A finding that surprised the researchers who ran it
The Study That Found Thinking About Your Own Death Makes You More Generous to People You Will Never Meet
When psychologists reminded people of their own death in careful, controlled experiments, something unexpected happened. Instead of turning inward, people became more generous, specifically toward generations they will never live to meet.
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, a professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, has spent her career studying what she calls intergenerational decisions: how people choose to treat the generations that come after them. The usual pattern in psychology is not encouraging. People discount the future by default. We care measurably less about someone the further away they are in time, the same bias that makes it hard to save for retirement or worry about a problem that will not land for decades.
In a 2012 study published in the journal Psychological Science, Wade-Benzoni and colleagues Leigh Tost, Morela Hernandez, and Richard Larrick tested what happens to that bias when people are first asked to think about their own death. Some participants wrote briefly about their own mortality before making decisions that split money and resources between people in the present and people generations into the future. **The participants who had just thought about dying did not protect what was theirs. They allocated more to the future, to people they will never meet, than the participants who had not been asked to think about death at all.**
Wade-Benzoni and later collaborators gave the pattern a name: the legacy motive. It is not vanity, and it is not really about being remembered by name. It is a documented psychological pull to leave something of lasting, positive value behind once a person becomes aware that their own time is not unlimited.
1. Being reminded you will die does not make people selfish. It does the opposite.
This is the part of the research that runs against intuition. The common assumption is that confronting mortality would make someone hold tighter to what they have, focus on the here and now, spend down rather than pass on. **The experiments found the reverse: mortality reminders increased generosity toward people the participants would never live to see,** reversing the normal tendency to care less about anyone far away in time.
Follow-up work has traced the same pattern into real decisions about money. A 2025 study by Jessica Paek, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, and Wade-Benzoni, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that legacy motives increased how much people chose to direct toward causes that would outlast them, a pattern the researchers named the Andrew Carnegie effect, after the industrialist who famously said the man who dies rich, dies disgraced.
Thinking about your own death does not make people more selfish. In these experiments, it consistently made them more generous to the future.
2. Legacy is not vanity. It is how people manage the fact that they will not always be here.
Wade-Benzoni's 2019 review in Current Opinion in Psychology defines a legacy plainly: an enduring meaning attached to one's own identity. **Leaving something behind gives a person's life a form of meaning that outlasts them, and the research finds it measurably eases the anxiety of knowing that life is finite.** That is why the legacy motive tends to switch on exactly when mortality becomes hard to ignore, not because people are performing for an audience, but because it is one of the few things a person can do about an otherwise unanswerable problem.
That also means a legacy is not a monument or a fortune. In these studies it shows up as smaller, ordinary choices: what to teach, what to pass down, what to make sure someone else still has after you are gone.
A legacy is not about being remembered by name. It is the ordinary, specific thing a person chooses to leave for someone who comes after them.
3. You do not have to wait for a mortality reminder to act on it
In the research, the legacy motive gets switched on by something uncomfortable: being made to sit with the fact of your own death. Most people do not go looking for that moment. It tends to arrive on its own, in a hospital waiting room or after a milestone birthday, often later than anyone would have chosen.
You do not need to wait for it. **The legacy motive is already there, whether or not something has switched it on yet.** Ari's job on a call is simply to ask the next question, the one that turns an ordinary conversation into something a grandchild who has not been born yet will someday get to hear in your own voice.
The pull to leave something behind does not need a crisis to act on. It just needs a chance to be recorded before the moment that would have forced it.
My father is not a sentimental man. He would never sit down and write a letter to grandchildren he has not met yet. But Ari asked him what he hoped his life would mean to people who never got to know him, and he talked for twenty minutes. I do not think he had ever said any of it out loud before.David, 49, recording his father's story for his own children
What you get with LifeScribe
- Grounded in peer-reviewed research on legacy motivation from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, not a guess about what people want.
- Ari asks the specific question that turns the pull to leave something behind into an actual, keepable recording.
- No health scare or milestone birthday required: the legacy motive does not need a crisis to act on, only a chance.
- The recording becomes a keepsake in their own voice, for the generations the research says people already care about more than they realize.
Start free, with nothing to lose
Try it on your next call this week, free. Nothing to install, nothing to learn. If it does not surface something worth keeping, you have lost nothing but a few minutes.
**The research found that people already care about generations they will never meet. The only variable left is whether anyone asks them the question in time to keep the answer.** That does not take a hospital waiting room or a milestone birthday. It takes one ordinary phone call.
You already have a legacy motive. Give it somewhere to go.
Pick a call you already have planned this week. Let Ari ask the question that turns it into something your family keeps.
Questions grandparents ask us
What did the 2012 study actually find?
Kimberly Wade-Benzoni and colleagues Leigh Tost, Morela Hernandez, and Richard Larrick published "It's Only a Matter of Time: Death, Legacies, and Intergenerational Decisions" in Psychological Science in 2012. Participants who were first asked to think about their own death allocated more resources to people from future generations, reversing the usual tendency to favor the present over the far future.
What is the legacy motive?
It is the term researchers use for a documented psychological drive to leave something of lasting, positive value behind. Wade-Benzoni's 2019 review in Current Opinion in Psychology defines a legacy as an enduring meaning attached to one's own identity, something that gives life meaning beyond its own length.
Is this the same as the Andrew Carnegie effect?
Related, not identical. The Andrew Carnegie effect is a 2025 finding by Jessica Paek, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, and Kimberly Wade-Benzoni showing that legacy motives increase how much people direct toward causes that will outlast them. It builds on the same underlying legacy motive as the 2012 study.
Do I need to think about my own death for this to apply to me?
No. The research shows the legacy motive already exists in people before any mortality reminder switches it on. You do not need a hospital waiting room or a milestone birthday to act on it, just a chance to put it into words.
How does this connect to LifeScribe?
The research says people already have a pull to leave something meaningful for generations they will never meet. Ari's job on a call is to ask the next question, so that pull becomes an actual recording your family keeps, instead of something that stays unsaid.
https://getlifescribeapp.com/blog/the-study-that-found-thinking-about-death-makes-you-more-generous