10.

1177/014616702236834
PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT

The Scrooge Effect: Evidence That Mortality Salience

Increases Prosocial Attitudes and Behavior

Eva Jonas
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Jeff Schimel
University of Alberta
Jeff Greenberg
University of Arizona
Tom Pyszczynski
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

From the perspective of terror management theory, reminders of
mortality should intensify the desire to express culturally pre-
scribed prosocial attitudes and engage in culturally prescribed
prosocial behaviors. Two studies supported these hypotheses. In
Study 1, people were interviewed in close proximity to a funeral
home or several blocks away and were asked to indicate their atti-
tudes toward two charities they deemed important. Those who
were interviewed in front of the funeral home reported more
favorability toward these charities than those who were inter-
viewed several blocks away. In Study 2, the authors found that
following mortality salience, people gave more money to a charity
supporting an American cause than people who had been
exposed to an aversive control topic. However, mortality salience
had no effect on the amount of money given to a foreign cause.
Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.
A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell strait upon the
bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, un-
wept, uncared for, was the body of this man. . . . Oh cold,
cold, rigid dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and
dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command:
for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and
honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy
dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not
that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it
is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand
was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm,
and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike Shadow, strike!
And see his good deeds springing up from the wound, to
sow the world with life immortal.
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1950, pp. 115-116)
At Christmas time, one of the most cherished and fre-
quently told stories in Western culture is Charles Dick-
ens’s A Christmas Carol. In this story, the ghost of Christ-
mas past and the ghost of Christmas present show
Ebenezer Scrooge how his cruelty and selfishness has
adversely affected his own life and the lives of others.
However, it is not until the ghost of Christmas future
shows Scrooge a glimpse of his own future, inscribed on
the head of a tombstone, that his stinginess and greed
give way to benevolence and compassion for others.
Dickens is telling us that one should value kindness and
concern for others over selfishness and material riches
or else die an insignificant and lonely death.
In other words, by doing the right things, Scrooge was
able to manage his terror of absolute annihilation. And
so, in this 19th-century story, we can see a literary presag-
ing of terror management theory (TMT), which pro-
poses that self-esteem, the belief that one is a valuable
person within the context of one’s cultural conception of
Authors’ Note: This research was supported in part by National Science
Foundation (NSF) Grants SBR-9601366, SBR-9601474, SBR-9731626,
and SBR-9729946 as well a grant from the German Science Foundation
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]), Jo. 388/1-1. The contri-
butions of the first two authors were equivalent. We thank Jaime Valger
for her work as an experimenter in Study 2. Correspondence for this
article should be addressed to Eva Jonas, Institute of Psychology, Social
Psychology Unit, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet, Leopoldstr. 13,
80802 Munich, Germany; e-mail: jonas@psy.uni-muenchen.de.
PSPB, Vol. 28 No. 10, October 2002 1342-1353
DOI: 10.1177/014616702236834
© 2002 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

1342

reality, provides protection from the fear of death
(Becker, 1971, 1973; Greenberg, Solomon, &
Pyszczynski, 1997; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski,
1991). Of interest, whereas most prior TMT research has
focused on negative or socially destructive consequences
of confronting one’s mortality, such as prejudice, bias,
and aggression, Dickens’s story hypothesizes a construc-
tive consequence of mortality salience: If generous
behavior helps to restore the belief that one is a mean-
ingful and valuable contributor to one’s cultural concep-
tion of reality, then reminders of mortality should
encourage people (perhaps even the “Scrooges” of the
world) to be kinder and more benevolent to others. The
primary purpose of the two studies reported here was to
assess this Dickensian hypothesis.
TMT and Research
TMT, which is derived from the writings and analysis
of Ernest Becker (1962, 1971, 1973), posits that psycho-
logical needs are an outgrowth of the existential
dilemma that humans are thrust into from birth. Similar
to other living organisms, human beings have an instinct
for self-preservation and survival. Unlike other organ-
isms, human beings possess intellectual capacities that
make them painfully aware that one day they will die.
This pairing of an instinctive desire for continued life
with awareness of the inevitability of death creates the
potential for paralyzing terror. Cultural conceptions of
reality evolved, in part, to provide protection against this
most basic of all human fears. At the most fundamental
level, these conceptions of reality provide people with a
sense of meaning, that life is significant and permanent
and consists of more than taking in food, expelling
waste, and temporarily clinging to survival on a clump of
dirt and rock hurtling through space. From the perspec-
tive of TMT, protection from death-related fear is pro-
vided by a dual-component cultural anxiety buffer con-
sisting of (a) a cultural worldview, which provides a
meaningful, orderly, stable conception of reality, stan-
dards, and values through which one can feel valuable,
and a promise of death transcendence that can be either
literal (e.g., heaven, nirvana) or symbolic (e.g., publica-
tions, artwork) for those who live up to these standards of
value and (b) self-esteem, which is the belief that one is
currently living up to cultural standards. Because of the
important role that these structures play in protecting
people from existential fear, a great deal of behavior is
aimed at sustaining these structures and defending them
against threats.
