Sheldon Solomon, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and the Courtney and Steven Ross Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College in upstate New York. He provides a comprehensive, accessible, and amazingly humorous overview of the ideas of Ernest Becker. His engaging wit and style have endeared him to students and audiences throughout the world, making him our most popular speaker.
The trio of experimental social psychologists, Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom PyszczynskI, developed Terror Management Theory (TMT) in 1980, to explore how the threat of death, conscious and unconscious, motivates human denial and behavior. Using modern social scientific methods they are testing and substantiating Becker’s theories, heretofore assumed to be untestable. Their 2003 book, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, uses TMT to analyze the roots of terrorism.