Life after death: An investigation into how mortality perceptions influence fertility preferences using evidence from an internet-based experiment

Paul Mathews; Rebecca Sear ORCID logo; (2008) Life after death: An investigation into how mortality perceptions influence fertility preferences using evidence from an internet-based experiment. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 6 (3). pp. 155-172. ISSN 1789-2082 DOI: 10.1556/jep.6.2008.3.1
Copy

Both life history theory and demographic transition theory predict that fertility responds to changes in mortality, but there have been relatively few tests which identify links between mortality perceptions and fertility preferences at the individual level. This paper provides an individual-level investigation of the relationship between mortality and fertility, by testing whether mortality priming results in an increase in fertility preferences. Data were collected via an internet-based experiment of students at the London School of Economics (LSE), who were randomly allocated between two questionnaires. The treatment questionnaire asked a set of mortality priming questions and then collected information on fertility preferences and attitudes towards the costs and benefits of children. The control questionnaire recorded information on fertility preferences without prior mortality priming. The results suggest that mortality priming resulted in higher ideal number of children for males, but not for females. There were no significant differences in the attitudes towards the costs and benefits of children for either sex, though the raw data suggest a slight shift towards viewing children as less costly after mortality-priming, particularly for men. This paper therefore argues that the reaction of fertility to mortality may be at least partly mediated by a direct psychological link between mortality perceptions and reproductive behaviour. © 2008 Akadémiai Kiadó.

visibility_off picture_as_pdf

picture_as_pdf
2_1-mathews%20fulltext.pdf
subject
Published Version
lock
Restricted to Repository staff only
copyright
Available under Copyright the publishers

Request Copy

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span Multiline CSV OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL EndNote HTML Citation JSON MARC (ASCII) MARC (ISO 2709) METS MODS RDF+N3 RDF+N-Triples RDF+XML RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer Simple Metadata ASCII Citation EP3 XML
Export

Downloads