How Do Children Function as a Means of Achieving Symbolic Immortality?

Abstract

Terror management theory (TMT) research illustrates that following mortality salience (MS) people defend their cultural worldviews and bolster self-esteem to transcend death. According to TMT, children provide a path to immortality by carrying on their parents’ legacy. When primed with MS, our desire to have children and the number of children we want to have increases (Wisman & Goldenberg, 2005; Fritsche et al., 2007). Thus, children act as one way of achieving death transcendence. They offer a sense of literal immortality by passing on our genetic material, but also symbolic immortality by passing on our beliefs, values, and worldviews. But what if our children are nothing like us and don’t share our worldviews? TMT research shows that MS increases worldview defense, which includes negative responses to people who don’t share our worldview. Does having children who don’t share our worldview still offer protection against death? We aim to test this by randomly assigning participants to either MS or a control condition and then asking them to rate the desirability of a child if the child will not be anything like them. If children really are seen as extensions of ourselves, then children who spurn our values and beliefs would be much harder to be seen as carrying on our legacy. Therefore, we hypothesize that MS will decrease the desire to have children if they will be nothing like us when compared to the group where MS is primed and the child will be a lot like us or the control conditions.

Details

Session 2

3:00pm – 4:30pm

Grand Salon