Mortality Salience and Extrinsic Goal Orientation: the Moderating Effects of Self-Esteem and Materialistic Values

Terror Management Theory (TMT) indicates that the terror associated with our awareness of death increases self-esteem striving. We experimentally manipulated self-esteem by having participants complete a word-search puzzle that was intended to either temporarily boost (easy word-search task) or threaten (difficult word-search task) self-esteem. We examined how self-esteem impacts consumers’ extrinsic goal orientations when mortality is made salient arguing that boosting (threatening) self-esteem may decrease (increase) extrinsic goal orientations. We also examined how preexisting materialistic values impacts extrinsic goal orientations when mortality is made salient arguing that preexisting high materialistic values may increase extrinsic goal orientations when mortality is made salient.



Citation:

L. J. Shrum and Jaehoon Lee (2008) ,"Mortality Salience and Extrinsic Goal Orientation: the Moderating Effects of Self-Esteem and Materialistic Values", in LA - Latin American Advances in Consumer Research Volume 2, eds. Claudia R. Acevedo, Jose Mauro C. Hernandez, and Tina M. Lowrey, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 228-228.

Authors

L. J. Shrum, University of Texas at San Antonio, U.S.A.
Jaehoon Lee, University of Texas at San Antonio, U.S.A.



Volume

LA - Latin American Advances in Consumer Research Volume 2 | 2008



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