24: How Death Affects Everything You Do with Sheldon Solomon

You might not think about death very often, but the work of today’s guest has demonstrated that death plays a crucial role in our psychological make-ups. Sheldon Solomon is an expert psychologist and one of the world’s leading theorists in Terror Management Theory, which is a subfield of psychology that explores how pretty much everything we do and think is an attempt to evade the prospect of death.  Death makes us feel vulnerable, so we become more entrenched in our cultural worldviews, more violent against outsiders, and more invested in our own egos.