Of Wealth and Death: Materialism, Mortality Salience, and Consumption Behavior

Theoretical work suggests that feelings of insecurity produce materialistic behavior, but most empirical evidence is correlational in nature. We therefore experimentally activated feelings of insecurity by having some subjects write short essays about death (mortality-salience condition). In Study 1, subjects in the mortality-salience condition, compared with subjects who wrote about a neutral topic, had higher financial expectations for themselves 15 years in the future, in terms of both their overall worth and the amount they would be spending on pleasurable items such as clothing and entertainment. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that subjects exposed to death became more greedy and consumed more resources in a forest-management game. Results are discussed with regard to humanistic and terror-management theories of materialism.