Throughout the past dozen years a substantial
amount of evidence has been gathered in support of
TMT’s primary hypotheses. The first central hypothesis
derived from TMT is that self-esteem serves as a buffer
against anxiety. A large body of evidence is consistent
Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT 1343
with this idea. Trait self-esteem is negatively correlated
with trait anxiety and anxiety-related problems, and
threats to self-esteem increase anxiety (for a review, see
Solomon et al., 1991). Most important, studies designed
specifically to test this hypothesis have shown that bol-
stering people’s self-esteem reduces both physiological
arousal and self-reports of anxiety in response to graphic
depictions of death and painful electric shocks and
reduces defensive distortions to deny one’s vulnerability
to an early death (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1993;
Greenberg, Solomon, et al., 1992). Furthermore, experi-
mentally manipulated and naturally occurring high self-
esteem has been shown to reduce defensive responses to
reminders of death (e.g., Arndt & Greenberg, 1999;
Harmon-Jones et al., 1997).
The second central hypothesis derived from TMT is
that if faith in the cultural worldview and self-esteem
function to protect people from anxiety about death,
then reminders of this primary fear should increase peo-
ple’s need for these psychological structures. To date,
more than 80 studies conducted in seven different coun-
tries have supported variants of this hypothesis (for a
review, see Greenberg et al., 1997). The bulk of these
studies have demonstrated that mortality salience
increases positive reactions to those who uphold or vali-
date the individual’s worldview and negative reactions to
those who violate or challenge the individual’s worldview
(Greenberg et al., 1990; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solo-
mon, Simon, & Breus, 1994; Greenberg, Simon,
Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Chatel, 1992; Ochsmann &
Mathy, 1994; Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon,
Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989). Other research consistent
with the mortality salience hypothesis has shown that
reminding people of death increases adherence to cul-
tural norms (Greenberg, Porteus, Simon, Pyszczynski, &
Solomon, 1995; Rosenblatt et al., 1989), heightens esti-
mates of social consensus for culturally relevant attitudes
(Pyszczynski et al., 1996), and increases optimal distinc-
tiveness strivings (Simon et al., 1997). Mortality salience
also has been shown to increase behaviors directly associ-
ated with self-esteem striving, such as risky driving
among those who are highly invested in their driving
ability (Taubman Ben-Ari, Florian, & Mikulincer, 1999),
focus on bodily appearance for those who take pride in
their physical appearance (Goldenberg, McCoy,
Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 2000), and identifi-
cation with successful groups and disidentification from
unsuccessful groups (e.g., Dechesne, Greenberg, Arndt,
& Schimel, 2000).
Although this short summary of terror management
findings illustrates that mortality salience affects a wide
range of different areas in human life, one should note
that this only applies to worldview-relevant domains. For
example, when testing the effect of the violation of cul-
1344 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
tural norms, Rosenblatt et al. (1989, Study 2) questioned
if following mortality salience participants also would
show an inclination to derogate any other person who
had, however, not violated any social or cultural rule.
The results revealed that although mortality salience led
to harsher reactions to a person who violated cultural
norms it did not influence the evaluation of a neutral
person (in this case, the experimenter). In addition,
Rosenblatt et al. (1989, Study 4) found that mortality
salience did not affect the evaluation of non-worldview-
relevant positive or negative events or the monetary esti-
mates of different consumer products. Indeed, many
normal, everyday behaviors, such as going to the bank to
make a deposit, choosing a meal at a nice restaurant,
driving to work in the morning, judging a work of art, or
going for a swim, may be unrelated to and unaffected by
people’s concerns about mortality. However, if one con-
siders himself or herself to be a shrewd financier, a con-
noisseur of fine foods, a skillful driver, or a future Olym-
pic swimmer, then such everyday behaviors take on
deeper meaning as ways of feeling personally valuable
and heroic within the broader culture. When such every-
day thoughts and behaviors become personal avenues
for self-esteem, mortality salience is thought to intensify
such behaviors.
TMT and Prosocial Behavior
Despite the large amount of evidence that has accu-
mulated in support of TMT, the tenor of most of this
work is that mortality salience increases negative reac-
tions to those who are different and exaggerates various
forms of self-serving behavior. However, along with
ethnocentric biases and egotism, acts involving kindness
and generosity toward others also should affirm people’s
faith in their cultural worldview and self-esteem. Most
people learn from early on that living up to standards of
benevolence and concern for those who are less fortu-
nate than ourselves is honorable and highly desirable.
For example, the Bible speaks clearly that one should
“love thy neighbor as thy self” through well-known para-
bles such as the Good Samaritan. Similarly, famous fig-
ures such as Mother Teresa and Ghandi exemplify the
benefits of living a humble, self-sacrificing, and benevo-
lent life. Moreover, as was mentioned at the outset of this
article, stories such as A Christmas Carol warn us that self-
ishness and greed may lead to a lonely life and an early
death, whereas kindness and compassionate giving leads
to happiness and may even grant postponement or tran-
scendence of one’s death. The message transmitted by
these historical figures, religious parables, and popular
stories is clear: We are good and safe if we live up to stan-
dards of generosity, kindness, and unselfishness and we
are bad and in peril if we fail to live up to these standards.
Indeed, research shows that people generally accept
these cultural prescriptions of value and maintain their
self-esteem by living up to them. For example, research
has shown that helping can be increased by anticipated
social approval and salient social norms (e.g., Berkowitz,
1972; Cialdini, Kallgren, & Reno, 1991; Kallgren, Reno,
& Cialdini, 2000; Macaulay, 1975; Moss & Page, 1972;
Satow, 1975). Other research has shown that people
repair their self-esteem after threats by engaging in help-
ful behavior. For example, Steele (1975) found that after
being criticized for their poor driving ability, women
were more likely to promise to help out with a commu-
nity project. Similarly, Brown and Smart (1991) found
that following a recent failure, people with high self-
esteem rated themselves higher on traits that exempli-
fied their kindness and generosity and spent more time
helping a research assistant.
