A Little Piece of Me: When Mortality Reminders Lead to Giving to Others
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Past research demonstrates that reminders of one’s own mortality can lead to materialistic and self-serving consumer behaviors. In contrast, across five studies, we explore a condition under which mortality salience (MS) leads to increased tendency to give away one’s possessions—when the donation act is high in transcendence potential. We propose and find that consumers are more likely to donate their possessions to charity under MS (vs. comparison conditions) when the product is considered highly (vs. not highly) connected to the self. Moreover, we demonstrate that this tendency manifests only when transcendence is attainable through donation. In support of the proposition of transcendence as the underlying mechanism, the observed effects are attenuated under conditions where: (1) transcendence has already been satiated via alternative means or (2) the donated possession will not transcend the self (i.e., its physical integrity is lost by being broken down and recycled). The theoretical and practical implications of the work are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it