Reports of My Death Anxiety Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: A Critique of Terror Management Theory from an Evolutionary Perspective

Although terror management theory’s proponents claim that it is an evolutionary the-ory of human behavior, its major tenets are implausible when examined carefully from a modern evolutionary perspective. We explain why it is unlikely that natural selec-tion would have designed a “survival instinct ” or innate “fear of death, ” nor an anxi-ety-reduction system in general, or worldview-defense system in particular, to ame-liorate such fears. We argue that results of mortality-salience experiments are better explained as by-products of a psychological system of coalitional computation that evolved for a variety of functions, including defense against other humans, that is ac-tivated by certain kinds of death-related thoughts. Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Pyszczynski, Solo-mon, & Greenberg, 2002) is in many ways an unusual theory in the contemporary social-psychology land-scape. Most striking to us is the fact that, in a field dominated by countless mini-theories and highly cir