Comment by baron_harkonnen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baron_harkonnen | Hacker News Reader

baron_harkonnen

What's really interesting to me that psychology twitter seems to have a rabid hatred for TMT which I find really strange since, at the very least, Becker's book (the Denial of Death) lays out a pretty reasonable foundation (much more reasonably than the vast majority of psych papers I've read) for a lot of human psychological behavior.

Becker's view is pretty straight forward: We cannot incorporate a true understanding of our inevitable death into our psyche and function, so basically a huge amount of the complexity of our psychology is based in ways our mind is able to divert accepting this reality. When I was younger I though "fear of death" was a wildly over blown notion (I remember reading Delillo's White Noise and thinking "is death that scary?"). But as I got older, and started having friends die, I realized that in youth I was just much more deeply in denial of death. Needless to say I think Becker makes a good point.

For me, the violent reaction by the psychology community against TMT seems to only add validity to Becker's idea. We really can't deal with the reality of our own personal death, and that is so strong that on an intellectual level we immediately was to laugh off the idea so that we don't have to face that this might even be the case.

Is it possibly due to a lot of the psychoanalytic language Becker uses? I'm uncertain how psychoanalysis is generally viewed by the presumably relatively young twitter psychologists, but I wouldn't expect it to be in fashion.

The Worm at the Core presents a more modern, evidence-based to TMT, but I don't know if it's widely read.

He chose the most fundamental category we have. It all comes to life and death, by definition everything a human can experience or do fits in there. There have been great philosophers who have explored the idea.

What does that give us from a psychological perspective? People still live, where's the new tool from the reframing?

Just to be clear I don't think much of Tmt. It has been done better before by the greats. It should be clear in the application of it, that it does not bring anything new.

What does it actually mean to “be in denial of death” though? How does our mind divert accepting this reality? I’ve never experienced that; it sounds somewhat dramatic.

You don't think about it much. You see death, you hear or read about death, and it doesn't register emotionally. The concept of your own death seems too distant to worry about.

That's what I understood GP to mean, though there's another form of death denial: all the stories people invent about "death giving meaning to life", about "great circle of life", or the various reasons people give to dismiss the idea that we should focus a bit more on working towards extending life.

There is an excellent "hidden brain" podcast episode about TMT.

It is not conscious.

One of the consequences is that it makes you want to belong to a group and makes you chastise people that go against its moral norms. One of the experiments was to determine the amount of an amend (or was it bail?) a prostitute would have have to pay.

The expected amount is $100 and that's what the control experiment got, but if you remind the judge of their own mortality before asking that question, the median amount jumps to $400.

edit : link to the expy : http://people.uncw.edu/ogler/Experimental/TM%201.pdf

The authors are very liberal in what they consider as evidence for their theory. The first experiment, with the judges, relies on a sample size of 22, from which any sort of analysis of variance is pretty suspect--the partial eta squared effect size confidence interval at a = .05 ranges between nearly zero and more than .4. The second experiment has a similarly wide CI on the effect size. The article claims to have provided robust, data-based evidence of TMT, but the experiments that followed from the earlier ones must be judged in consideration of those earlier ones, which puts into question the coverage of alternative explanations.

Consider this claim:

"The major finding of Experiment 1 was that, as predicted,reminding subjects of their mortality led them to recommendhigher bonds for an accused prostitute. According to terror management theory, moral principles are part of the culturalanxiety-buffer that protects individuals from anxiety concern-ing their vulnerability and mortality. Transgressions againstthese standards implicitly threaten the integrity of the anxiety-buffer and thus engender negative reactions toward the trans-gressor. Inducing subjects to think about their mortality pre-sumably increased their need for faith in their values, and thus increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor"

The experiment, to them, is confirmation of their theory, but this hardly follows as a parsimonious explanation that emerges by eliminating alternative explanations.

Frankly, I find the article absurd, and I have difficulty taking the theory seriously. Then again, I only have an undergraduate's understanding of the field.

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