Recently, cancer experts at the World Health Organization indicated that tanning beds are at the top of the list of cancer causes, up there with lovely things like tobacco, mustard gas, and asbestos. Oh poor misunderstood mustard gas. Of course, most Americans have known for some time that sun-tanning is dangerous business. Yet, each year millions of Americans strive for that perfect tan and even spend their hard earned money to purposefully expose themselves to artificial sources of ultraviolet radiation. Why do people put themselves at risk of getting cancer? The answer is that tanning not only increases mortality risk, it also helps solve the problem of death. And scientific research supports this seemingly absurd claim. Really.
Tanning is a cure for death because it boosts self-esteem and self-esteem helps counter the psychologically threatening aspects of mortality. That is, death is not only a biological threat, and a very permanent one, but it is also a psychological threat that we dread. Humans are intellectual animals, and with great intelligence comes great anxiety. We know that despite all efforts to avoid death, we will someday die (lucky us). It gets better. We realize we could die at any time for reasons that we cannot necessarily predict or control.
In technical terms, death-awareness is potent anxiety-provoking cognitive capacity. In plain English, death-awareness sucks. Therefore, as intellectual problem-solvers, humans spend a significant amount of time and energy trying to resolve the problem of death. Specifically, according to terror management theory or TMT, a prominent social psychological theory focused on the social and psychological impact of death awareness, people gain feelings of death transcendence by feeling like they are meaningful members of an enduring cultural world. In other words, we all know we will one day die, but gain psychological security from feeling as if the social and cultural groups we belong to will continue to thrive long after we die. Thus, we go to great lengths to ensure that we are fitting in and living up to the standards of the cultural and social groups we identify with, regardless of how silly these standards are (karaoke night anyone?). Bottom line, we seek self-esteem (the feeling of being a person of value).
A large body of research supports the assertion that self-esteem helps solve the problem of death-awareness. For example, experiments show that when people are asked to think about their death, compared to a control topic, they seek to increase their self-esteem. Further, high self-esteem reduces death-anxiety.
So does tanning, by boosting self-esteem, help solve the problem of knowing that we are destined to die? For the last several years, my colleagues and I have been exploring this question. The guiding hypothesis in our research is that if sun-tanning helps counter the psychological threat of death-awareness, then having people think about death should make them want to tan more, not less. So in our studies we have people in one group think about death and people in a control group think about an unpleasant topic not related to death (e.g., dental pain, uncertainty). Then we measure their motivation to sun-tan or intentions to protect themselves from the sun. As predicted, we find that thinking about death increases the desire to tan and decreases the desire to use protective sunscreen. This effect was observed both in the laboratory and on an actual beach. Importantly, this effect was only found for those who indicated that having tanned skin was an important source of self-esteem or when we made participants believe that tanned skin is an important source of self-esteem. We were even able to reverse this effect when we made participants believe that having pale skin is what is socially desirable. That is, we had participants read an article from a fashion magazine (we actually wrote the article) that suggested that pale skin is in fashion. Participants who read this article responded to thoughts of death with decreased, not increased, interest in tanning. In short, our research indicates that when people are thinking about death, the self-esteem motive often trumps health and safety motives.
Reason and intuition often make us believe that the best way to promote healthy living is to inform people of the physical dangers of behaviors such as smoking, binge-drinking, fast driving, and sun-tanning. However, psychological research supports a counter-intuitive position. Warning people of the deadly nature of certain behaviors may increase the need for self-esteem because self-esteem helps solve the psychological problem of death. And if people derive self-esteem from the very behaviors that we are warning against, ironically, our warnings may promote these behaviors.
So how then should we promote healthy behavior? The short answer is to associate healthy behavior with self-esteem. As previously noted, in our research we were able to get people to decrease tanning intentions after thinking about death when we led them to believe that pale skin is in fashion. As someone who happens to be pigmentally challenged, I personally have to thank movies like Twilight for making pale sexy. However, besides making me feel good (which of course is of vital importance), promoting a culture that does not so highly value the artificially-bronzed look may be our best hope for reducing the risk of skin cancer caused by purposeful exposure to UV rays. Humans are such a curious species.
For further reading about the research on tanning as a response to the threat of death awareness see
Routledge, C., Arndt, J., & Goldenberg, J.L. (2004). A time to tan: Proximal and distal effects of mortality salience on intentions to sun-tan. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1347 - 1358.
Cox, C., Cooper, D. P., Vess, M., Arndt, J., Goldenberg, J. L., & Routledge, C. (in press). Bronze is beautiful but pale can be pretty: The effects of appearance standards and mortality salience on sun-tanning outcomes. Health Psychology.
Arndt, J., Cox, C. R., Goldenberg, J. L., Vess, M., Routledge, C., Cooper, D. P., & Cohen, F. (2009). Blowing in the (social) wind: Implications of extrinsic esteem contingencies for terror management and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1192 - 1205.
