Death reminders work through brief two-question mortality salience prompts

Evidence

One of the questionnaires was a two-question “Morality Attitudes Personality Survey.” First, we asked the judge to “please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you.” … “I don’t think about it much, but I guess I would feel very sad for my family, who would miss me,” he wrote. … Next we asked the judge to “jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” … He wrote: “I feel that I will enter a tunnel of pain and then release into the light. I will notice that my body will be buried and eventually decay under the earth, but my soul will rise up to heaven where I will meet my Savior.” — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 78

Categorization

• CANDY: A judge casually describing his soul rising to meet his Savior on a personality survey is almost comically ordinary — good anecdotal material.