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Vol. 2, No. 1 - August 27, 2002
| Solomon’s New Book Looks
at Post-9/11 Terror In the Wake of 9/11 - The Psychology of Terror, (American Psychological Association, 2002) a new book co-written by Skidmore Professor of Psychology Sheldon Solomon, explores the despair, fear, and anger that arose after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. Solomon and co-authors Tom Pyszczynski of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona analyze the events of last fall through the lens of Terror Management Theory, which they originally defined about 20 years ago. Terror Management Theory helps explain why humans react the way that they do to the threat of death, and how this reaction influences their post-threat cognition and emotion. In their new book, the authors explain how Terror Management Theory provides ways to understand and reduce terrorism’s effect. According to the authors, “Terror Management Theory concerns the impact that awareness of the inevitability of death has on how we live our lives. It is essentially a theory about the effect of death on life.” In the book’s introduction they explain, “What the terrorist attacks have done is to disrupt our normal means of managing our natural terror and, in so doing, threatened to undermine the psychological equanimity necessary for people to function effectively on a daily basis.” Drawing on the work of the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, the trio began to examine Becker’s assertion that the uniquely human awareness of death and the consequent denial of it is a primary force that instigates and directs a substantial portion of human behavior. Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for his book, The Denial of Death, believed that humans refuse to accept awareness of their own mortality and that this inability to acknowledge mortality motivates virtually all human behavior. Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Greenberg have studied how Becker’s theories illuminate the interrelatedness of various forms of human behavior and motivation. They translated Becker’s ideas into Terror Management Theory and subjected a number of hypotheses to empirical scrutiny. Their research has provided new knowledge about diverse aspects of the human condition, including self-esteem striving, intergroup conflict, conformity, aggression, creativity, and altruism. In their book, the authors point out, “We are animals with an instinctive desire for life with enough intelligence to know that we will someday die. The potential for terror this knowledge creates leads us to seek shelter in the form of cultural worldviews that give life meaning and permanence, give us the opportunity to view ourselves as valuable, and provide some hope of transcending death. Whether these anxiety-buffering worldviews are religious or secular, they ultimately serve the same psychological function of protecting us from the ‘rumble of panic’ that lies beneath the surface and that energizes our quest for meaning in life and value in ourselves.” Using Terror Management Theory as the foundation for their discussion, the authors consider the effects of the September 11 attacks on the American public and discuss ways in which the impact of such terrorism can be reduced. Conflicts involving terrorism are explored, and practical suggestions for resolving terrorism are presented.
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