Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski — The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life

219 published claims from this book.

• A digitized self uploaded to a cloud would be a novel kind of entity
• A prank with hot sauce on police food led to assault charges
• A visible tampon makes both sexes rate a woman as less competent
• Accepting mortality can make life more meaningful and compassionate
• Accepting mortality reduces destructive unconscious death fears
• Adam Smith held that people pursue wealth for social regard, not necessity.
• Adults respond to death reminders with mundane distraction and consumption
• Affluence and technology allow Americans to avoid facing death
• American youth absorb thousands of onscreen violent acts by adulthood
• Ancient cosmetics used often-toxic compounds to stave off old age
• Ancient cultures widely imagined earthly places to live forever
• Another group’s immortality beliefs threaten one’s own death-transcendence claims
• Attachment to a caregiver is an evolutionary survival necessity for human infants
• Belief in saviors extends childhood experience of parental protection
• Believers in God’s image feel shielded from death by divine attributes
• Belittling national identity raises subconscious death-thought accessibility
• Bin Laden framed modern grievances within a thousand-year humiliation narrative
• Body hair has long been linked culturally to animality and immorality
• Boosting self-esteem reduces measurable physiological anxiety responses
• Both religious and secular worldviews can produce fatal medical noncompliance when death is salient
• Career ambition functions as a defense against unconscious death awareness
• Caste-based stigma persists violently despite formal legal abolition
• Cave art materialized the supernatural as a real, traversable realm beyond death
• Chappaquiddick scandal permanently blocked Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions
• Character and culture are built to shield us from death-terror
• Charismatic leaders offer followers collective immortality in troubled times.
• Children fear death more than parents realize they do
• Children first fear death, and only later learn to use culture against that fear
• Children’s specific fears coalesce into fear of their own nonexistence
• Chinese emperors entombed living retainers and armies to continue ruling after death
• Classical Islamic afterlife texts portray a corporeal paradise of perfected bodies and plenty
• Conscious and unconscious death thoughts trigger different defense systems
• Conscious death thoughts favor expert advice while unconscious ones favor celebrities.
• Conscious death thoughts require delay to trigger worldview defenses
• Contact comfort, not feeding, determines how monkeys respond to stress
• Cosmic framing converts geopolitical grievances into sacred duty
• Countercultural threats get defanged by commercial absorption
• Creating social roles for the marginalized builds self-esteem and dignity
• Crises that undermine cultural self-worth push people toward charismatic leaders.
• Cryopreservation transforms death into a reversible, purchasable process
• Cultivating ancestry functions as a buffer against death
• Cultural worldviews evolved to buffer humans against death terror.
• Cultural worldviews provide the blueprint that makes self-esteem possible
• Cultural worldviews structure conscious experience to mask death’s inevitability
• Cultures regulate body functions to deny their animal nature
• Death and sex reminders make men lenient toward male violence against women
• Death awareness emerges around age three with self-consciousness
• Death awareness would have been lethal without simultaneous cultural adaptations to deny it
• Death fears fuel authoritarian dependence, superstition, and insatiable greed.
• Death reminders alter decisions without conscious awareness
• Death reminders boost admiration for celebrities as proof of lasting remembrance.
• Death reminders double the hot sauce people inflict on ideological opponents
• Death reminders drive women to restrict their food intake in pursuit of thinness
• Death reminders increase people’s desire to have children
• Death reminders intensify nicotine intake in highly addicted smokers
• Death reminders make people insist humans differ from animals
• Death reminders more than triple willingness to buy strong alcohol.
• Death reminders work through brief two-question mortality salience prompts
• Death rituals dampen one’s own mortality dread enough to sustain daily routines
• Death thoughts and physical sexuality suppress each other in a reciprocal loop
• Death-awareness drives humans to cling to cultural worldviews and self-esteem
• Death-based explanations were initially rejected by mainstream psychology
• Death-linked monumental projects predate and probably triggered settled agriculture
• Death-related religious monuments predated and may have stimulated agriculture
• Death-terror drives art, religion, war, consumerism, and fame-seeking
• Death’s most powerful influence operates unseen in normal life
• Descartes pioneered a mechanistic, repair-based approach to immortality
• Descartes’ cogito was partly motivated to prove the soul immortal
• Designed to banish death thoughts, rationalizations defer health behaviors indefinitely.
• Disgust evolved past pathogen defense into death-anxiety management
• Disparaging a lower-status group psychologically uplifts the higher-status group
• Dissociation eases immediate trauma but predicts later development of PTSD
• Distal defenses minimize the occasions that proximal defenses must handle
• Doctors’ death anxiety produces diagnostic bias along cultural-religious lines.
