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TMT and Self-Esteem

Role of Self-Esteem in TMT

Self-esteem lies at the heart of TMT, and is a fundamental part of its main experimental paradigms. TMT, fundamentally, seeks to elucidate the causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem, and theoretically, it draws heavily from Ernest Becker’s conceptions of culture and self-esteem (Becker, 1971; Becker, 1973). TMT doesn’t just attempt to explain what self-esteem is, but rather tries to account for why we need self-esteem, and what psychological functions it may serve. The answer, according to TMT, is that “self-esteem functions to shelter people from deeply rooted anxiety inherent in the human condition ... [it] is a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe...” (pg. 436). That is the why. The what for TMT is that self-esteem is a sense of personal value, that is “obtained by believing (a) in the validity of one’s cultural worldview and (b) that one is living up to the standards that are part of that worldview” (pg. 437).

Self-esteem is the feeling that one is a valuable and essential agent in a universe that is fundamentally meaningful. Therefore, TMT’s conception of self-esteem hinges on the notion that self-esteem is socially constructed and maintained; that self-esteem is unintelligible irrespective of the particular culture that fostered those beliefs about the self, and of the other individuals within that culture that socially validate an individual’s self-esteem. Thus TMT is coherent with most notions of cultural relativism, in that there is an infinite amount of ways that an individual can obtain and maintain self-esteem. This is precisely why self-esteem can be so tenuous and fragile: the very existence of other cultures and other esteemed individuals within those cultures threatens the very stability and validity of one’s own self-esteem, and hence, their sense of invulnerability (especially in the face of death). In sum, self-esteem serves as an anxiety buffer.

Main Theoretical and Experimental Paradigms

Self-Esteem as Anxiety Buffer

The anxiety buffer hypothesis starts with a brief look at the literature regarding children’s development of self-esteem (e.g., Becker, 1971/1973; Bowlby 1969/1982). Essentially, the human child is born completely helpless and dependent upon its caregivers, and learns through an extensive process of socialization that in order to maintain the feelings of security that come from being attached to the powerful other (i.e., the mother), he/she must concede its physicality and “trade it in” for a symbolic sense of self (i.e., self-esteem). In this way the child quickly learns that its security is dependent upon living up to the standards and values of his/her caregivers, and ultimately, to his/her culture. The preeminent example of this process is in toilet training, whereby the child must give up the pleasure and convenience of soiling itself wherever/whenever, and adopt the largely arbitrary rules of the caregivers/culture that the toilet is the depository of human waste, and that to go elsewhere, is to result in shame and exclusion from the mother’s death-denying aura (cf. Becker, 1973).

Experimentally, then, the anxiety buffer hypothesis states that if self-esteem and faith in one’s cultural worldview serve an anxiety buffering purpose, then bolstering self-esteem (whether artificially, or by selecting participants that are naturally high in self-esteem) should decrease an individual’s proneness to anxiety, and serve as a “shield” against threats to their psychological equanimity. One of the first TMT studies demonstrated just this. Greenberg, Solomon, and colleagues (1992) found that (1) boosting levels of self-esteem with positive feedback reduced self-reported anxiety on a standard anxiety scale after viewing graphic depictions of death, (2) bolstered self-esteem lead to less physiological arousal in anticipation of painful electric shocks, and (3) bolstered self-esteem made participants less likely to deny a short life expectancy (i.e., were realistic about their mortality). Subsequent support for this hypothesis comes from a vast literature that is constantly growing. For an empirical review of self-esteem as an anxiety buffer in TMT, see Pyszczynski et al. (2004).

Mortality Salience

The mortality salience hypothesis (MS) states that if indeed one’s cultural worldview (or their self-esteem) serves a death-denying function, then threatening these constructs should produce defenses aimed at restoring psychological equanimity (i.e., returning the individual to a state of feeling invulnerable). In the MS paradigm, these “threats” are simply experimental reminders of one’s own death. This can, and has, taken many different forms in a variety of study paradigms (e.g., asking participants to write about their own death; conducting the experiment near funeral homes or cemeteries; having participants watch graphic depictions of death, etc.). Like the other TMT hypotheses, the literature supporting the MS hypothesis is vast and diverse. For a meta analysis of MS research, see Burke, Marten and Faucher (2010).

Experimentally, the MS hypothesis has been tested in close to 200 empirical articles After being asked to write about their own death (vs. a neutral, non-death control topic, such as dental pain), and then following a brief delay (distal, worldview/self-esteem defenses work the best after a delay ... see Greenberg et al., 1994, for a discussion), the defenses are measured. In one early TMT study assessing the MS hypothesis, Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and colleagues (1990) had Christian participants evaluate other Christians and Jewish students that were similar demographically, but differed in their religious affiliation. After being reminded of their death (experimental MS induction), Christian participants evaluated fellow Christians more positively, and Jewish participants more negatively, relative to the control condition. Conversely, bolstering self-esteem in these scenarios leads to less worldview defense and derogation of dissimilar others.

