Thoughts Of Death Make Us Eat More Cookies -
Research Reveals How Watching TV Crime Shows Triggers Overeating
July 14, 2008
According to new research by Dirk Smeesters, Associate Professor of Marketing at
the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, people who are thinking
about their own deaths want to consume more.
In a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research, "The Sweet
Escape: Effects of Mortality Salience on Consumption Quantities for High- and
Low-Self-Esteem Consumers", Dirk Smeesters and co-author Naomi Mandel
(Arizona State University) reveal that "consumers, especially those with a
lower self-esteem, might be more susceptible to over-consumption when faced with
images of death during the news or their favorite crime-scene investigation
shows."
Smeesters and Mandel conducted experiments in Europe and the United States on
746 subjects who wrote either about their own death or a visit to the dentist
(the control group). The findings revealed that consumers with low self-esteem
writing about their death ate more cookies and listed more items on a
hypothetical shopping list compared to those who wrote about the dentist.
Similar effects were obtained by subliminally presenting the word 'death' to
consumers and exposing them to death-related news.
Smeesters and Mandel explain this effect using a theory called 'escape from
self-awareness'. When people are reminded of their inevitable mortality, they
may start to feel uncomfortable about what they have done with their lives and
whether they have made a significant mark on the universe. This is a state
called 'heightened self-awareness.' One way to deal with such an uncomfortable
state is to escape from it, by either overeating or overspending.
Follow-up research found that death-related news can not only increase
consumers' consumption behavior, but can also affect their preferences for
domestic and foreign brands. More specifically, consumers who were exposed to
death-related news (e.g. a news report about a fatal car crash) had more
positive preferences for domestic brands, but more negative preferences for
foreign brands compared to consumers not exposed to such news. These effects
were obtained because thinking about death made consumers more patriotic. These
studies clearly demonstrated the potential negative effects of advertising
foreign brands shortly after the broadcast of death-related programs on
television.
About Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
RSM is an internationally top-ranked business school renowned for its
ground-breaking research in sustainable business practice and for the
development of leaders in global business. Offering an array of bachelor,
master, doctoral, MBA and executive education programmes, RSM is consistently
ranked amongst the top 10 business schools in Europe. http://www.rsm.nl
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