• Doctors’ death fears override patients’ expressed end-of-life wishes.
• Durable self-esteem manifests as grace, self-compassion, and other-focus
• Early American Calvinists read wealth as a sign of divine favor.
• Effective health campaigns must address both proximal and distal death defenses simultaneously
• Egyptian resurrection belief framed cosmic cycles as needing constant human maintenance
• Egyptian tombs functioned as fully provisioned dwellings for navigating a dangerous afterlife
• Elaborate 28,000-year-old burials show death awareness predates complex civilization
• Ending death could heighten rather than eliminate death anxiety
• Enlightenment scientists pursued literal immortality through science
• Escalating violence persists because backing down is itself humiliating
• Even skeptics cannot fully abandon the idea of immortality
• Even those who deny all meaning tacitly affirm things that matter to them
• Even tiny intimations of mortality drive humans to prove their worth
• Every existing species survives because its ancestors’ evolutionary experiments were thwarted by fear
• Existential dread drives conspicuous consumption beyond rational calculation.
• Existential therapy accepts rather than argues against the reality of isolation
• Extreme caregiver deprivation halted children’s physical and mental development
• Faith-based worldviews can drive fatal refusal of treatable medical care
• Fear of death ultimately reduces to thwarted biological survival instinct.
• Following religious conversions, personality can change measurably
• Genuine self-esteem is stable, humble, and oriented toward others
• Gilded Age elites spent fortunes on display while most Americans earned under $1,200 yearly.
• Gilded Age magnates literally imported English royal history into their Long Island homes
• Global cosmetics spending exceeds the UN’s entire annual budget
• Göbekli Tepe served ritual burial purposes, not habitation or farming
• Grandiose delusion can temporarily eliminate felt anxiety
• Grandiosity combined with fragile self-esteem drives defensive violence when threatened
• Great wealth removes the distractions that normally mask existential emptiness.
• High self-esteem and optimism enable constructive responses to death threats.
• Home accidents kill and injure more Americans than driving does
• Human newborns are the most helpless of all living creatures at birth
• Humans have long despised body hair as a mark of animality
• Humans pursue symbolic immortality through works, namesakes, and progeny
• Humans reframe their animal biology as culture to deny mortal embodiment
• Imagining flight reduces death thoughts after mortality reminders
• Inflated fragile self-esteem masks existential dread but needs constant reassurance
• Islamic terrorists mainly target fellow Muslims, not Western enemies
• Keats’s obsession with death drove his poetic ambition
• Keats’s poetry emerged against ridicule and personal catastrophe
• Knowing how death awareness drives defenses enables more self-determined choices
• Language allowed ancestors to think about things absent in time and space
• Language and symbols can never fully bridge the gap between separate minds
• Lenin’s preserved body fused Orthodox saint relics with scientific resurrection hopes
• Lethal terrorist backlash followed the 2003 Iraq invasion
• Life-extension technology will disproportionately serve the wealthy
• Lindbergh’s death terror drove his biomedical immortality work
• Long-term worldview security makes everyday death-distraction strategies workable
• Low self-esteem at age eleven predicts adult aggression and delinquency
• Luxury consumption boosts self-esteem, a defense against death anxiety.
• Male violence against women partly stems from resentment of their own bodily arousal
• Marriage’s physical intimacy can deepen rather than cure a bride’s dread of death
• Meaning alone is insufficient; self-worth within the worldview is required for security
• Mildly depressed people respond to death reminders with amplified nationalism
• Modern wage labor strips the craftsmanship that once gave bakers self-esteem
• Money originated in religious rituals connected to ancestor worship.
• Money serves transcendent death goals beyond rational economic exchange.
• Morsi publicly urged Egyptians to raise children on hatred of Jews
• Mortality awareness drives conflict between competing worldviews
• Mortality reminders bias judicial decisions regardless of the evidence.
• Mortality reminders dramatically increase support for charismatic leaders
• Mortality reminders increase desire for high-status luxury goods.
• Mortality reminders make men denigrate sexually provocative women
• Mortality reminders make people endorse preemptive attacks on non-threatening countries
• Mortality reminders strengthen religious belief even in atheists
• Mortality reminders uniquely trigger worldview defense unlike other threats
• Mortals accept symbolic immortality when literal immortality is unattainable
• Most humans have believed their existence continues literally beyond physical death
• Narcissists avoid superior competition while secure people seek it out
• Nazi Germany functioned as a secular religion replacing Christian rites.
• Nearly forty percent of hospitalized schizophrenic men are overtly preoccupied with death
• No account of human behavior is complete without the awareness of death
• Only 37 percent of eligible students ate free lunches in San Francisco schools.