Death Thought Accessibility

Origins and Measures

Another paradigm that TMT researchers use to get at unconscious concerns about death is what is known as the death thought accessibility (DTA) hypothesis. Essentially, the DTA hypothesis states that if individuals are motivated to avoid cognitions about death, and they avoid these cognitions by espousing a worldview or by buffering their self-esteem, then when threatened, an individual should possess more death-related cognitions (e.g., thoughts about death, and death-related stimuli) than they would when not threatened.

The DTA hypothesis has its origins in work by Greenberg and colleagues (1994) as an extension of their earlier terror management hypotheses (i.e., the anxiety buffer hypothesis and the mortality salience hypothesis). The researchers reasoned that if, as indicated by Wegner’s research on thought suppression (1994; 1997), thoughts that are purposely suppressed from conscious awareness are often brought back with ease, then following a delay death-thought cognitions should be more available to consciousness then (a) those who keep the death-thoughts in their consciousness the whole time, and (b) those who suppress the death-thoughts but are not provided a delay. That is precisely what they found. In these initial studies (i.e., Greenberg et al., 2004; Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Simon, 1997), and in numerous subsequent DTA studies, the main measure of DTA is a word fragment task, whereby participants can complete word fragments in distinctly death-related ways (e.g., coff_ _ as coffin, not coffee) or in non death-related ways (e.g., sk_ _l as skill, not skull). If death-thoughts are indeed more available to consciousness, then it stands to reason that the word fragments should be completed in a way that is semantically related to death.

Importance of the DTA Hypothesis

The introduction of this hypothesis has refined TMT, and led to new avenues of research that formerly could not be assessed due to the lack of an empirically validated way of measuring death-related cognitions. Also, the differentiation between proximal (conscious, near, and threat-focused) and distal (unconscious, distant, symbolic) defenses that have been derived from DTA studies have been extremely important in understanding how people “manage their terror”.

Here it is important to note how the DTA paradigm subtly alters, and expands, TMT as a motivational theory. Instead of solely manipulating mortality (as in the mortality salience paradigm) and witnessing its effects (e.g., nationalism, increased prejudice, risky sexual behavior, etc.), the DTA paradigm allows a measure of the death-related cognitions that result from various affronts to the self (e.g., self-esteem threats, worldview threats, etc.), and is therefore valuable in assessing the role of death-thoughts in self-esteem and worldview defenses. Furthermore, the DTA hypothesis lends unique support to TMT in that it corroborates its central hypothesis that death is uniquely problematic for human beings, and that it is fundamentally different in its effects than meaning threats (i.e., Heine, Proulx, &Vohs, 2006), and that is indeed death itself, and not say, uncertainty and lack of control associated with death (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008).

Since its inception, the DTA hypothesis had been rapidly gaining ground in TMT investigations, and as of 2009, has been employed in over 60 published papers, with a total of more than 90 empirical studies.

Criticisms

Though TMT is fortified by hundreds of studies, it is, however, not without its criticisms and challenges to the assumptions and claims of the theory.

Specificity to Death

Since findings on mortality salience and worldview defense were first published, other researchers have claimed that the effects may have been obtained due to reasons other than death itself, such as anxiety, fear, or other aversive stimuli such as pain. Other studies have found effects similar to those that MS results in – for example, thinking about difficult personal choices to be made, being made to respond to open-ended questions regarding uncertainty, thinking about being robbed, thinking about being socially isolated, and being told (falsely) that one’s life lacks meaning. While these cases exist, thoughts of death have since been compared to various aversive experimental controls, such as (but not limited to) thinking about: failure, writing a critical exam, public speaking with a considerable audience, being excluded, paralysis, dental pain, intense physical pain, etc. Of all of these (and more), no effects were found to be uniform with those elicited by thoughts of one’s death. Further, TMT does not claim that thoughts of death alone are endowed with the capacity to elicit defensive responses.

With regards to the studies that found similar effects, TMT theorists have argued that in the previously mentioned studies where death was not the subject thought about, the subjects would quite easily be related to death in an individual’s mind due to “linguistic or experiential connection with mortality”(p. 332). For example, being robbed invokes thoughts of violence and being unsafe in one’s own home – many people have died trying to protect their property and family. A second possible explanation for these results involves the death-thought accessibility hypothesis: these threats somehow sabotage crucial anxiety-buffering aspects of an individual’s worldview or self esteem, which increases their DTA. For example, one study found increased DTA in response to thoughts of antagonistic relations with attachment figures. (For a comprehensive review of the unique import of death, see Pyszczynski et al., 2006).

