Mortality Salience, Self-esteem and Status Seeking

According to the Terror Management Theory, the fear of death may induce anxi-ety and threaten individual self-esteem. To remove this fear, individuals need to ob-tain and sustain self-esteem, for example by competing in rank order tournaments, or by focusing on status seeking. Within an experimental setting, this paper inves-tigates the effect of Mortality Salience on individual productivity, manipulating the information on subjects ’ relative performance in a real-effort task where the eco-nomic incentive is to not perform: in a first treatment subjects receive only private feedback, which may have effects on productivity via individual self-esteem, while in a second treatment subjects receive public feedback, which may have effects on productivity via status seeking. Our results suggest that the majority of subjects ex-posed to death-related thoughts tend to be more sensitive to in-group conformity when both types of feedback are provided