More than three decades ago, social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski proposed “terror management theory,” which makes startling predictions about how our often unconscious fear of mortality affects our behavior at all levels, from the personal to the geo-political. In this talk, Solomon will review the increasingly abundant experimental evidence for the theory, which he, Greenberg and Pyszczynski describe in their provocative new book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.
Free and open to the public. For more information contact the Center for Science Writings director John Horgan, [email protected].
Social psychologist Sheldon Solomon is the Ross Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College, where he began teaching in 1980 at the age of 26. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Franklin and Marshall College and a doctorate from the University of Kansas. He, Greenberg and Pyszczynski also wrote the 2003 book In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror.