From a TMT perspective, the belief that one is living
up to the standards and values set forth by one’s cultural
worldview provides protection from deeply rooted fear.
To the extent that prosocial behaviors are valued by
one’s culture and contribute to self-esteem, acting in
ways that are helpful, giving, and benevolent should
serve a terror management function. However, it may be
that some forms of helping provide better protection
from existential concerns than others. According to
TMT, people develop their own individualized ways of
achieving a sense of personal value within the context of
the broader cultural framework. Some people try to be
good Republicans, Christians, or educators, whereas
others gain a sense of value by constructing buildings,
playing music, or practicing medicine. Thus, people find
value and significance by adhering to their own unique
individualized set of standards and values that they have
abstracted from the wide array of cultural values to which
they have been exposed. In support of this point, a vari-
ety of studies have shown that the effects of mortality
salience depend on the content of the individual’s
worldview (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1990; Greenberg,
Simon, et al., 1992; Rosenblatt et al., 1989; Simon, Arndt,
Greenberg, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 1998).
From a TMT perspective, then, prosocial behavior
that conforms to one’s personalized belief system would
offer the best protection against existential fear. Based
on this reasoning, Study 1 was designed to test the
hypothesis that a subtle real-world reminder of mortality
would increase the favorability of people’s attitudes
toward charities. Study 2 was designed to more directly
examine the helping behavior (as opposed to helping-
relevant attitudes) and to test the hypothesis that mortal-
ity salience would have a greater effect on donations to
charities that benefited ingroup members than to chari-
ties than benefited outgroup members.

STUDY 1
Following Pyszczynski et al. (1996), Study 1 was a field
study in which pedestrians walking on the street were
interviewed in front of a funeral home or several blocks
away from the funeral home. Their attitudes toward two
different charitable organizations that they deemed
moderately important constituted the dependent vari-
able. We predicted that mortality salient participants,
that is, those interviewed in front of the funeral home,
would exhibit more favorable attitudes toward the two
charities than would participants interviewed away from
the funeral home.
Method
Participants. The participants were 17 male and 14
female pedestrians who were solicited to take part in a
short survey while walking down a street in Boulder, Col-
orado. All of the participants were U.S. citizens.
Procedure. Participants who were walking on a trajec-
tory that was anticipated to take them past a funeral
home were randomly assigned to be interviewed by a
male interviewer either directly in front of the funeral
home or approximately three blocks (150 m) away from
it. The funeral home was a brick building with a large
sign clearly visible to the pedestrian that read “Howe’s
Mortuary.” At the time the study was being conducted,
there was masonry work being done on the building near
the sign, which drew pedestrians’ attention to the sign as
they passed by. As in previous mortality salience studies
using this manipulation (Pyszczynski et al., 1996), the
interviewer positioned himself so that the participants
were forced to face the front of the building so that they
could clearly see the sign.
The experimenter first asked participants if they
would be willing to take about 5 mins of their time to
complete a short survey. Once they agreed, the experi-
menter proceeded by giving them a form with a short
description of 10 different charities and told them to
rank order the charities according to which ones they
thought were most important (1 = most important, 10 =
least important).1 Once they had completed this task, the
experimenter told the participants that this survey was
part of a research project for a class. Thus, in exchange
for participating, they would have $5 donated in their
name to a charity of their choice. The experimenter took
the participants’ list of charities, circled the charities par-
ticipants’ ranked number “3” and “4” on the list, and
then said, “It just so happens that we are donating money
to these two charities—so what I need you to do now is
choose which of these two charities you would like to
have us donate $5 in your name.” Once the participants
made their decision, the experimenter had them fill out
a receipt that asked them to print and sign their name,
Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT 1345
TABLE 1: Means and Standard Deviations for Participants’ Ratings
of the Charities in Study 1
Death Salience Control
M SD M SD
How beneficial is this
charity to society? 17.31 2.96 14.73 3.91
How much does society
need this charity? 17.37 2.70 15.80 3.62
How desirable is this charity
to you personally? 16.06 3.29 13.40 4.12
Favorability composite 50.75 7.60 43.93 10.68
N 16 15
the date, and the name of the charity they had chosen.
The experimenter then handed the participants a ques-
tionnaire asking several questions about the chosen and
nonchosen charity.2 These questions asked, “How bene-
ficial is this charity to society?” “How much do you think
society needs this charity?” and “How desirable is this
charity to you personally?” All responses were made on a
10-point scale (1 = not at all, 10 = very much). Once the
participants completed these questions, the experi-
menter debriefed them about the true purpose of the
study.