• Only humans feel terror with no danger present, due to the neocortex.
• Peak flow experiences need anchoring in other transcendence modes to fulfill
• People are generally oblivious to death yet it shapes their experience
• People irrationally believe proximity to a celebrity magically protects them from disaster.
• People pursue self-destructive trends most avidly when death thoughts are unconscious
• People seize on spurious longevity facts to feel death can be kept at bay
• People self-sabotage to preserve excuses that protect self-esteem
• People unaware of their death fears are nonetheless governed by layered psychological defenses
• Persistence past a hostile rejection turned terror management theory toward empiricism
• Personifying death as villains makes it psychologically manageable for children
• Phobias channel uncontrollable death fears onto more controllable objects
• Physical contact comfort, not feeding, is the root of parental love
• Planning imagined futures through symbols is uniquely human
• Pre-Christian seasonal customs were survival rituals against death, not recreation
• Pregnancy and breastfeeding trigger derogation of women when death and animality are salient
• Prehistoric shamans likely directed artists to depict heaven and earth in caves
• Primate neocortex size predicts social group size
• Prolonged death contemplation keeps mortality thoughts conscious and suppresses defensive reactions
• Prosperity theology frames wealth as evidence of God’s blessing.
• Proximity to a cemetery shifts people toward preferring their own cultural goods
• Psychological disorders result from failed attempts to manage death anxiety
• Rank regarded the soul as an invention against death
• Realist and idealist philosophies conceive death differently as non-human limit or humanized ending
• Reason is what distinguishes redeemable humans from eternally trapped animals
• Regulation of women’s bodies also stems from anxiety about physicality and death
• Religious disembodiment stems from fear of bodily mortality
• Reminders of death shift electoral preferences toward tough charismatic leaders
• Reminders of mortality increase physical strength output
• Ritual is active wishful thinking — acting out desired outcomes
• Rituals originate when one person’s emotional outburst is copied and formalized
• Romania’s ban on contraception and abortion produced vast numbers of abandoned orphans
• Sacrifice functioned as a negotiated exchange with the gods for protection
• Sartrean heroes long for irreversible acts that fix their identity forever
• Scapegoating rituals transferred communal death-anxiety onto a sacrificial other
• Schizophrenic delusions function as shields against death terror
• Seeking ever-larger worldviews is a defense against death anxiety, not a search for truth
• Self-esteem acts as a physiological vaccine against fear and adversity
• Self-esteem functions as protection against the terror of death
• Self-esteem is a core survival need, not a luxury.
• Self-esteem is as vital as food for human psychological survival
• Self-esteem is embodied, not just mental, and blunts death-anxiety
• Self-flagellation disciplines the flesh to deny animal mortality
• Settled monument-building may have preceded and driven the adoption of agriculture
• Severe humiliation and bullying can drive violent rebellion against low self-esteem
• Sex terrifies because it reminds humans they are mortal animals
• Shared belief renders delusion indistinguishable from truth
• Shared isolation rather than perfect understanding is the basis of real intimacy
• Socrates argued the soul’s immortality from innate knowledge
• Some suicides stem from a horror of mortality itself rather than physical pain
• Subliminal environmental cues make death thoughts more accessible in consciousness
• Subtle death reminders drive worldview defense, self-esteem striving, and unhealthy behavior.
• Successful conversion reduces the converter’s death anxiety
• Suicidal people often genuinely believe they will survive their own death
• Taoist immortality practices framed the breath as a bridge to the divine
• Ted Kennedy achieved more for the underprivileged than his martyred brothers
• Terror management dynamics equally drive Muslim hostility toward the West
• Terror management increases opposition to local mosque construction
• The biblical fall mirrors the evolution of self-aware mortality knowledge.
• The death experiment recruited real judges to test worldview defense
• The fig leaf originated as shame about death, not just nudity
• The personal pronoun arose as a way to distinguish self from group
• The pursuit of immortality drove major scientific and technological advances
• Thinking about death and about physical sex each activate the other
• Threatening cherished beliefs brings thoughts of death closer to awareness
• Toddler fears of monsters and the dark stem from perceived survival threats
• Twentieth-century psychology long held that babies bond only through feeding
• Unrealistic self-worth standards drive widespread depression in America
• Video game addiction partly reflects escape from the terror of death via infinite lives
• Wealth accumulation shifted social valuation from actual ability to prestige.
• Werner Herzog missed the same plane crash Juliane Koepcke survived
• Western movements now use casual cafés to normalize talking about death
• Without proximal defenses people would be perpetually panicking about death
• Word-stem completion rate validly measures how close death thoughts are to consciousness