Abstract
The psychology underlying the desire to be remembered after death by leaving a legacy is an understudied area in the social sciences. In the current thesis, I broaden the theoretical examination of the appeal of leaving a legacy and the likely psychological factors behind this motivation. In Chapter 1, I survey the extant literature to develop a better conceptualization of the category itself, then identify candidate mechanisms involved in the desire to leave a legacy. Chapter 2 explores participants’ forced choice preferences for a positive reputation in life, or for a positive legacy, both in a creative and in a moral context. The results demonstrate a split preference for a positive reputation in life and a positive legacy. A survey was used in Chapter 3 to assess participants’ desires to leave a legacy, as well as their goals and motivations for this goal. The results demonstrated most participants did desire to leave a legacy and identified various legacy typologies and motivations for doing so. These motivations were utilized for the development of the Legacy Motivation Scale (LMS) in Chapter 4 as an instrument to measure legacy motivations, due to the lack of such a measure in the literature. Furthermore, two studies demonstrated the construct validity and partly demonstrated the predictive validity of the LMS. Chapter 5 explored potential cognitive factors for the desire to be remembered after death, such as afterlife beliefs and conceptions of post-mortem consciousness. I hypothesized that participants in an afterlife affirmation condition would report higher desires to leave a legacy than participants in an afterlife disconfirmation condition. The results failed to support this hypothesis. Chapter 6 explored potential adaptive benefits for caring about post-mortem reputation by investigating the disadvantages conferred on those related to someone who leaves a negative legacy. The results indicated that a negative legacy had detrimental effects on the mating prospects for the relatives of the deceased, suggesting the maladaptive impact a negative legacy has on one’s descendants. I conclude the thesis with a general discussion (Chapter 7) summarizing the findings of the present research, their limitations, implications, applications, and potential areas for future research.