Grave Matters: The Role of Death in Life - Sheldon Solomon, PhD

Sheldon Solomon, PhD
Professor of psychology at Skidmore College and co-author of
The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for The Denial of Death, arguing that fear of death is “the mainspring of human activity,” but his ideas were generally dismissed as philosophical speculation. Sheldon Solomon and his colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski developed Terror Management Theory (TMT) to substantiate Becker’s claim that
death awareness has a profound and pervasive effect on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in almost every domain of life. Find out how intimations of mortality influence everything from the
mundane to the momentous—what you ate for lunch, whom you voted for in the last election, how judges make legal decisions, your attitudes about shopping, your mental health and physical well being, whom you love, and whom you hate.