Mortality Salience

Mortality salience is the psychological state that results when a person is made consciously aware of their own eventual death, whether through direct reminders, dangerous situations, or subtler cues in their environment. It is the central experimental manipulation used to test terror management theory, which holds that awareness of mortality creates existential anxiety that people manage by more firmly defending their cultural worldviews and self-esteem. Studies inducing mortality salience have repeatedly found that it can increase people's affiliation with their own social or national group and their negative judgment of people or ideas seen as different, compared to control conditions that do not raise thoughts of death.