In this video I provide a (very) brief overview of existential psychology and how knowledge of our own mortality may play a role in shaping behaviors and societies.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to take a brief look at existential psychology and an important idea for existential psychology is that death is inescapable. We’re all going to die and this creates a certain amount of angst or anxiety. And the reason that it causes anxiety is not because we’re going to die but because we’re aware of the fact that we’re going to die.
We have knowledge of our eventual certain death and the idea is that this causes an existential crisis because we have to think about how we should live. We have to come up with our own “dasein” and this is from Martin Heidegger and it’s German for “being there” but it’s often translated as “being in the world”. I mean we have to come up with our way of dealing with our eventual death, right? How should we live given that we won’t live forever?
We will eventually die, so this brings us to the idea of terror management. And this is the idea that knowledge of our death evokes a certain amount of terror and we have to manage that in order to live. So one way that we manage terror is by defining meaning of our lives. So we ask ourselves how should I live given that I can’t live forever? And as a result that forces us to come up with a way of living meaningfully. Often the meaning that we find in our lives is going to be within a certain social or cultural context. So people think about how their life is going to have meaning and one way that they might give it meaning is to think about how they can live on after. One way they might do that is by contributing to their society contributing to their culture, something that’s going to be passed on to future generations, and in that way it allows them to live on after their eventual death.
Now we can also think about how reminding people of their death might influence their behavior. This is called “mortality salience“. So what happens when we make someone’s mortality more salient to them? We remind them of the fact one day they’ll die. And what’s often seen when people are reminded of their eventual death, is that people have a tendency to cling to their social and cultural values. They often affirm their worth to their society; “I’ve been you know a good person to this society. I’ve served my own society in this way.”
And a really vivid demonstration of this came in 2001 in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks because we didn’t see many people thinking about the flaws in American foreign policy or thinking about negative perceptions of Americans in the rest of the world. Instead what we generally saw was people clinging to their national values. People were waving flags and putting them on their cars and singing that they were “proud to be an American”. Now, I’m not criticizing any of these behaviors. I’m simply pointing out that these are a good demonstration of how mortality salience might cause people to cling to their values, affirm their own worth, emphasize their national pride. Saying they’re proud to be part of this society or this culture.
We can think about how this could be negative. We could think about how conflict, wars, and the threat of death suddenly looming over a large group of people might cause them to cling to their values and this could further entrench the conflict. We can think about situations like the Vietnam War, where as the threat of death sort of extends to more and more people, that they’re more likely to align themselves to the values that may have initiated the conflict to begin with.
But I don’t want to be too negative here because this tendency for mortality salience to pull people together and sort of unite them behind their values can have positive effects as well. It can encourage acts of bravery. It can help people to persevere in the face of difficulties and find a sense of devotion to a meaningful cause, you know? Of course, the threat of death is not the only problem that we have to deal with in our lives and we might even think that there are some problems that are worse than death. But this emphasis on death and finding meaning in our lives from existential psychology gives us another way of thinking about how that might shape people’s personalities. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
