Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg began doing research together as graduate students at the University of Kansas, where they each received a PhD in psychology in the early 1980s.

Inspired by the work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, they developed Terror Management Theory as a conceptual framework to illuminate the interrelatedness of various forms of human behavior and motivation. The theory integrates ideas from existential psychology, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary theory into a framework that is amenable to rigorous scientific testing. In doing so, their work lays the groundwork for an experimental existential psychology, a new perspective on the human condition influencing current thinking on a wide range of issues within psychology. Their work has yielded a wealth of new insights into diverse aspects of the human condition, including self-esteem striving, prejudice, intergroup conflict, human sexuality, unconscious motives, conformity, aggression, creativity, altruism, and love.

Currently, the three authors are professors of psychology—Dr. Pyszczynski at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Dr. Solomon at Skidmore College, and Dr. Greenberg at the University of Arizona.

In the Wake of 9/11 explores the emotions of despair, fear, and anger that arose after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the Autumn of 2001. The authors analyze reactions to the attacks through the lens of terror management theory, an existential psychological model that explains why humans react the way they do to the threat of death and how this reaction influences their post-threat cognition and emotion. The theory provides ways to understand and reduce terrorism's effect and possibly find resolutions to conflicts involving terrorism. The authors focus primarily on the reaction in the United States to the 9/11 attack, but their model is applicable to all instances of terrorism, and they expand their discussion to include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This fascinating book has practical implications and will be an irreplaceable resource for mental health practitioners, researchers, and anyone concerned with the causes and effects of terrorism.