Short answers, pulled from the story.
Terror management theory was developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski. The theory draws on the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death provided its intellectual foundation. Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski codified the theory in their 2015 book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life.
Terror management theory proposes that human behavior is driven largely by a conflict between the instinct for self-preservation and the knowledge that death is inevitable and unpredictable. That conflict produces terror, which people manage through cultural beliefs, worldviews, and self-esteem. Cultural systems ranging from religion to national identity serve to counter the anxiety of mortality by offering forms of symbolic or literal immortality.
The mortality salience hypothesis states that reminding people of their own death activates psychological defenses aimed at restoring a sense of invulnerability. In experiments, participants reminded of death show stronger allegiance to their own cultural worldview and more hostility toward those who hold different worldviews. The hypothesis has been tested in close to 200 empirical articles, according to TMT researchers.
Death thought accessibility is a hypothesis introduced by Greenberg and colleagues in 1994 that measures unconscious death-related cognitions. Researchers use a word fragment task, where participants complete ambiguous fragments such as coff_ _ as either coffin or coffee, and sk_ _l as skull or skill. By 2009, the hypothesis had been employed in over 60 published papers with more than 90 empirical studies.
TMT researchers point to the nearly 50 percent jump in George W. Bush's approval rating after the September 11 attacks as an illustration of mortality salience increasing preference for strong, charismatic leadership. When citizens became acutely aware of their own mortality, the theory predicts they would gravitate toward leaders who promise to restore safety and meaning. A 2004 study by Cohen and colleagues confirmed in a lab setting that mortality-salient participants favored charismatic leaders over task-oriented or relationship-oriented ones.
Many Labs 4 failed to replicate the mortality salience effect on worldview defense. Researchers in 21 labs across the United States re-ran a key 1994 study by Greenberg and colleagues with a combined total of 2,200 participants, and the core effect did not hold under any condition. Tom Pyszczynski, one of TMT's founding psychologists, criticized the replication for insufficient sample sizes, failure to follow researcher advice, and deviation from its preregistered protocol.