Lawyers working with clients in the areas of probate, trusts and estates are fortunate that more attention by psychologists is being given to how people behave when thinking about passing on property as well as non-tangible assets. For example, here's a new piece of research.
Abstract from "It’s Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions" (Psychological Science):
Intergenerational decisions affect other people in the future. The combination of intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future may lead one to expect little intergenerational generosity. In the experiments reported here, however, we posited that the negative effect of intertemporal distance on intergenerational beneficence would be reversed when people were primed with thoughts of death. This reversal would occur because death priming leads individuals to be concerned with having a lasting impact on other people in the future. Our experiments show that when individuals are exposed to death priming, the expected tendency to allocate fewer resources to others in the future, as compared with others in the present, is reversed. Our findings suggest that legacy motivations triggered by death priming can trump intergenerational discounting tendencies and promote intergenerational beneficence.
Excerpt from Discussion:
Our findings also make important theoretical contributions to research on the effect of death priming on prosocial behavior. Researchers who investigate terror management theory have examined the effect of death priming on individuals’ other-oriented behaviors and found that death primes increase prosocial behavior toward those who validate the individual’s worldview, but not toward others who violate it (Jonas et al., 2002). According to terror management theory, death priming does not increase prosocial behavior toward the latter group because the purpose of prosocial behavior in this context is purportedly to endorse other people who represent the individual’s worldview. Our work suggests an additional situation in which death priming can produce beneficent behavior: Not only does death priming increase the desire to help other people with whom individuals already feel a connection (e.g., those in our cultural groups), but it also induces a desire to connect with others in the future as a mechanism for establishing a legacy, which produces beneficence to these future others.
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Intertemporal and interpersonal distance creates inherent barriers to intergenerational beneficence. We highlight, however, that these two components can, under certain conditions, combine to produce psychosocial benefits that promote intergenerational beneficence. The intertemporal aspect of intergenerational decisions can change the meaning of interpersonal trade-offs, transforming them into an opportunity for self-extension in time. These findings imply that the degree to which public policies can encourage environmentally and ecologically sustainable behaviors, for example, may depend on making individuals’ mortality salient and explicitly framing their decisions as intergenerational trade-offs. Taken together, the results indicate that people’s desire to extend themselves into the future and potentially beyond mortal life, such as when they create a legacy, is a deep and strong impetus for generative action.