Results
For each of the three attitude items, we collapsed par-
ticipants’ ratings for the chosen and nonchosen chari-
ties to form a favorability score for each of the items. We
then performed a principal components analysis on
these item scores and found that each of them loaded
heavily on a single factor (eigenvalue = 2.45). The factor
loadings for each of the items were .92, .94, and .84,
respectively. We therefore summed these three items to
form a single composite measure of favorability toward
charitable organizations. A t test performed on this
favorability composite yielded a significant effect of our
mortality salience treatment, t(31) = 2.06, p < .05, indicat-
ing that mortality salience increased the favorability of
participants’ attitudes toward the charitable organiza-
tions. The means and standard deviations for the com-
posite measure and the individual items are presented in
Table 1.3
Discussion
The results support the prediction derived from
TMT: When interviewed in front of a funeral home, and
thereby reminded of mortality, people showed a more
favorable attitude toward charitable causes than when
interviewed three blocks from the mortuary. Reminded
of mortality, people judged charitable organizations that
were important to them as more beneficial to society and
more desirable to them personally and indicated that
1346 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
society needs those charities more. Thus, mortality
salience leads to a more positive attitude toward organi-
zations perceived to serve an important function in our
society and to help others in need. According to TMT,
cultural conceptions of reality serve to protect people
from the fear of absolute annihilation. Therefore, when
reminded of death, cultural norms should become more
important to people and cultural values should become
more valued. The findings of Study 1 extend previous
findings that mortality salience increases rewards recom-
mended for a hero and punishment recommended for a
moral transgressor (Florian & Mikulincer, 1997;
Ochsmann & Reichelt, 1994; Rosenblatt et al., 1989) by
showing a similar effect of mortality salience on the value
people place on charitable organizations. Similar to
Dickens’s Mr. Scrooge, people who were reminded of
their mortality by standing in front of a funeral home
came to view charitable giving in a more favorable light.
It is important, however, to determine whether this
increase in favorable attitudes toward charities extends
to people’s actual charitable behavior. It is one thing to
say that charities are important and quite another to
behave in accordance with such attitudes. To see if peo-
ple would put their money where their mouth is, Study 2
assessed whether people would donate more money to
charitable organizations after being reminded of
mortality.
When we consider why people become more favor-
able toward charities when reminded of their mortality,
two possibilities emerge. Presumably, following death
salience, people try to live up to cultural standards of
helping as a means of upholding the moral principles of
their cultural worldview. As we know from other
research, people who are religious donate more money
to charitable causes, partly because of the belief that it
will lead to heavenly rewards and that this is part of one’s
religious duty (Myers, 1992). Other people are moti-
vated by more abstract moral principles of fairness or jus-
tice and concern with longer term changes in society
(Radley & Kennedy, 1992). Both of these reasons for val-
uing giving suggest that there is a connection between
donating money to charities and feeling that one is a
good person and a valuable member of society. Thus,
mortality salience may increase people’s general motiva-
tion to help others because doing so increases their per-
ceptions that they are living up to their culturally derived
principles of “goodness” and morality.
However, we think that mortality salience would be
most likely to increase people’s motivation to help mem-
bers of their ingroup. Many previous studies have shown
that mortality salience increases ingroup favoritism
(e.g., Greenberg et al., 1990; Harmon-Jones, Greenberg,
Solomon, & Simon, 1996; Nelson, Moore, Olivetti, &
Scott, 1997). There is also a good deal of evidence show-
ing ingroup bias in helping behavior. For example,
Brown (1978) showed that people donate more money
to ingroup than outgroup causes and Gaertner, Dovidio,
and Johnson (1982) showed that Whites are less likely to
help Blacks than fellow Whites when their behavior is
not easily identifiable. In a study on charitable giving
among American Jews, it was found that the participants
gave a median amount of $175 per year to Jewish chari-
ties versus $75 to non-Jewish charities (Rimor & Tobin,
1990). Similarly, members of Black American churches
donate more to Black charities and organizations not
connected to their church than to non-Black charities
(Carson, 1990). These findings suggest that people pri-
marily value helping fellow ingroup members in need;
therefore, we would expect mortality salience to increase
helping for those within one’s own culture.
STUDY 2
To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment
in which participants were reminded of their own death
or an aversive control topic (i.e., dental pain). After the
experiment ostensibly was over, we asked them whether
they would be willing to support specific charitable orga-
nizations the university was sponsoring by donating
money. All participants got a brochure in which one
American and one international charity organization
were described. If mortality salience generally increases
willingness to help, we would expect a main effect: Par-
ticipants in the mortality salience condition would give
more money to charities than participants in the control
condition would give. On the other hand, if mortality
salience only increases the willingness to give money to
charities that support one’s own culture then we would
expect an interaction: Participants in the mortality
salience condition would donate more money to the
American charity than participants in the control condi-
tion, whereas mortality salience would have little or no
effect on donations to international charities.
Method
Participants and design. Twenty-seven introductory psy-
chology students (18 women and 9 men) from the Uni-
versity of Arizona participated in this experiment for par-
tial course credit. Three participants were dropped for
suspicion after indicating that they thought the experi-
ment was concerned with whether people would donate
money to charities. Two participants were dropped from
the analysis because they were foreign students. Partici-
pants were run in groups ranging in size from 3 to 5 and
were randomly assigned to conditions in a 2 (mortality
salience: death vs. dental pain) × 2 (charity: American vs.

international) factorial design with charity treated as a
repeated-measures variable.
Procedure. After arriving to the experimental session,
the experimenter told the participants that the study was
concerned with how different personality measures were
related and that they would complete a short packet of
personality measures. Before the experiment started
they were given $1.50, ostensibly for participating in this
study. The reason for this ploy was to make sure all partic-
ipants would have at least a small amount of money to
donate to the charities they would learn about later in
the study. The participants were told that the current
study was sponsored by the National Science Foundation
(NSF), which was in fact true, and that therefore we were
required by the NSF to pay them for their participation
in the study (which of course was not true). The experi-
menter told participants that we were not able to give
them a lot of money but at least we could afford a little
sum for each person. She explained further that “to
make the distribution as fair as possible—across all the
studies—we have decided to give them one quarter for
each page they filled out.” Because there were six pages
in the packet, in addition to receiving credits for their
psychology class, the participants also received six quar-
ters. The experimenter explained that she wanted to
give them the money before the experiment started so
that it would not take time at the end.
