wow, this is actually what I've been dwelling on for all of my kid-hood. Jeff and I talk about how our terror-management theory has been our own form of death denial. Shelden's book, The Worm at the Core, The Role of Death in Life, is about how death anxiety makes us more tolerant of others and how it can lead to mental disease. --- When I was five years old, I realized that death was going to happen to me. To this day, I feel shudders of terror when I recall that moment. Ernest Becker argued that humans have a profound fear of death, and that we spend most of our lives trying to explain, forestall, or avoid the inevitability of our own death. Sheldon Solomon has spent 30 years studying this fear. Throughout human history, theologians, philosophers, and even people sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere have tried to characterize the essence of what it means to be a human being. And one way that people have been characterized is as homo sapiens. Human beings are also called homo ludens, homo faber, homo aestheticus, and homo narratization. I think they are all useful heuristic devices that draw our attention to different aspects of our humanity. We propose a new designation for humans, homo mortalis, based on Alexander Smith's idea that it is the knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. Charles Darwin assumed that human beings share with all forms of life a basic biological predisposition towards survival, in the service of self-preservation, as well as reproduction. But he turned around and said that human beings are uniquely different because we can imagine things that do not yet exist. Da Vinci and Michelangelo were doodling in their notebooks in the 1500s and people denounced them as crazy. Yet today we routinely transport ourselves by what was originally denounced as the doodlings of a mad man. Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish existential philosopher, said that we are so smart that we actually come to realize that we exist. If I could see you, I would ask you if you were aware that you were listening to me. Kierkegaard made the point that humans are the only ones who can render themselves the object of their own subjective inquiry, and if you grant him those two theoretical assertions, living things like to stay alive and people are so smart that we know that we are here, we can keep going. Kierkegaard says that it is awe-inspiring to be alive and that some of our finest moments are the result of the spontaneous exuberance that we experience just from the fact that we're here. The last sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses is the longest sentence in the history of literature, and it starts and ends with the same word, "YES". Kierkegaard says that it is great to be alive, but it is also dreadful, because you will someday die. Kierkegaard pointed out that it's not just the fact that you will someday die that's discombobulating, but the fact that you can die at any moment for reasons that you could never anticipate or control. The Elephant Man film is a great film, and the point that Becker makes is that if we only thought about our biological selves, we would never be able to get up in the morning. Becker says that human beings developed culture to try to minimize the terror of death. Culture consists of beliefs about the nature of reality that we share with our fellow human beings. In his book The Birth and Death of Meaning, Becker argues that culture gives us meaning and value by giving us an explanation of the origin of the universe, prescriptions for how we're supposed to behave while we're here, and hope of immortality. We may know that we're not gonna be here forever, but we're comforted nonetheless by the prospect that some vestige of our existence will persist over time. We need to believe that life is meaningful, otherwise we may experience depression. Who among us hasn't dreamed of winning an Olympic gold medal, a Nobel Prize, and managing a hedge fund at the same time? Culture helps us feel valuable by providing us with social roles with associated standards of conduct. Human beings are so smart that we realize that we exist. We manage this existential terror by embedding ourselves in a culturally constructed belief system that gives us a sense that we're persons of value in a world of meaning. Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, "The Denial of Death", but was roundly denounced in academic circles. Tom, Jeff and I discovered Becker's ideas and started traveling all over North America and Europe to give talks about them. We wrote a paper about these ideas, sent it to our flagship journal, The American Psychologist, and six months later we got a rejection. The reviewer said that these ideas were of no interest to any psychologist alive or dead. Jeff, Tom, and I have been doing experimental, social psychology for almost 35 years, and we'd like to address the "so what" question and the "how do we know this is true" question at the same time. Ernest Becker offers a provocative answer to why people can't get along with other human beings who don't share their beliefs about the nature of reality. He says that if we accept the validity of an alternative conception of reality, we undermine our confidence. If you lose faith in your own beliefs about reality and you run into somebody who is different, you're gonna experience anxiety about your own death. If I believe that God created the Earth in six days, and I run into somebody in the Borneo of the South Pacific who believes that Earth was gestated out of a giant coconut tree, I will denigrate and belittle them and try to convince them to adopt my beliefs. Ernest Becker argues that we cannot understand human inhumanity to man unless we accept people who are different. Jeff, Tom and I had an accident. We were bowling one day and a thought struck us: if Becker is right, then what would happen if we reminded some people of their own mortality? We've done literally hundreds of experiments to measure how people's culturally constructed beliefs affect their attitudes towards others. We've shown people gory images of car accidents and autopsies, and asked people to write down their thoughts and feelings associated with their own death. We flash the word death at people while they're reading stuff on a computer. Studies have shown that reminding people of their mortality affects their attitudes and behaviors. For example, reminding Germans of their mortality makes them sit closer to fellow Germans and further away from people who appear to look like Turkish immigrants. We did a study in Iran where we reminded people of their mortality and asked them if they supported suicide bombing. After being reminded of their mortality, Iranians were very supportive of suicide bombing and quite willing to consider becoming one. George Bernard Shaw said that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretenses of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud. Max Weber, a German sociologist, said that in times of historical upheaval people often become attracted to a certain kind of leader, a charismatic leader. And after the events of September 11th, 2001, George W. Bush had one of the highest approval ratings. The events of September 11th, 2001, may have posed an existential threat to the American public, leading them to elect a president who promised to rid the world of evildoers. We did a bunch of