Money and the fear of death: The symbolic power of money as an existential anxiety buffer

Tomasz Zaleskiewicz, Agata Gąsiorowska (), Pelin Kesebir, Aleksandra Luszczynska and Tom Pyszczynski

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2013, vol. 36, issue C, 55-67

Abstract: According to terror management theory, people deal with the potential for anxiety that results from their knowledge of the inevitability of death by holding on to sources of value that exist within their cultural worldview. We propose that money is one such source capable of soothing existential anxiety. We hypothesize that death anxiety would amplify the value attributed to money, and that the presence of money would alleviate death anxiety. Study 1 indicated that individuals reminded of their mortality overestimated the size of coins and monetary notes. In Study 2, participants induced to think about their mortality used higher monetary standards to define a person or family as rich than those in the control condition. Study 3 revealed that people reminded of death desired higher compensation for waiving the immediate payment of money. Finally, Study 4 showed that priming participants with the concept of money reduced self-reported fear of death. We conclude that, beyond its pragmatic utility, money possesses a strong psychological meaning that helps to buffer existential anxiety.

Keywords: Terror management theory; Mortality salience; Money; Money attitudes; Money priming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487013000391
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:36:y:2013:i:c:p:55-67

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2013.02.008

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().