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Posthumous events affect rated quality and happiness of lives

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Author Info
Paul Rozin
Jennifer Stellar
Abstract

Diener and colleagues (2001) illustrated that individuals rely heavily on endings to evaluate the quality of a life. Two studies investigated the potential for posthumous events to affect rated life quality, calling into question the intuitive ``ending'' of a life at death. Undergraduates read a series of short life narratives to assess the consequences of posthumous reversals of fortune on judgments of the goodness and happiness of the life. In a 2x2 within-subjects design, lives positive and negative in valence were displayed twice: once from birth to death and once each life was followed by a posthumous event of opposite valence. Results demonstrated that posthumous reversals of fortune shift judgments of the goodness and happiness of the life in the direction of the valence of the posthumous event. These effects were not related to an individual's religiosity or the degree to which the life made an engaging story. We suggest that the posthumous happy effect may be a case of a more general process, which we call retroactive re-evaluation.

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Publisher Info
Article provided by Society for Judgment and Decision Making in its journal Judgment and Decision Making.

Volume (Year): 4 (2009)
Issue (Month): 4 (June)
Pages: 273-279
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Handle: RePEc:jdm:journl:v:4:y:2009:i:4:p:273-279

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Related research
Keywords: endings; quality of life; happiness; positive psychology; subjective well-being; death; posthumous events; happiness.;

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  1. Kahneman, Daniel & Wakker, Peter P & Sarin, Rakesh, 1997. "Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 112(2), pages 375-405, May.
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This page was last updated on 2009-12-27.

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Department of Economics, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Connecticut using RePEc data on a server sponsored by the Society for Economic Dynamics.