bodhi tree swaying

From today’s Boston Globe comes this interesting snippet about an experiment or experiments (it’s not clear) showing that thinking about one’s own death reinforces faith in the notion of progress. And denying the idea of progress prompts people to think more about their own death. As I mentioned in a comment to Bob the other day, “when people are reminded of their mortality they become emotionally invested in institutions, like religion or nation, that could be thought of as providing a kind of immortality.” The idea of progress would seem to provide a similar function, in that the individual can see his or her life as being part of a larger pattern involving an onward march to a better world.

For many people, faith in a higher power gets them through dark times. But for those

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Jesse Bering, who has been mentioned in this blog before, has an interesting column in Scientific American outlining a couple of experiments investigating mortality salience (the effect that an awareness of death has on us).

These rather elegant experiments show that when presented with reminders of death, people are more likely to make patriotic statements and to overestimate how many people share their opinions. In general it seems people cling to group membership as a protection against the idea of their own mortality.

Another such study found that judges presented with cues reminding them of death would set bond almost 10 times higher than they otherwise would.

In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, German psychologist Eva Jonas from Ludwig-Maximilians University and Immo Fritsche from Otto-von-Guericke University teamed up with terror management theory co-founder, social psychologist

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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

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