Terror Management Theory and mortality awareness: A missing link in climate response studies?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adaptation and mitigation efforts are hampered by multiple obstacles and thus lag behind climate changes' speed and scope. Some of the most powerful obstacles to climate action are the social‐psychological factors that influence human thought, preferences, and behaviors. These factors, including those articulated by environmental psychology generally, and Terror Management Theory (TMT) specifically, are neglected within climate response research. TMT underlies an extensive and well‐established literature; researchers have shown that efforts to repress one's mortality awareness, triggered when people are explicitly or implicitly reminded of their unavoidable death, influences individuals' attitudes and behavior. These psychological defenses, including denial, distraction and worldview defense, sometimes produce counter‐intuitive and potentially counter‐productive outcomes. Meanwhile, the growing global awareness and media coverage of climate change, and much scholarly research, has skewed toward negative “disaster and death” narratives. Exposure to such stimuli, highlighting climate change's potentially life‐threatening effects, may exacerbate counter‐productive responses. In this thought experiment, we propose that mortality awareness could be a critical variable that helps explain climate action at the individual and societal levels. We survey TMT insights, focusing on the relationship between mortality reminders and human responses. We then identify how climate change may lead to increased mortality awareness and consider the psychological defenses triggered by this awareness. We argue that mortality defenses may both limit and advance climate action. Finally, we set out an agenda for TMT‐climate response research and discuss the potential to advance several inquiry lines, including climate change communication, collective action and the capacity for transformational responses. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.042 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".