Participants were then ushered into individual cubi-
cles to ensure their privacy, where they filled out the per-
sonality questionnaires. First, they received a filler mea-
sure and then a mortality salience or control treatment,
which was titled “The Projective Life Attitudes Assess-
ment.” The mortality salience treatment consisted of
having participants respond to two open-ended ques-
tions: “Please briefly describe the emotions that the
thought of your own death arouses in you” and “Jot
down, as specifically as you can, what you think will hap-
pen to you as you physically die and once you are physi-
cally dead.” In the control condition, we asked the same
questions with regard to dental pain. The experimenter
was blind to these manipulations. Participants then
responded to two filler questionnaires consisting of one
mood assessment (the PANAS-X) (Watson, Clark, &
Tellegen, 1988) and a filler questionnaire about partici-
pants’ sleeping and waking patterns to constitute a delay
between the mortality salience manipulation and the
dependent measure (cf. Greenberg et al., 1994).
After participants finished all of the questionnaires,
the experimenter went into each cubicle and gave them
a brochure and two envelopes. The experimenter went
on to explain that it might take a little longer until every-
one was finished so while they were waiting she was won-
dering if they could read a brochure. She explained that
Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT 1347
in the last few weeks, the Psychology Department had
agreed to work with the university to help raise money
for some different charities. There were two specific
charities that the university was sponsoring. The bro-
chure would tell them about each of these organizations.
If they wanted to donate anything there were some enve-
lopes on which the names of the charities were written
and they could just put the money in the envelope of the
charity to which they wanted to donate and then drop
the envelope in a box on the floor. She emphasized that
it was totally up to them whether they wanted to make a
contribution and that the contents of the envelope
would be completely anonymous. Then she closed the
door of the cubicle and gave them privacy while they
read the brochure.
The brochure was titled “Support Charities as a Mem-
ber of the University of Arizona Community” and started
by emphasizing that “the support of charitable organiza-
tions was a cornerstone of American culture and that the
University of Arizona itself couldn’t succeed without the
support of the community.” The brochure went on to say
that the university wanted to take part in the tradition of
supporting a variety of charitable causes and thereby giv-
ing back to the community. It was further explained that
the university was asking its employees and students to
donate money “to some organizations that were
strengthening our society by improving education and
helping young families, causes close to the heart of every
university community.” Finally, it was emphasized that
every little amount would help, no matter how small.
Then, two specific charity organizations were described:
one American and one international organization.
From the description, it was clear that the American
organization helped people in the United States and
that the international organizations helped people out-
side of the United States. To avoid making this differenti-
ation too obvious, we chose two different charity areas:
one about education and one about house building; the
goal in both areas was to help people in under-resourced
regions. The two organizations we included in the bro-
chure were real charities. We made two different coun-
terbalanced versions of the brochures such that one bro-
chure included an American education charity and an
international house-building charity, whereas the other
included an international education charity and an
American house-building charity. Each one of the two
envelopes we gave to the participants together with the
brochure had the name of the corresponding organiza-
tion on it.
After the participants finished reading the brochure
and decided whether they wanted to donate money, they
were debriefed. Because we had to tell them that the
request of donating money was part of the experiment
1348 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
and did not come from the university, they were offered
the opportunity to get their money back in case they
wanted to, but none of the participants retracted their
donation. When all of the data for the study was col-
lected, we donated the participants’ money to the appro-
priate charities.
Results
Money donated. Our dependent measure was the
amount of money participants donated to the different
charities. We first performed a 2 (mortality salience:
death vs. dental pain) × 2 (charity: American vs. interna-
tional) × 2 (version: house building vs. education)
ANOVA on the amount of money participants donated
to see if the different versions interacted with the other
conditions. The three-way interaction was not signifi-
cant, F(1, 18) < 1.78, suggesting that the different ver-
sions did not interfere with our results.4 We therefore
collapsed the money donated to the American versus
international organizations across the two types of chari-
ties (education vs. house building). We then submitted
this measure to a 2 (mortality salience) × 2 (charity)
ANOVA with charity treated as a repeated-measures vari-
able. However, an analysis of the distribution of partici-
pants’ donations within each condition revealed that
this measure did not meet the assumption of homogene-
ity of variance for ANOVA. We therefore performed a
square-root transformation on the amount of money
participants donated and then submitted this measure
to the ANOVA. This analysis yielded no significant main
effect for mortality salience, F(1, 20) = 2.76, p > .11, or
charities, F(1, 20) < 1. However, there was a significant
Mortality Salience × Charity interaction, F(1, 20) = 7.06,
p < .02.
Pairwise comparisons supported the prediction that
participants in the mortality salience condition gave
more money to the American charities than would par
ticipants in the control condition, t(20) = 4.08, p < .001.
In contrast, mortality salience had no significant effect
on the amount of money donated to the international
charities, t(20) < 1. Looked at differently, within the mor-
tality salience conditions, mortality salience led to higher
donations to the American as opposed to the interna-
tional charities, t(20) = 2.52, p < .03, whereas within the
dental pain salience condition, there was no significant
difference in donation to the American as opposed to
the international charities, t(20) = 1.19, p > .20 (cell
means and standard deviations of the transformed and
nontransformed data are presented in Table 2).
