Presenter

Mayank Dalal, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta

Abstract

Terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski & Solomon, 1986), proposes that our evolved desire to live conflicts with the awareness that we will eventually die and that humans attempt to resolve this psychological conflict by attempting to earn literal (e.g., heaven) or symbolic (e.g., legacy) immortality. Thus, according to TMT, death reminders should lead people to pursue goals that may help them to achieve some form of immortality; this hypothesis has been confirmed in hundreds of studies. In the current study, we tested the inverse hypothesis – that taking away the ability of a goal to confer immortality will lead people to abandon that goal, especially when death is salient. To test this hypothesis, we recruited female undergraduate students who reported that they were invested in their personal appearance. Participants read an article saying that beauty does not help to secure a lasting legacy (vs. a control article) and then wrote about their own death (vs. control). Our dependent variable was how much time, money, and energy people intended to spend on personal beautification. We found that participants decreased beauty striving when they were led to believe that beauty does not help people to achieve a legacy after their death, however, there was a main effect or interactions with mortality salience. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Poster

Authors & Affiliations

Mayank Dalal, Andy Scott, Mike Sharp, Jeff Schimel (Psychology Department, University of Alberta)