Nothing is Certain Except Taxes and the Other Thing: Searching for Death Anxiety in a Large Online Sample

Abstract

Philosophical and psychological literature has suggested that death anxiety has a profound impact on our lives, and is a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. Based on such claims, we wanted to examine how people expressed their thoughts about death when giving short free-text responses in a large online sample. To do so we explored a qualitative dataset where 803 Americans state their thoughts about either death or physical pain (toothache). Comparing these, we found that death reminders caused less negative affect and more positive affect than toothache reminders. We also observed that reactions to death were quite diverse and did not show signs of being dominated by existential anxiety. Qualitative analyses indicate that psychological defense mechanisms do not seem to sufficiently explain the differences between the two conditions. The article also serves as a companion for the open dataset, to facilitate the exploration and reuse by other researchers.