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How Fear Of Death Could Make You Splurge

How Fear Of Death Could Make You Splurge
Farah Mohamed
By 

Managing Editor, The WorldPost

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 13: Osvaldo Colon walks the streets proselytizing with other believers that the world will end this May 21, Judgment Day, on May 13, 2011 in New York City. The Christian based movement, which claims thousands of supporters around the country and world, was founded by the Oakland, Calif.-based Harold Camping. Camping is president of Family Stations Inc., a religious broadcasting network that promotes the belief that May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day. Camping claims to have come to this date by a deep and complex study of religious texts. Camping was wrong on his prior end-of-the-world prediction in 1994. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
NEW YORK, NY - MAY 13: Osvaldo Colon walks the streets proselytizing with other believers that the world will end this May 21, Judgment Day, on May 13, 2011 in New York City. The Christian based movement, which claims thousands of supporters around the country and world, was founded by the Oakland, Calif.-based Harold Camping. Camping is president of Family Stations Inc., a religious broadcasting network that promotes the belief that May 21, 2011 is Judgment Day. Camping claims to have come to this date by a deep and complex study of religious texts. Camping was wrong on his prior end-of-the-world prediction in 1994. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

If you’re trying to sell something, consider putting a tombstone in your ad. It might seem macabre, but a new study suggests that thinking about death makes people eager to buy.

Tom Jacobs at Pacific Standard report that the psychologist Enny Das and her co-authors showed participants several fake ads, some death-themed and some not. In a particularly grim experiment, they offered each subject the opportunity to see his or her own name and birth date on a gravestone, as part of an ad for a newspaper (tagline: “How long do you want to wait? Take a trial subscription to X now for only 9.95 per month”). The subjects were actually more positively disposed to this ad than to one that featured a boy innocuously waiting by a mailbox; they also said the tombstone ad would make them more likely to subscribe.

Read more on The New York Times

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