There has been plenty of scary news in recent years, and even more so in recent days. Some of us try to look away, others can't get their eyes off the news about the various wars raging in the world—some further away from us than others, some more violent than others, and some taking up more of the headlines of newspapers and social media than others. But exposure to war news is not without psychological consequences, as findings on terror management theory show.

Terror management theory is about how we react to confronting the possibility of our mortality. And the main lesson of terror management theory is that confronting the possibility of our mortality makes us rely more on a meaning-giving worldview.

Here is an example. In a famous experiment, American subjects were primed (unconsciously) with death-related words. They were not aware of this, but they nonetheless showed increased preference for pro-US essays and decreased preference for anti-US ones. The same effect was not observed when, in the control group, subjects were primed with pain-related words.

Terror management is closely related to some forms of cognitive dissonance. It is not pleasant to be confronted with the idea of death. And in the experimental situations where terror management is examined, the most common reaction to cognitive dissonance, that is, distracting ourselves with something else, is not an option. We need to protect ourselves from the bad feelings this contemplation of death creates. And this is typically done with what is known in the terror management theory literature as the worldview defense. When confronted with the thought of death, we rely more on what we take to be something larger than us: our meaning-giving worldview.

In the example above, this meaning-giving worldview was nationalism: the love of our country. That has all the markings of a meaning-giving worldview: it is something larger than us. We can put our own fragility in a wider and more reassuring context. Another often triggered meaning-giving worldview is religion; it's hardly a surprising finding that confronting death can bring us closer to religion.

But this meaning-giving worldview is not necessarily part of the conservative mindset. Even the most liberal people also have, and often rely on, meaning-giving worldviews, although these are unlikely to be nationalism or religion. It may be the belief in the advancement of human rights or the core belief that everyone in the world deserves the same chance to succeed. While nationalism and religion are the two most obvious and most thoroughly researched examples of a meaning-giving worldview, they are not the only ones. If you are not a conservative to begin with, when you confront your own mortality, the worldview defense takes the form of relying more on your own, maybe idiosyncratic, meaning-giving worldview.

The experiment I talked about gave the subjects very subtle nudges towards confronting death, unconscious priming of death-related words. But switching on the TV or reading the headlines in the newspaper or social media these days have not-so-subtle ways of confronting us with death. We have a constant, daily or even hourly, job of terror management facing us. What would terror management theory predict about our reaction to all this? Not that the war news turns all of us into conservatives. But it predicts that conservatives become more conservative and liberals will become more liberal, as both groups will embrace their core beliefs more strongly.

Exposure to war news will create more fissures in our political landscape. We get conservatives with stronger conservative core beliefs and liberals with stronger liberal core beliefs. And this will not help us heal the already very deep divides in our society.

© Psychology Today