Terror Management During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic raised awareness of myriad personal, social, and political issues. Perhaps most strikingly, the spread of the virus and barrage of media coverage heightened people’s awareness of mortality, making death-related thoughts particularly salient. Research based on terror management theory has shown that heightened death awareness motivates people to strive for psychological comfort by marshaling two kinds of psychological defenses. When death is in focal attention, proximal defenses are activated, in which people either do pragmatic things to avoid dying or become avoidant and denial oriented and distract themselves from thoughts of death. When death is close to consciousness but not in focal attention, distal defenses are activated, in which people shore up their sense that life is meaningful, and that they are significant contributors to that meaningful life. This typically involves becoming more defensive of one’s worldview and striving for self-worth. Collectively, this prior research bears important implications for the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a terror management perspective, this chapter highlights the literature and its implications for postpandemic outcomes and offers directions for future research.