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 there fore experimentally activated feelings of insecurity by having some subject s write short essays about death (mortality-salience condition). In Study I , subjects in the mortality-salience condition, compared with subjects who wrote about a,neutral topic, had higher financial expectations for themselv es 15 years in the future, in terms of both their overall worth and the amo unt they would be spending on pleasurable items such as clothing and entert ainment. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that subjects exp osed to death became more greedy and consumed more resources in a forest-ma nagement game. Results are discussed with regard to humanistic and terror-m anagement theories of materialism.