In the Q&A below, Greenberg reflects on his team's pioneering work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF). He elucidates the intricacies of their theory, recalls how prostitutes and judges proved invaluable in their first few experiments, and shares the curious way their research, which easily became "big in Europe," finally caught on in the U.S.

What was the original intent of your research?

As social psychology graduate students at the University of Kansas back in 1980, Sheldon, Tom, and I felt that our field had become narrowly focused on questions far removed from the whys and hows of everyday life. We didn't buy the prevailing view in psychology at the time that people are essentially information processors guided by cognitive schemas and heuristics because we were raised by working class families surrounded by joy and anger, sibling love and rivalry, passion and sarcasm. The people we knew were driven by ethnic, regional, and occupational pride and conflict; and weren't dispassionate androids. So one broad intent of our research was to encourage the field to think outside the lab and consider the basic motivations that guide people's actions out in the real world.

A more specific intent was to develop a way to test terror management theory, or TMT. The theory is a formal elaboration of ideas that had been floating around since at least the time of the ancient historian Thucydides and that were first introduced in psychology by Otto Rank. Basically, the idea goes: the fear of death drives people to maintain faith in their own culture's beliefs and to follow the culture's paths to an enduring significance that will outlast their own physical death, often to the detriment of others who seem to block their pursuit of these goals.

Could you explain the theory further with an example or illustration?

TMT began with two simple observations about human beings. First, humans share with other mammals many biological systems oriented toward keeping themselves alive. Included among these is a fight-flight-freeze response to imminent threat of death, usually in humans accompanied by the subjective experience of terror. Second, unlike other mammals, adult human brains have highly developed prefrontal lobes that allow them to realize that no matter what, sooner or later, death will come. Thus, part of the human condition is living with a desire to continue to live and an inherent fear of death on the one hand, and, on the other, the knowledge that this desire will inevitably be thwarted and that what is feared will inevitably occur. The theory consequently posits that this existential predicament creates an ever-present potential to experience a terror of no longer existing.

As this awareness of mortality dawned on our ancestors, they were drawn to belief systems that helped them continue to function with equanimity. These cultural worldviews portrayed the world as a meaningful, purposeful place in which death is not the ultimate end. Until very recently, these worldviews virtually always included the idea of a literal afterlife for some aspect of oneself -- a soul -- but also included modes of transcending death via permanent symbolic marks of the self, such as heroic deeds, great achievements, memorials, and heirs.