Sheldon Solomon

Sheldon Solomon earned a bachelor’s degree at Franklin and Marshall College and a doctorate at the University of Kansas, and joined the Skidmore College faculty in 1980 at age 26.⁠[1]

He recalled that in his first week at Skidmore, assigned to teach personality theory, he found Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning and The Denial of Death next to Freud’s books in the library, and Becker’s argument that awareness of death underlies much human activity made him feel his professional and personal life had become conjoined.⁠[2]

He said most academics then considered Becker’s ideas untestable, so he and his graduate school colleagues Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski developed terror management theory to make them open to empirical scrutiny.⁠[3]

He recalled that at first hardly anyone in academic psychology took their work seriously except attachment theorist Phil Shaver and psychologist Robert Firestone, who wrote to them around 1986 or 1987 urging them to keep going.⁠[4]

He was an assistant professor at Skidmore in 1980–1987, associate professor in 1988–1997 and professor from 1997; he was a visiting associate professor at the University of Arizona in 1988–1989 and a professor at Brooklyn College in 2000–2002.⁠[5]

He said their experiments found that thinking about death sharply increased support for George W. Bush; in a September 2004 study, registered voters favored John Kerry four to one in a control condition but Bush two to one after thinking about death.⁠[3]

He co-wrote In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror with Greenberg and Pyszczynski, published by the American Psychological Association.⁠[6]

He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and received an American Psychological Association Presidential Citation in 2007 and a Lifetime Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity in 2009.⁠[7]

In February 2011 he gave Skidmore’s seventh annual Jon Ramsey lecture, “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” explaining human cruelty and violence through Becker’s ideas; his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Ernest Becker Foundation and featured in the documentary Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality.⁠[6]

In April that year he lectured at the University of Washington on “John Locke’s Errors,” arguing that contemporary liberal and conservative thought rests on Locke’s erroneous assumptions about human nature and proposing the rudiments of a political philosophy based on an evolutionary existential view of human nature.⁠[8]

On May 12, 2015, Random House published The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, written with Greenberg and Pyszczynski, which draws on thirty years of research and hundreds of experiments to argue that fear of death and the desire to overcome it drive much human behavior.⁠[9]

Publishers Weekly called the book intriguing but uneven, noting an experiment in which judges made more aware of mortality sentenced prostitutes more harshly.⁠[10]

Reviewing it for Times Higher EducationTimes Higher EducationTimes Higher Education (THE) is a London-based higher education news and data company. It grew out of the Times Higher Education Supplement, launched in 1971, and is best known for its World University Rankings, founded in 2004; it has been owned by the private equity firm Inflexion since 2019.Open the full entry, Janet Sayers questioned whether the death-reminder tasks evoked terror of death at all, since the book reports none of the students’ responses to them.⁠[11]

He recalled finding the realization as a young child that he would someday die decidedly unwelcome; in 2015 he was Skidmore’s Ross Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies and co-owned a restaurant in Saratoga Springs.⁠[1]

In September 2016 he gave the talk “Election 2016: Fatal Attraction” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, drawing on Becker, Erich Fromm, Eric Hoffer and Marshall McLuhan to examine Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric and why people vote as they do.⁠[12]

In December 2019 Richard Klein and colleagues published the results of Many Labs 4, in which 21 US labs with more than 2,200 participants repeated Study 1 of Greenberg et al. (1994), half of them following a protocol developed with the original authors: it found no mortality salience effect on worldview defense in either group; they said this does not mean the effect is not real but raises doubts about its robustness.⁠[13]

Co-founder Pyszczynski, with Armand Chatard and Gilad Hirschberger, argued that Klein et al. had not followed their preregistered analysis and that including only labs with at least 40 participants per condition yielded a significant effect consistent with the original; a Bayesian multiverse analysis by Julia Haaf and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam then found evidence against a mortality salience effect in most analyses.⁠[14]

He appeared on episode 117 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls him a social psychologist, philosopher, co-developer of terror management theory and co-author of The Worm at the Core; topics included the role of death in life, Jordan PetersonJordan PetersonJordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, author and podcast host who taught at Harvard University and the University of Toronto; he drew wide attention for publicly opposing Canada’s Bill C-16 in 2016 and the ensuing free-speech debate, wrote the bestseller 12 Rules for Life and founded the online education platform Peterson Academy.Open the full entry, civilization collapse, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, religion, consciousness, Ernest Becker, AI and mortality, and the meaning of life.⁠[15]

In 2021 he received the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Career Contribution Award, and in 2022 the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology Career Contributions Award.⁠[5]

In February 2022 The Lancet published the Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life, of which he is one of the listed authors; he is also a member of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny.⁠[16][17]

In May 2023 PLOS ONE published a set of five studies that failed to replicate the mortality salience effect on worldview defense; the authors noted that a meta-analysis by Burke and colleagues of 277 experiments had found a moderate average effect, and wrote that the theory’s proponents hold that scientific progress depends on presenting and addressing “anomalous findings.”⁠[18]

In 2023 TAP Magazine published his conversation with editor in chief Austin Ratner, noting that he has written more than 150 scientific papers.⁠[2]

In October 2025 he appeared on Nate Hagens’s podcast The Great Simplification to discuss how fear of death drives materialism and political and religious attitudes.⁠[7]

Skidmore College: Official website: https://www.skidmore.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]