You say that Terror Management Theory was originally developed not just to explain why people do the things that we do and why we need self-esteem, but also to answer the question of “Why can’t we just all get along?” Can you talk about how TMT helps us understand prejudice and discrimination?

From the perspective of Terror Management Theory, prejudice is the result of the basic human motives to have meaning in our lives and value in ourselves, to maintain the cultural worldview and our certainty of it, and to maintain a sense of personal value within that context. Those are ideas that have been around in psychology for a long time. What TMT adds is that our worldviews and self-esteem protect us from very basic fears – they’re anxiety buffers – and the root of much of that anxiety is fear of death. This doesn’t mean that it’s the only thing that we’re afraid of, or that it’s the only motive, but our view is that awareness of death as it was emerging in early humans changed the way other motives operate. It created this potential for terror that led people to gravitate towards ways of understanding the world that helped them control that fear. Worldviews that dealt with the problem of death were very appealing and became easily widespread and accepted within groups.

In terms of prejudice, looking at it from the perspective of TMT, people who are different interfere with the anxiety control that our worldviews and self-esteem give us. People with different cultures, different beliefs, different gods, different lifestyles, who look different, etc., undermine our social consensus for our way of being – our sense that ours is the “right” way. As there is no tangible way of knowing the “real” values or the “real” truths, we rely on other people who share our beliefs and values to validate them; if everyone sees things the way that we do, it suggests that that’s the way things probably are. If people are seeing it differently, that means one of us is wrong, and it’s much better for it to be them than for us. So the magic bullet is to view ourselves as superior. And one way to do this is to see people who are different as inferior—to see them as primitive, as ignorant, as uneducated, or as overly educated and lost in abstractions and out of touch with the normal person’s reality (which is another form of prejudice that we’re seeing a lot of right now in America). It’s what people have called downward social comparison: the more negatively you view the other group, the better your own group looks by comparison, which makes you better, which increases your self-esteem which gives you more security.

We knew from decades of research in social psychology that people are attracted to those similar to themselves. What we added is to show that when people are reminded of death, it exaggerates that preference, that bias towards people who share your own beliefs and values. When reminded of death, people have a greater need for protection, so they react more vigorously against those who have different beliefs and values, or lifestyles, and more strongly embrace those who share their own values.

From the perspective of TMT, people who are different interfere with the anxiety control that our worldviews and self-esteem give us.

How does this apply to current racial unrest in the US? Can TMT help us understand the hostile reactions and push back to the Black Lives Matter movement?

Yes. There are a lot of modern world complications to our meaning systems and our ability to get self-esteem from them—income inequality, lack of meaning in one’s job, feeling left behind, etc. When people across the US feel less effective, less competent, and not able take pride in their work, one of the comforting ways of managing the distress that this causes is to take it out on someone who is worse off than themselves. Lyndon B. Johnson said “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” So this gives people who are being screwed by the system the sense that, well at least I’m white, at least I’m a “real American” – meaning an American of European descent. When instances of injustice occur, such as when African-Americans are killed by police officers, there is a lot of anger among people of color and those who care about them, and the anger is experienced by some White Americans as an attack on the establishment, on the police, who in our culture are thought of as our protectors. And for people who lean in the white nationalist direction, there’s a sense that people of color are getting more attention, sympathy, and favor.

When people like that talk about the “good ol’ days,” they’re talking about the days when white Euro-Americans were pretty much all you saw on television as the major characters – they were the only people who held political power, most of the police were white, most of the educators were white, most athletes were white. So part of it is they want the white race to be restored to its position of power they held in the past and not have to share it with other people, and they resent the idea, the perception, or misperception in most cases, that people of color are given advantages that they are not given. So if an African American gets killed by police, that gets an incredible amount of attention and upsets people, but some think “Who’s sticking up for us?” They may say, whites get killed by police all the time and it doesn’t get that reaction. Of course, the reason for the uproar is that it’s more common for Blacks, and that it’s a repeated occurrence. The great example everyone points to is to imagine for a moment if it was a Black Lives Matter group trying to overthrow the capitol. Imagine how that would have gone.

I find it strange that so many Americans identify with the confederate flag, and confederate generals and military leaders who were insurrectionists, who were anti-American. Yet the idea of getting rid of their statues from major public squares is seen as a threat because it’s seen as something to address the concerns of African Americans. The idea for people who buy into the white nationalist mentality is that good things for them means bad things for us. Once you define a group of people as the “other,” a rival, or an enemy, good things for them translates to bad things for me, because it removes that superiority, that balance of power that the majority group has. Of course, I don’t know if many of these guys think about this explicitly, but the other thing that’s happening is that the demographics in the US are changing, so white majority isn’t what it was once and in the future euro-white people may not be the majority, which can also tap into the threat they feel.

You have written a lot on peace and terrorism/counter-terrorism, and you say that the psychological forces that motivate people to join hate groups are the same ones that motivate those who fight them. How can the idea of parallel existential motivations on both sides of a conflict be used to reduce intergroup hate and violence?

Yes. I also want to point out that the same psychological forces that promote Islamic radicalism also promote white nationalism. If you look at interviews with radicals in the Islamic world or the white nationalist world, it’s a sense of not being respected, of their culture being diminished, of them not having advantage, and a sense of being humiliated. Of course the specific world events and relationships are different, but the underlying psychological forces are the same.

Once you define a group of people as the “other,” a rival, or an enemy, good things for them translates to bad things for me, because it removes that superiority, that balance of power that the majority group has.

This point came out of collaborations that started shortly after 9/11. I was contacted by an Iranian psychologist, Abdolhossein Abdollahi, and we exchanged emails and started doing studies. One of the issues that came up often is the irony that there’s this sort of world conflict, including a desire to kill, coming out of religions that think of themselves as oriented towards peace and compassion and universal love. So we had the idea: what if we reminded people of those core values of their religion? In the US, after reading compassionate Bible verses, death reminders no longer increased support for war. We did parallel studies in Iran where we used verses from the Quran. And again, a Quranic verse, “be compassionate because Allah loves compassion,” actually reversed things and now death reminders made them less hostile towards the west. And we did other studies where we activated a sense of common humanity by showing pictures of how people the world over are all the same, how we all have family, we all have parents and kids and grandparents, and that had a similar effect. We did other studies where we activated a sense of attachment to one’s parents, usually the mother, and thinking about mom reversed the hostility as well.

Obviously in an experiment you can control to make sure those values are salient, but out in the world how do we ensure that more positive values will be used in any given situation?

That’s a fantastic question. In the real world, making positive values salient in a way that outweighs the other things that are coming across is very difficult. We just went through four years in which the president of the United States, in most speeches, basically his message was kind of screw the rest of the world. America is the best country, being an American is better than being another kind of person, we don’t want people from other countries, we don’t trust them, we don’t want to engage with them, we don’t want to cooperate. And because of all the problems people were facing economically, many people were so insecure that feeling superior to the rest of the world was appealing. And the pandemic certainly turned up the juice. With the pandemic, death is constantly in the air. But, what these studies show is the potential that compassionate values, religion, what we all have in common with other people worldwide, family connections, the shared threat of climate change, etc., the potential that if those things are on people’s minds, they can respond to that anxiety by becoming more prosocial rather than hostile towards those who are different.