Affect. To assess whether the mortality salience treat-
ment affected participants’ mood, we performed t tests
on the various subscales of the PANAS-X (Watson et al.,
1988). There was only a marginal effect of mortality
salience on surprise t(20) = 2.05, p < .06, indicating that
TABLE 2: Means and Standard Deviations for the Absolute and
Transformed Amount of Money Donated in Study 2
Salience
Death Dental Pain
Charity Organization M SD M SD
Absolute amount
American charity $1.44 $1.38 $0.30 $0.38
International charity $0.88 $1.47 $0.49 $0.44
Transformed amount
American charity $1.03 $0.64 $0.38 $0.41
International charity $0.63 $0.72 $0.57 $0.42
N 11 11
participants experienced more surprise in the dental
pain condition. To assess whether feelings of surprise
mediated our results, we conducted a 2 (mortality
salience) × 2 (charity) analysis of covariance (ANCOVA)
using surprise as the covariate. This analysis revealed a
significant Mortality Salience × Charity interaction, indi-
cating that surprise did not mediate our results. t tests
performed on the remaining subscales of the PANAS-X,
including positive and negative affect, revealed no signif-
icant differences (all ts < 1.31).
Discussion
The findings of Study 2 clearly illustrate the impact
that mortality salience has on prosocial behavior by dem-
onstrating that mortality salience increased the amount
of money people contributed to charitable organiza-
tions. Moreover, Study 2 served to specify the conditions
under which prosocial behavior occurred: After mortal-
ity salience, people donated more money to charities
that supported projects in America but did not increase
giving to international projects. These results suggest
that mortality salience does not simply motivate people
to behave according to a general norm of universal help-
ing. Rather, when people are particularly concerned
with defending against the thought of their own death,
they showed a strong bias toward charitable causes that
promote their own culture.
This is consistent with findings of previous terror
management research showing that following remind-
ers of mortality, people respond especially favorably
toward people and ideas that support their cultural affili-
ations (Greenberg et al., 1990; Rosenblatt et al., 1989).
Thus, in a sense, our results can be viewed as another
manifestation of the tendency for mortality salience to
lead to favoritism toward one’s own culture. However, all
of the prior evidence of increased positive responses
after mortality salience has assessed self-reported atti-
tudes and intentions; the finding of increased monetary
contributions to American charities constitutes the first

evidence of a positive behavioral effect of mortality
salience, and one involving personal costs to the
participants.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
Two studies supported the idea that terror manage-
ment concerns can contribute to prosocial inclinations.
Study 1 demonstrated that reminding people of death
leads to a more favorable attitude toward charities.
Study 2 found that mortality salience increased actual
prosocial behavior in terms of giving more money to
charity organizations, but this only occurred with chari-
ties that benefit one’s own culture. Mortality salience
had no effect on giving when the beneficiaries of this
kindness were not members of one’s ingroup. Thus,
Study 2 supported the culture-specific hypothesis con-
cerning the effects of mortality salience on helping. Just
as Ebenezer Scrooge responded to a dramatic confronta-
tion with his mortality by helping his employees, their
families, and other members of his community, so too
did participants in Study 2 respond to an admittedly less
dramatic reminder of their mortality by giving more to
ingroup charities, helping those in their own culture.
Whereas Study 1 showed the effect of mortality
salience on attitudes toward charities in the context of a
field study in which people were interviewed either in
front of or several blocks away from a funeral home,
Study 2 was conducted under the controlled conditions
of the laboratory, comparing the effects of filling out a
questionnaire about death-related issues to a control
group in which participants were reminded of a non-
death-related aversive topic (dental pain). The converg-
ing findings across two very different operationalizations
of mortality salience strongly implicate death-related
thoughts in these effects, particularly in conjunction
with a large body of other research utilizing these and
other operationalizations and control conditions (see,
e.g., Greenberg et al., 1997; Greenberg, Schimel, Mar-
tens, Solomon, & Pyszczynski, 2001).
The Contribution to the Terror
Management Literature
This research provides evidence of mortality salience
affecting yet another type of human behavior: prosocial
action. In doing so, the present findings also add to a
small but growing body of evidence of behavioral effects
of mortality salience (Greenberg et al., 1995; McGregor
et al., 1998; Ochsmann & Mathy, 1994; Taubman Ben-Ari
et al., 1999). These studies highlight the role terror man-
agement concerns play not only in people’s attitudes but
also in how they actually behave in various situations.
Positive effects of mortality salience. In addition, our
results expand on current TMT research by emphasizing
Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT 1349
the positive impact that terror management concerns
can have on human behavior. TMT studies so far have
predominantly focused on negative implications of mor-
tality salience, such as increased prejudice (e.g.,
Greenberg et al., 1990), aggression (McGregor et al.,
1998), or racism (Greenberg et al., 2001). Although
there are some studies that also indicate positive effects
following mortality salience, such as increased liking and
rewards for those who support one’s worldview or
uphold cultural standards (see, e.g., Rosenblatt et al.,
1989), these results were usually accompanied by an
increased disliking of those who represent a different
culture (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1990). In contrast to this
prior research, the present Study 2 showed that although
mortality salience only increased participants’ willing-
ness to give more money to charities of their own culture,
this was not accompanied by lessened donations to chari-
ties that help foreign cultures. For international chari-
ties, there was simply no difference between participants
in the mortality salience and the control condition.
