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FEAR AND ANXIETY ARE TWO OF THE MOST INTOLERABLE EMOTIONS WE humans are capable of experiencing. People will do almost anything to avoid being afraid. When, despite their best efforts, these feelings do break through, people go to incredible lengths to shut them down. Ever since Freud's seminal theorizing, psychologists have been fascinated with the role that fear and anxiety play in both normal everyday behavior and serious individual and social pathologies. This article will focus on a theory, and the very large body of research that supports it, that suggests that fear and anxiety are inherent aspects of the human condition. But although all animals-including humans - experience fear when they are faced with clear and present dangers to their survival, only humans experience anxiety, a more diffuse form of fear in which it is not always obvious just what it is we are afraid of. It is becoming increasingly clear that this core anxiety inherent in the human condition plays a role in just about everything we do.
I am not suggesting that anxiety is the only psychological process that needs to be understood if we want to understand why people do the things they do. But a complete and well-rounded understanding of the human condition requires that we comprehend the roots of this anxiety and how it affects us in ways that we have no way of becoming aware of through simple introspection. Because the source of this anxiety is usually obscure, kept hidden from our awareness, it is extremely difficult to control its effects. This lack of awareness of the source of our fear and our resulting inability to introspectively observe the way it affects us make it an effective a force with which politicians, religious leaders, and just about everyone else can manipulate us.
TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
About 20 years ago, I, along with my colleagues, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg, stumbled across a couple of books written by the late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker: The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971), and the Denial of Death (1973). At that time we had just finished our doctorates in experimental social psychology and were becoming jaded with the highly fragmented state of our field; it seemed that social psychologists were so...