Awareness of death, and ego-defense

Fascinating post on The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer’s site on neuroscience.

I’ve been writing about impermanence a lot recently, as part of a book project I have on the go. The topic of the book is the Six Elements, which is a Buddhist framework for reflecting on impermanence and mortality. It’s a given in Buddhist thinking that the ego is driven by a fear of its own destruction, but this is the first time I’ve seen experimental evidence to support that notion.

Over at Mind Matters, I’ve got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death and then observed how this affected their judicial decisions:

LEHRER: How does this theory relate to mortality salience (MS)? And what’s an experimental example of mortality salience at work?

SOLOMON: A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that MS increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.

Our first experiment was conducted with 22 municipal court judges in Tucson, Ariz. We told the judges we were studying the relation between personality traits, attitudes and bond decisions. A bond is a sum of money a defendant pays prior to trial to be released from prison in the interim. The judges completed a set of questionnaires consisting of some standard personality assessment instruments. Embedded in the personality assessments were two questions designed to trigger mortality salience: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die and once you are physically dead.” Only half of the judges were randomly given these questions to answer.

The judges were then given a legal case brief virtually identical to one they would typically see before a trial. The brief stated the arresting charge, which was prostitution, and the defendant’s address, employment record and length of residency. A copy of the citation issued to the defendant when she was arrested was also included. Finally, the judges were given a form to set bond for the defendant. We chose judges for the study because they are rigorously trained to make rational and uniform decisions based solely on evidence relative to existing laws. And we had them pass judgment on an alleged prostitute because prostitution offends the moral sensibilities of the average American. To the extent that cultural worldviews serve to mitigate mortal terror, we hypothesized that judges who thought about death would set higher bonds than those in the control condition. The results were striking. Judges in the control condition set an average bond of $50, which was typical for this charge in actual cases at the time. However, judges who thought about their death set an average bond of $455.

One Response to “Awareness of death, and ego-defense”

isabella mori says:

November 2, 2008 at 1:37 pm

absolutely fascinating! results that clear-cut are not typical in psychological experiments.

it would be interesting to think about how this experiment, which deals with a threat of absolute death, relates to the threat of ego destruction (e.g. humility, submission to a teacher, etc.) i suppose you’ll talk about that in your book?