Abstract
The thought of one’s own death induces anxiety and threatens self-esteem. According to Terror Management Theory (TMT), to reduce this existential threat individuals (1) adhere more strongly to their cultural worldview and (2) embrace behaviors aimed at boosting self-esteem. Previous psychological studies of TMT do not generally rely on incentive-compatible mechanisms. However, economic incentives are strong drivers of individuals’ behavior and need to be studied along with intrinsic motivations. Here, we combined—for the first time—a real effort task with psychological priming techniques. Crucially, we adopted a “flat-wage” scheme to investigate whether individuals primed with death-related thoughts, i.e., a Mortality Salience (MS) induction, increase their individual productivity more than individuals primed with a control topic (Music salience induction). We also investigated whether the effect of MS on performance is mainly driven by the quest for self-esteem vs. status-seeking, providing either private or public feedback on performance. Participants generally showed lower performance levels in the MS compared to the control condition. Public feedback bolstered performance, but its effect was milder under MS. These results suggest that in the absence of economic incentives to perform, individuals do not generally increase effort and productivity; they rather adhere more tightly to cultural (materialistic) worldviews, avoiding effort that is not compensated. The effect of MS, indeed, was strongly influenced by individual materialism.
Highlights
As humans, we are all aware that our life will come to an end, and we all have experienced - at least once in our life –the terror accompanying the thought of our death
It is evident that the distributions of points for the treatments with mortality salience have a different shape in comparison to the distributions of points for the control treatment, both when private and public feedback are provided to the subjects
The result of public feedback per se is not so striking.6. To see whether these effects are statistically significant, we first compare across treatments the mean values of the number of points computed by keeping for each session the average. The results from these unpaired tests (TTEST) suggest there are no significant differences in the mean when comparing the distributions according to the priming strategy
Summary
We are all aware that our life will come to an end, and we all have experienced - at least once in our life –the terror accompanying the thought of our death. According to Becker (1973), to avoid living in a state of paralyzing terror, individuals seek to deny this threat and bolster self-esteem, by conforming to a variety of cultural belief systems that help reducing existential insecurity. This view is consistent with that held by several philosophers, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rank, Sartre, and Tillich (see Arndt et al (2004a)). Cultural beliefs are socially constructed and are shared by groups of people in a certain place and at a certain time Faith in these cultural beliefs is an essential means by which individuals afford protection from existential insecurity, it is not itself sufficient. Substantial evidence confirms the reliability of this theory across a variety of measures, countries, and demographic samples (seeArndt et al (2004b); Solomon et al (2004))
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