We believe that by demonstrating positive effects of
mortality salience, this work provides an initial step
toward an important new direction for terror manage-
ment research. Although most prior writing and
research on terror management has focused on defen-
sive responses, people in their everyday lives spend con-
siderable energy bolstering their faiths in their beliefs
and their sense of self-worth through a wide variety of
good works. Indeed, theorists have suggested that rais-
ing and passing on values to children; personal produc-
tivity, such as artistic, scientific, and technological
achievements; passing on one’s knowledge and skills
through teaching; and contributions to charities and
political and social causes are all positive ways in which
people can achieve and sustain a sense of death transcen-
dence (e.g., Adler, 1930; Erickson, 1950/1963; Lifton,
1983; McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992; Peterson & Stew-
art, 1993; Rank, 1932/1989). Perhaps this function of
altruistic acts helps explain why prosocial behavior is val-
ued in all cultures and prescribed so strongly in all the
major religions of the world. More empirical work on
such approach-oriented responses to the knowledge of
our mortality is sorely needed.
On the ubiquity of mortality salience effects. Before consid-
ering the implications of this research for prosocial
behavior, we think a legitimate question needs to be
addressed.5 Now that mortality salience effects have
been found for prosocial as well as antisocial actions, is
there anything mortality salience does not affect? In
other words, does mortality salience simply intensify all
cognitive and behavioral propensities? The theory and
research does suggest that mortality concerns can affect
a wide range of behaviors, but they also provide a clear
answer to this question: no. Theoretically, mortality
1350 PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY BULLETIN
salience should only intensify attitudes, judgments, and
behaviors that serve to bolster one’s worldview and self-
esteem, and a large body of research strongly supports
this answer.
Certainly, a very wide range of attitudes, judgments,
and behaviors can potentially serve to bolster aspects of
an individual’s worldview and one’s self-worth. However,
the theory suggests two broad sets of conditions under
which mortality salience should not affect cognition and
behavior. The first is when the cognitions and behaviors
simply are not relevant to bolstering the individual’s
worldview or self-worth. The first evidence for this point
was obtained in the first set of mortality salience studies.
Rosenblatt et al. (1989) found that whereas mortality
salience increased punitive responses toward a prosti-
tute and rewards for a hero, it did not intensify liking for
the experimenter or ratings of worldview-irrelevant posi-
tive and negative events.
A wide variety of studies since then also have shown
that whether mortality salience affects cognitions and
behaviors depends very much on individual and situa-
tional factors that make particular judgments and
actions either relevant or irrelevant to the individual’s
worldview or self-worth. A list of study findings that, in
the context of theoretically specified significant interac-
tions, demonstrate cognitions and behaviors not
affected by mortality salience includes evidence that
mortality salience does not affect (a) problem-solving
behavior, unless the problems required inappropriate
use of cultural icons to be solved (Greenberg et al.,
1995); (b) Whites’ liking for a neutrally presented Afri-
can American (Schimel et al., 1999); (c) low neurotics’
ratings of the appeal of physical sex (Goldenberg et al.,
2000); (d) the reactions to a different other of partici-
pants who highly valued tolerance or for whom toler-
ance has been made salient (Greenberg, Simon, et al.,
1992); (e) ratings of romantic partners and relationships
in insecurely attached individuals (Mikulincer &
Florian, 2000); (f) driving style of participants for whom
driving ability is irrelevant to self-worth (Taubman Ben-
Ari et al., 1999); (g) ratings of a critic of one’s group
when ingroup identification is considered permeable
and identification with a criticized group when identifi-
cation is considered impermeable (Dechesne, Janssen, &
van Knippenberg, 2000); and (h) psychological distanc-
ing from a Hispanic person by White participants
(Arndt, Greenberg, Schimel, Pyszczynski, & Solomon,
2002).
The second set of conditions under which mortality
salience is predicted to have no effects is when terror
management structures are very strong, such as when
self-worth is dispositionally high or situationally boosted.
For example, under such conditions, mortality salience
has been shown not to affect (a) pro-American bias in
Americans (Harmon-Jones et al., 1997), (b) self-percep-
tions associated with a long life expectancy (Greenberg
et al., 1993), (c) driving style in participants for whom
driving ability is self-relevant (Taubman Ben-Ari et al.,
1999), and (d) punitive reactions to moral transgressors
(Mikulincer & Florian, 2000).
A final counterpoint to the idea that mortality
salience is simply an intensifier of people’s tendencies is
evidence that mortality salience leads to preferences that
are not evident or actually in the opposite direction in
the non-mortality-salient control conditions. For exam-
ple, mortality salience has been shown to reverse the
direction of (a) Christians’ responses to fellow Christian
and Jewish students (Greenberg et al., 1990), (b)
Whites’ preferences for stereotypic and counterstereo-
typic African Americans (Schimel et al., 1999), (c)
Whites’ reactions to individuals who express White ver-
sus Black racial pride (Greenberg et al., 2001), (d) guilt
and social projection in response to creative versus
noncreative action (Arndt, Greenberg, Solomon,
Pyszczynski, & Schimel, 1999), and (e) in the present
Study 2, contributions to American versus foreign chari-
ties. What these findings may indicate is that when peo-
ple are not particularly concerned about maintaining
faith in their worldview and self-esteem, cognitive factors
such as rational information processing or situational
factors that are worldview irrelevant may guide behavior.
However, when people are mortality salient, they
respond in a manner that is worldview affirming and self-
esteem bolstering.
