May 20, 2011 10:01 GMT  ·  By

In an interesting study, experts demonstrated that people who think specifically about their own death are more likely to be willing to help society, such as for instance through blood donations. Those who thought about dying in a more abstract manner were less likely to do so.

As such, the main conclusion of the new investigation is that the way in which individuals think about their own death can be used as an indicative factor on how they will behave in their lives.

Details of the study and the methodology used to arrive at this result are scheduled for publication in an upcoming issue of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) journal Psychological Science.

The research was conducted by scientists at the University of Essex, in England, and was led by PhD student Laura E.R. Blackie and her thesis advisor, professor Philip J. Cozzolino. The study was focused on 90 participants recruited in a British town center.

A number of test subjects were asked to answer questions about death, including their thoughts and feelings on the mater, their opinion about what happens afterwards, and so on. Another subgroup of participants was made to think about dental pain.

Members of the third subgroup were asked to image that they were dying in an apartment building fire. After this though was implanted in their minds, they were asked to answer a number of questions, regarding for example how they think their families would react, or how they would deal with this.

All test subjects were then given one of two, fake BBC articles. One of the pieces suggested that blood donations in the UK were low, and that the need for transplant blood was high. The other article read the exact opposite. Participants were guaranteed a fast registration at a blood center that very day.

Scientists found that the individuals who were made to think about death in an abstract way were more motivated by the story on the blood shortage. The other story did not move them too much, experts say.

On the other hand, people who were made to think about death in a personal way tended to pick up the papers guaranteeing their access to a blood center regardless of which fake BBC paper they read.

In other words, they were looking to donate blood regardless of how much that was actually needed. “Death is a very powerful motivation,” Blackie explains.

“People seem aware that their life is limited. That can be one of the best gifts that we have in life, motivating us to embrace life and embrace goals that are important to us,” she goes on to say.

Thinking specifically about your own death “enables people to integrate the idea of death into their lives more fully,” Blackie argues, as quoted by Science Blog.