Awareness of one’s own mortality is psychologically unsettling for many people. According to (TMT), a branch of existential psychology, people feel a need to defend against the produced by thoughts about death and they do this in a number of ways that can increase their against those who do not share their values. According to a recent paper, thinking about atheists and atheism can threaten a person’s in the existence of an afterlife, producing death anxiety. This leads to distrust of and prejudice against atheists. The authors of this paper wonder if there might be more benign ways people could deal with their existential anxiety that do not involve prejudice and concomitant against those who do not share their worldview. One possible solution is to encourage a personal sense of humility. Research has found that an attitude of humility reduces anxiety about death. Humility might be a more adaptive way to cope with immortality as it involves no illusions and does not encourage prejudice against outsiders.

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According to TMT, awareness of our own mortality has the potential to create unbearable anxiety. One of the main ways people attempt to defend against the anxiety produced by awareness of death is to affirm a belief in some form of immortality, which can be either literal or symbolic. Literal immortality generally involves belief in an afterlife, whereas symbolic immortality may involve the belief that some aspect of oneself is an integral part of something greater that will continue to exist after one dies, e. . one’s culture or nation, or that some extension of oneself will continue to live on, e.g. through one’s children or one’s achievements. Many research studies have found that when people are reminded of death they become more motivated to defend their own culture from criticism and take more negative attitudes to those who do not share their culture’s values. This research has found that being exposed to criticism of one’s cultural worldview increases the accessibility of death-related thoughts, while defending one’s cultural worldview by derogating its critics reduces the accessibility of such thoughts (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010).

Although cultural worldview defence may be effective in temporarily reducing existential anxiety in response to reminders of death, it can also cause problems. Increased defensiveness about one’s worldview can produce prejudice against those who do not share one’s views. According to a recent paper, prejudice against atheists in particular might occur at least in part because they reject the existence of an afterlife, provoking existential unease about the possibility that they just might be right (Cook, Cohen, & Solomon, 2015). Negative attitudes towards people who disbelieve in God (or Gods) have been common around the world throughout history and is currently quite prevalent in the USA in particular. For example, studies have found that Americans indicate that they would be more willing to vote for a gay man or a Muslim as President than an atheist, and regard atheists as the group that least shares their vision of American ideals (Cook, et al., 2015).

Cook et al. performed two experiments to test their ideas. The first experiment tested the idea that a reminder of death would increase derogation of atheists relative to another religious minority. As predicted, participants who were reminded of death reported a greater dislike of atheists compared to participants in a control condition who were reminded of pain. On the other hand, participants’ feelings about another religious minority (Quakers) did not differ whether they were reminded about either death or pain. Additionally, participants generally distrusted atheists more than Quakers, and this effect was exacerbated when they had been reminded of death.

The second experiment tested whether thinking about atheism increases the tendency to think about death. In this experiment participants were asked to think about one of three things: atheism, their own death, or extreme pain. To assess the accessibility of death-related thoughts, participants were then asked to complete a set of word fragments, each of which had two letters missing. A number of these could be completed with either a death-related word or a neutral word, e.g. S K _ _ L can be completed as either “skull” or “skill”. Participants in the atheism condition completed as many death-related words as those in the own death condition (which was significantly more than those in the pain condition). This indicated that thinking about atheism increased death-thought accessibility as much as thinking about death directly.

The results of the two experiments suggest that reminders of death can increase already substantial levels of prejudice against atheists, and that thinking about atheism reminds people of their own mortality. These results support the idea that people associated atheists and atheism with existential unease and that expressing prejudice against atheists may be a way of coping with this unease by reinforcing one’s cultural worldview. Prejudice can lead to aggression and discriminatory behavior, which is why it is not generally considered a good way of dealing with people who do not share one’s views. The authors note that future research could aim to identify more benign ways people could deal with their existential anxiety that do not involve prejudice and concomitant aggression against those who do not share their worldview, although they do not present any specific suggestions.

I am aware of a couple of lines of research that may suggest more benign solutions. Since atheism threatens one’s belief in immortality, bolstering a person’s belief in the afterlife might reduce the sense of threat. A previous study (Dechesne et al., 2003) found that people who read a passage arguing that the near death experience provides scientific evidence for an afterlife responded less defensively to reminders of their own death compared to participants who read a passage arguing that near death experiences are produced by a dying brain starved of oxygen. Those who were primed with belief in an afterlife showed less inclination to defend their cultural worldview after a reminder of death compared to those who were presented with an opposite view. Hence, strengthening belief in literal immortality reduced the need to affirm one’s symbolic immortality. A similar experiment could be adapted to test whether afterlife belief/doubt moderates the effect of being reminded of death on prejudice against atheists. Another experiment could be performed in which participants read either of the two afterlife passages and then asked to think about either atheism or a control topic such as pain. Then they could be tested for death-thought accessibility.

A problem with trying to convince people that there is scientific support for the afterlife though is that it is not actually true. Furthermore, even people who believe in literal immortality may sometimes have doubts they need to assuage. An alternative and more realistic approach would involve helping people to accept things as they really are. Research on humility has found that people who are naturally humble have less of death than less humble people (Kesebir, 2014). An attitude of humility allows a person to accept the limitations of the self as they are without the need for comforting illusions. This may be because humble people are not especially preoccupied with their own importance and may not have such an egocentric need to feel that they will live forever. Additionally, there is evidence that humility can be experimentally induced, at least temporarily. One study found that experimentally inducing a sense of humility helped reduce fear of death compared to a baseline condition whereas experimentally inducing pride did not (Kesebir, 2014). Inducing humility might reduce death-thought accessibility in response to thinking about atheism, and might counteract the effect of mortality reminders on prejudice against atheists and perhaps even more generally. An advantage of humility is that it is a realistic view that requires no illusions and does not provoke hostility to out-groups. It is also possible that having an attitude of humility might help a person have a better appreciation of how wondrous the universe really is. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sums this up nicely in a video in which he states that: “If you are after being exposed to the cosmic perspective, you started your day with an unjustifiably large ego.” He goes on to say that if instead one starts out without any ego, one will develop a great appreciation for how awesome the cosmos is and realise that each one of us is an inseparable part of it.

Prejudice against atheists and atheism may well be part of a larger problem of how people cope with awareness of their own mortality. Many people try to cope with their existential anxieties by derogating those who do not share their values, which can lead to all sorts of social problems. Furthermore, this approach does not fundamentally address the real problem and is not a stable solution. Accepting one’s place in the universe with humility seems like a better way with fewer problems. Future research might consider why this latter more reasonable approach has not already become more universally embraced and why some people find it so difficult to come to terms with death.

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.

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References

Burke, B. L., Martens, A., & Faucher, E. H. (2010). Two Decades of Terror Management Theory: A Meta-Analysis of Mortality Salience Research. and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 155-195. doi: 10.1177/1088868309352321

Cook, C. L., Cohen, F., & Solomon, S. (2015). What If They’re Right About the Afterlife? Evidence of the Role of Existential Threat on Anti-Atheist Prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science. doi: 10.1177/1948550615584200

Dechesne, M., Pyszczynski, T., Arndt, J., Ransom, S., Sheldon, K. M., van Knippenberg, A., & Janssen, J. (2003). Literal and symbolic immortality: The effect of evidence of literal immortality on striving in response to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(4), 722-737. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.84.4.722

Kesebir, P. (2014). A quiet ego quiets death anxiety: Humility as an existential anxiety buffer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 610-623. doi: 10.1037/a0035814