Michael was talking the other day about self-control resources being expended by trying to block out thinking about death. I found some papers on this. There are definitley more out there.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/feardie.pdf
http://www.bepress.com/bejte/advances/vol5/iss1/art5/
Abstract
"We model denial of death and its effect on economic behavior. Attempts to reduce death anxiety and the possibility of denial of mortality-relevant information interact with intertemporal choices and may lead to time-inconsistent behavior and other “behavioral” phenomena. In the model, repression of signals of mortality leads to underconsumption for unsophisticated individuals, but forward-sophisticated individuals may over-consume in anticipation of future denial and may seek ways to commit to act according to one’s mortality prospects as currently perceived. We show that the mere possibility of engaging in this kind of denial leads to time-inconsistent but efficient behavior. Refusal to face up to the reality of death may help explain a wide range of empirical phenomena, including the underutilization of tax-advanced inter vivos gifts and inadequate purchase of life insurance"
This is some interesting research. The effects of fear of death- death denial over smaller time-scales would be also interesting to investigate. Those who have a high fear of death probably must use much self-control resources to deal with this fear. It seems from the Baumeister research that having high levels of self-control resources is adaptive and helps deal with such thoughts.
ReplyDelete'Restrained' eaters who are using much self-control resources to control their eating usually to meet societal expectations of thinness, are easily disinhibited to eat if negative emotion is induced. It may be the case that negative emotion induces myopia in regard to the futrue.
In the same way mortality salience may induce greater impulsive behaviour in those who are using much self-control resources to deal with a high fear of death.
On another vein I have been reading in 'The Challenge of Affluence' how advertising may be contributing to a decline in faith in culture. This may be part of the reason why there seems to be a rise in religious fundamentalism, for instance in the U.K. It may be possible that like how mortality salience drives people to cling to their world view, that an unstable or fragmented culture may make people cling to specific localised and intense systems of belief. This may be a form of fear of death as it is perhaps an increased possible belief-invalidity salience.
The psych experiments on death thoughts have shown that these thoughts cause people to be more aggressive to the person defined as 'the other' who disagrees or has different beliefs to ones own. I know there was a survey showing there was a greater endorsement of fundamentalist beliefs amongst the current teenage generation rather than their parents, this may be a result of their increased exposure to possible belief-invalidity and the lack of a coherent general cultural worldview to fall back on.