Implications Regarding Prosocial Action
From a practical perspective, these two studies suggest
that people’s terror management concerns might be
able to produce prosocial effects on a societal level, for
example, by increasing the amount of money donated to
charitable causes when the request is presented in the
context of death reminders. Similar effects might be
obtained with regard to public service advertisements or
blood drives.
This research also may have implications for thinking
about the influence of cultural organizations and institu-
tions on human behavior. Study 2 demonstrates the
effect mortality salience has on support of different char-
itable institutions, pointing to the important role that
cultural institutions may play in connecting values with
behavior. Following mortality salience, people did not
donate more money in general; they gave more only to
charities of their own American culture but not to chari-
ties helping foreign cultures. This suggests that mortality
salient participants may have followed the American
norm of supporting American charities and, as a result,
helped poor people in their own country rather than
poor people in foreign countries. Given prior helping

research (e.g., Brown, 1978; Carson, 1990; Gaertner
et al., 1982; Rimor & Tobin, 1990), it is likely that Ameri-
cans primarily value helping those “at home.” Indeed,
subsequent to Study 2, at the end of a class midterm, we
asked a small sample from the same population “How
important do you think charities for poor people in for-
eign countries are?” followed by the same question refer-
ring to people in the United States. On a 4-point scale
from not at all important to of great importance, the partici-
pants rated charities for American poor people signifi-
cantly higher in importance than charities for foreign
poor people, t(24) = 2.32, p < .02, means of M = 3.40 and
M = 3.08, respectively. Thus, although American stu-
dents in our sample did not view helping needy foreign-
ers as unimportant, they viewed helping Americans as
more important, suggesting that this value is more cen-
tral to their worldviews. The results of Study 2 can thus be
viewed as further evidence that mortality salience
encourages behaviors most strongly prescribed by the
individual’s worldview.
The results of Study 2 also can be taken as consistent
with the strong connection between mortality salience
and the affiliation to one’s own culture emphasized by
TMT. Because culture is the ultimate vehicle for sustain-
ing a sense of death transcendence, and charity organi-
zations help to ensure the preservation of one’s culture,
supporting one’s culture’s own causes might serve a pro-
tective function against the human fear of death and
annihilation. Of course, given the results of our small
survey and the fact that some Americans do give to inter-
national charities such as CARE, at least some Americans
do highly value helping those from other countries.
Therefore, we would not rule out the possibility that for
some Americans or under some conditions, mortality
salience may encourage helping for outgroup members.
However, for these college students, the preference fol-
lowing mortality salience was to help the American char-
ity. This suggests a need for further research on the psy-
chological functions of particular cultural institutions
(cf. Gergen, 1982; Sampson, 1981; Tetlock, 1992).
Finally, these findings pertain to the broad issue of the
different goals prosocial behavior can serve. As Batson
and colleagues have long argued (e.g., Batson, 1990),
the goal of prosocial behavior, particularly when aroused
by feelings of empathic emotion, may simply be to help
the other person. However, such behavior also may serve
a variety of more self-serving goals (e.g., Cialdini, Brown,
Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997). The present research
suggests that terror management may be one such goal.
Prosocial actions can serve to bolster the individual’s
faith in his or her cultural worldview and sense of value
within it, especially when the helpful behavior is directed
toward one’s own culture. Although this may not seem
quite as noble as pure altruism unbiased by one’s con-
Jonas et al. / THE SCROOGE EFFECT 1351
nection to the person or group being helped, if, as Dick-
ens’s story and this research suggest, the heightened
awareness of one’s own mortality can encourage the
“Scrooges” of the world to become kinder to at least
some of the “Tiny Tims,” should we quibble over the ori-
gins of such transformations?
NOTES
1. The 10 charities used in Study 1 were as follows: Partnership for a
Drug-Free America, Association for Retarded Citizens, Acid Rain
Foundation, National Alliance to End Homelessness, American Soci-
ety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Congress on Racial Equal-
ity, Albert Einstein Peace Prize Foundation, Keep America Beautiful,
American Foundation for Aging Research (AFAR), and the National
Child Safety Council.
2. A second hypothesis also was explored in this first study. We were
initially interested in whether mortality salience would affect prefer-
ences for the chosen versus nonchosen charity. This hypothesis was
derived from cognitive dissonance research showing that after people
make an important decision between two closely valued alternatives,
the chosen alternative will be highly favored over the nonchosen alter-
native. There was no support for this spreading of choice alternatives,
either with or without mortality salience, thus, the classical free choice
dissonance effect was not replicated, which rendered our attempted
test of the terror management variation on it ambiguous. Therefore,
this unsupported hypothesis is not discussed further.
3. We also performed t tests on the individual item composites. This
analysis revealed a significant effect of mortality salience for the first
and third item composite (i.e., “How beneficial is this charity to soci-
ety” and “How desirable is this charity to you personally”), t(31) = 2.08,
p < .05 and t(31) = 1.99, p < .06. A t test performed on the second item
(i.e., “How much does society need this charity”) revealed the same
pattern as the one with the other two items but was not statistically sig-
nificant, t(31) = 1.38, p < .19.
4. We also performed a three-way (Mortality Salience × Charity × Gen-
der) ANOVA that yielded no significant effects with regard to gender
(all Fs < 1.78). Therefore, gender will not be discussed further.
5. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this
issue to our attention.
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Received June 27, 2001
Revision accepted January 14, 2002