Death reminders increase people’s desire to have children

Evidence

Research around the world confirms that reminders of death increase the desire for children in the service of symbolically transcending death. Germans who wrote the first sentence that came to mind while thinking about their own death subsequently reported a greater desire to have children, and to have them sooner, than those who wrote about being in pain. After being primed with death thoughts, Chinese participants were more resistant to the nation’s one-child-per-family policy, and Americans indicated that they were more likely to name future offspring after themselves. And after thinking about having children, Israelis reminded of their mortality completed fewer death-related words on a Hebrew version of our word-stem task, signifying that death was less troubling after the prospect of progeny was brought to mind. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Direct empirical support for the terror-management mechanism the whole book argues for; ties to cross-cultural findings in the early chapters. — connects to: Woman’s alliance with death is the inverted mirror of her fertility. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 355

Related

• Death thoughts and physical sexuality suppress each other in a reciprocal loop (similarity 0.83)
• Death and sex reminders make men lenient toward male violence against women (similarity 0.80)
• Children fear death more than parents realize they do (similarity 0.79)
• Children first fear death, and only later learn to use culture against that fear (similarity 0.79)
• Subtle death reminders drive worldview defense, self-esteem striving, and unhealthy behavior. (similarity 0.79)
• Knowing how death awareness drives defenses enables more self-determined choices (similarity 0.79)