Why have we brought such disaster upon ourselves? How do otherwise seemingly intelligent people engage in such self-destructive activities? Psychologists Nathan DeWall and Roy Baumeister have argued that “we have an inbuilt psychological immune system that works tirelessly beneath our conscious awareness, tuning our mind to a more positive channel whenever we think about death.” In their article in the journal Psychological Science, DeWall and Baumeister recount how they asked students to think about their own death and then what they thought of when presented with incomplete words like “jo_.” Those who had just contemplated their death were much more likely to think of a positive word like “joy” than those students not asked to think about death beforehand.The latter tended to see neutral words like “job” or “jog.”1