[on_and_off]

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

[orhmeh09]

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.