Just as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre affirmed man's existence through his own Cartesian tautology ("I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am"), Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski simply assumed that there is a universal, baseline cognizance of the threat of death, and then investigated the instances when death was on people's minds more than usual.
Decades later, hundreds of published academic papers have shown that worrying about death affects everything from our prejudices and voting patterns to how likely we are to exercise or use sunscreen. More broadly, they've proven Greenberg and company's original terror management theory right all along: that people deal with death by upholding worldviews that are larger and longer-lasting than themselves, and opposing anyone or anything that violates these "cultural anxiety-buffers."
"As children develop cognitively, they begin to understand the threat of death," says Greenberg. "Their basis of security shifts from the parents to large cultural concepts, such as deities and ideals."
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