Wade-Benzoni, K. A., Tost, L. P., Hernandez, M. & Larrick, R. P. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(7), 704–709.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
Experimental evidence that legacy motivation drives beneficence toward people one will never meet. For QUESTION-301.
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
Hurlstone et al. (2020) give almost nothing of Wade-Benzoni et al. 2012 directly. They list it among laboratory studies of intergenerational allocation, and attribute to “Wade-Benzoni, 2002” the finding that implicit death primes reduce discounting of benefits to future others, which appears to be the 2012 result miscited (p. 2). What they give is a conceptual extension: a mortality-salience message, one of three, raised cooperation for future generations in a group game. The APS news release of 26 June 2012 supplies the 2012 design. In a first experiment, participants entered a $1,000 lottery, read a newspaper story about an airplane passenger’s death in a freak accident or a neutral story, and could pledge part of any winnings to a charity serving the needy now or in the future; the death group gave more to the future charity. In a second, participants as an energy company’s vice-president split a new energy supply between their company today and another organization now, another group in the future, or their own organization in the future; mortality-primed participants gave more to future recipients, and this related to their felt connection (affinity) with the recipient. Missing still: sample sizes, statistics, the exact prime and any delay, how the own-organization-in-the-future condition came out, the form of the affinity analysis, and whether legacy motivation itself was measured.