The Meaning Maintenance Model

The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) was initially introduced as a comprehensive motivational theory that claimed to subsume TMT, with alternative explanations for TMT findings. Essentially, it posits that people automatically give meaning to things, and when those meanings are somehow disrupted, it causes anxiety. In response, people concentrate on “‘meaning maintenance to reestablish their sense of symbolic unity’ and that such “meaning maintenance often involves the compensatory reaffirmation of alternative meaning structures." These meanings, among other things, should “provide a basis for prediction and control of our...environments, help [one] to cope with tragedy and trauma...and the symbolic cheating of death via adherence to the enduring values that these cultures provide."

TMT theorists argue that the MMM cannot describe why different sets of meaning are preferred for a symbol by different people, and that while they may exist, “different [(i.e., more concrete)] types of meaning have different psychological functions”. For example, MMM theorists argue that all types of meaning are basically equal, and yet one could not compare the likelihood of defensive responses resulting from exposure to a deck of cards containing black hearts with something like the 9/11 terrorists attacks. TMT theorists argue, essentially, that unless something is an important element of a person’s anxiety-buffering worldview or self-esteem, it will not require broad meaning maintenance.

In sum, TMT theorists believe that the MMM cannot accurately claim to be an alternative to TMT because it does not seem to be able to explain the current breadth of TMT evidence. As an example, TMT theorists assert that mortality salience would not be a threat to meaning, since our eventual demise is a necessary condition of life. Therefore, it should not cause an individual to engage in general meaning maintenance. MMM also makes no attempt to explain why threatening meaning increases DTA.

Offensive Defensiveness

Some theorists have argued that it is not the idea of death and nonexistence that is unsettling to people, but the fact that uncertainty is involved. For example, these researchers posited that people defend themselves by “changing a fear response to uncertainty into a zealous or enthusiastic approach response in some other domain” (p. 336). TMT theorists agree that uncertainty can be disconcerting in some cases and it may even result in defense responses, but note that they believe the inescapability of death and the possibility of its finality regarding one’s existence is most unsettling. They ask, “‘Would death be any less frightening if you knew for certain that it would come next Tuesday at 5:15 P.M., and that your hopes for an afterlife were illusory?’.... Would you rather be certain that death is the end, or live with the uncertainty that it might not be” (p. 337)? They also note that people actually seek out some types of uncertainty, and that being uncertain is not always very unpleasant.

Though TMT theorists acknowledge that many responses to mortality salience (MS) involve greater approaches (zealousness) towards important worldviews, they also note examples of MS which resulted in the opposite, which Offensive Defensiveness cannot account for: when negative features of a group to which participants belong were made salient, people actively distanced themselves from that group under MS.

Evolutionary Psychology, Coalitional Psychology, and TMT

Several critiques have been proposed against TMT from evolutionary psychologists – for example: “... because fear is an adaptive fitness response designed by natural selection to respond to specific fitness challenges, inhibiting anxiety would have been maladaptive in our ancestral past and ... it is therefore implausible that psychological processes for inhibiting anxiety ... would be active today”(p. 491). In response, TMT theorists argue that this critique is mixing up fear related to immediate danger with anxiety related to thoughts of threats that will or may occur eventually. TMT is talking about the protection that self-esteem and cultural worldviews offer against the threat of unavoidable death in the future. While anxiety may be adaptive in avoiding entering a dangerous place (i.e. because a predator may be waiting), this doesn’t mean that anxiety must be adaptive in all cases – just ask any clinician who helps people suffering from anxiety disorders. For a more comprehensive review of TMT and evolutionary psychology, see Landau et al., 2007.

Coalitional Psychology (CP) is presented as another alternative to TMT, which proposes that there is an evolutionary tendency to seek safety in groups (coalitions) as a reaction to adaptive threats. People already a part of coalitional groups seek to protect their membership by exhibiting their value to the group. In other words, “belief systems, cosmologies, values, rituals, and various other trappings of culture exist simply to facilitate group cohesiveness; thus any meaning, sense of personal value, or hope of death transcendence such beliefs may provide is purely epiphenomenal to their coalition-binding function”. However, Landau et al. (2007) make several criticisms of this position, including the objection that CP cannot be a useful alternative for TMT because it doesn’t provide evidence that cannot be applied to any number of theories, and because it does not directly account for the empirical evidence supporting TMT.