experiments in 2003 and 2004 where we reminded people of death and then asked them if they supported President Bush's policies in Iraq. We found that people who were reminded of death were more enthusiastic about President Bush's policies. Americans reminded of their mortality were more likely to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and this is ominous for democracy. Because of our concerns about death, we are alienated from nature and contribute to the degradation of the physical environment. We are also uncomfortable with our own bodies and don't like things that would normally be extraordinarily pleasurable, even sexual activity. A study by Dutch psychologists found that people who were reminded of their mortality liked forests more than neighborhoods, and that when reminded of their mortality in simulated games, they tempered their behavior in the service of maintaining a non renewable natural resource. Human beings in Western society are overwhelmingly preoccupied with the desire for money and stuff. When reminded of their mortality, people say they want to have more money and to have more fancy, luxury items. Polish researchers found that people drew bigger coins and paper money after being reminded of their mortality, and that people who just got to count money reported having less death and anxiety. America is currently a Petri dish of psychopathology. A third of the population is depressed, another third is addicted to drugs and alcohol, and the final third is watching survivor to see who could drink the most yak urine. The American dream is highly unlikely to be achieved in the United States. If you embrace the American dream and you're 40 years old in a polyester suit selling three pound burritos on the second shift at the drive through at Taco Bell, well then that's your fault. I was the last generation of Americans where it was okay to be average, and I fear for the youth today because they are being held accountable for standards that are just not realistically attainable, and this is a recipe for psychological despair. I'm tempted to stop, but I don't want to leave you with that thought. Let's end on a more propitious note, by recognizing that human beings can use their ingenuity to reduce the destructive potential of their existential fears. If Albert Camus's ideas about death are right, then we should all think about how our concerns about our mortality influence a lot of what we do. Erik Erikson said that when parents have the courage to die, their children will have the faith to live, and I think that we can all contribute to making the world a better place. The first study that we did with municipal court judges in Tucson, Arizona, was to see if death reminders would influence the punitive reactions of the judges. And sure enough, the bond was nine times higher when the judges were reminded of their mortality. Lisa's silly joke: next time you get a parking ticket, pray that the judge hasn't driven past a cemetery on the way to sentencing you. There's been more than one study that shows that legal decisions are routinely altered by momentary conditions that include death reminders. We should talk afterwards because we think there's other things going on and people aren't so sure when the psychological crap hits the fan. Vera, an atheist, wants to know if religion has anything to do with death denial. Buddhists are good people, but in Burma, they treat others badly. Atheists are worse than agnostics, because they are convinced of things they can't know, and so they are just as vicious as their theistic counterparts. Atheists are just another death denying world view and a rather shallow and disenchanted one. When reminded of their mortality, atheists say they believe in God less, but unconsciously they become more religious just like religious people. We are studying people who work in health care settings, like nurses, surgeons, and first responders, and we don't know yet if death reminders have predictable effects. We haven't studied people who trend towards suicide, because we can't see a way to do that in an ethical fashion. We do have a chapter in our book about suicide that argues that most people who commit suicide believe that there is something better. Most primitive cultures, including shamanist and animist cultures, are tolerant of other religions, but they still see them as inferior to their own. This is because they see other religions as less than human. Good question, though, since you're saying that death anxiety is an inherent part of our humanity. Have you looked at children to see if their perspective is different than adults? We have a chapter in our book on how children become aware of death. Some research suggests that children as young as nine hate Russian immigrants in Israel and love Jewish people. By age 9, the effects that I spoke about tonight are already manifested in kids. But I don't know if the effects happen at the same time for all people, or if there's a developmental trajectory that can shed light on that. There are studies that show that death reminders persist for hours or even days, but again, that doesn't answer your question. We're assaulted by a bouillabaisse of death-related imagery on a relatively regular basis. We are doing research on how attitudes about abortion have been impacted by death anxiety. So far, we have found that Americans reminded of their mortality hate Muslims, object to a mosque being built in their neighborhood, and object to immigrants moving into their neighborhood. People don't seem to care about environmental issues, even after the Inconvenient Truth was released. They have a million excuses about why they aren't going to help the environment, and they don't want to take the blame. Death anxiety is implicated in all of these issues, but it doesn't follow that it's the only factor. For example, conservatives are more willing to admit that global warming is real if it can be solved through market forces. I don't know if parents exhibit less fear anxiety than do non-parents, but I do know that when parents are reminded of their mortality, they say they want to have more kids, and they say they want to have them sooner. People who have had near death experiences report lower death anxiety, but when reminded of death, they become the most hateful of people who are different. So we are studying people who have had near death experiences, and measuring unconscious death anxiety. Near death experiences, we're looking at that now. There are a number of compelling examples of death reminders eliciting bad behavior, culminating in some current events regarding politics. We're now trying to figure out if we can leverage some of the same psychological phenomenon to bring out the best in us, rather than just delineate the psychological underpinnings of the most unsavory characteristics of human behavior. When Lisa said that you didn't realize it, when you were five. My epiphany was when I was eight years old, and my grandmother died. When I first read Ernest Becker, I was like wow, this is actually what I've been dwelling on for all of my kid-hood. Jeff and I talk about how our terror-management theory has been our own form of death denial. Shelden's book, The Worm at the Core, The Role of Death in Life, is about how death anxiety is affecting people today, and he invites you to come and join him for a book signing and a screening of the film Endless Abilities.