The Buffering Agents of Terror Management Theory– A Letter on Terror Theory
On Friday 13th October of 1972, a Uruguayan plane, crashed in the Andes Mountains. Months later it was learned that in order for the terrified survivors to survive the 72 day ordeal, a genesis of terror was born faced with no food and the prospects of death and its expression, effects, and responses from the prospect of cannibalizing the remains of some dead passengers. According to TMT, to eliminate or reduce existential terror in response to such horrific events, (Yum/Hamlin 2005), humans need two kinds of support against the knowledge that we must die: self-esteem and a sustaining cultural world view. Because cultural world views differed and clashed, their validation system (religion, political ideology) that provided a sense of security was threatened by differing communal ideas.
Their account of the expression, effects, and responses which led them to eat their deceased comrades includes factors related to TMT which you and together with your colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski developed. The cultural and self-esteem factors the 27 survivors faced and ultimately how they developed right from wrong is at the heart of their dilemma.
The cultural perspective that I now introduce is the Catholic religious beliefs shared by the survivors. The discussion of eating the corpses that ensued after several days of no food having only eaten a few morsels of Chocolate was first brought up by a medical student named Canessa. His cultural and situational argument was that the frozen corpses were dead and “he asserted that the bodies were no longer people” (Henslin, 2003). In his mind he had resolved to the satisfaction of his self-awareness that this would negate any moral transgression of his religious beliefs affirming his self-esteem as a terror anxiety buffer alleviating feelings of powerlessness. However other’s had a differing belief in their cultural world view and found his argument to be confounded based on their differing articles of faith. As such, they defended that the corpses were not to be transgressed in such a culturally disrespectful manor which would diminish their own sense of personal self-esteem thus unwilling to submitting to his sense of self-esteem nor willing to submit to the prospects of the terror of death by starvation. A few days later as their hunger grew, Canessa soon found himself no longer alone in the group’s religious debate as three more survivors recanted their previous opinions after their previous veil of cultural religiosity thinned based on a belief that “we have a duty to survive, God’s wants us to survive” (Henslin, 2003).
By using their cultural religious beliefs as a defense to eat the corpses they were able to retain their self-esteem as a terror management buffer in a belief that by adhering to revised cultural standards of meaning, goodness, and value to eventually attain a sense of security and immortality, thus in effect finding a way of managing the psychological terror of dying. It seems in this case that as circumstances of their terror changed, people became more open to fundamental changes in their cultural identity but not at a risk of loss of self-esteem. In closing it seems evident that interpersonal communication is an important means of eliminating or reducing existential terror.
Citations
Henslin,James, Doing the unthinkable: Eating your friends is the hardest: The survivors of the F-227. 2003 New York, NY, US: Free Press
| Young-Ok, Yum and William Schenck-Hamlin. (2005). Reactions to 9/11 as a Function of Terror Management and Perspective Taking. The Journal of Social Psychology [0022-4545] Yum yr:2005 vol:145 iss:3 pg:265 -286 |
Weiten, W., & McCann, D. (2009). Psychology: Themes and variations (2nd Cdn. ed.). Toronto,
ON: Nelson.
