| dc.description.abstract | Emotion and thoughts affect our behavior and decision making. In the past, researchers found that people tend to change their current situation to ameliorate a negative emotional state. Thus, they resort to a more cautious and rational way to deal with receptive information. Lerner’’s study further found that objects eliciting feelings of disgust make people change their original behavior patterns. They may decide to disown the dreaded object, such as through underselling in business. Similarly, studies have asked about what kind of impact thoughts of death would have on people’s decision making? This study focuses on the influence of anxiety and fear induced by thoughts of death on one’s mental affects; further, on one’s behavior and decision making. According to Greenberg, in avoidance of anxiety, people conform their behavior to that required by the world view which is deemed acceptable in society, when facing issues of death and dying.
This study applies mortality salience adopted from Terror Management Theory, to probe into its influence on decision making about whether or not to engage in lying. Moreover, the study explores the physiological mechanisms behind skin conductivity and heart rate. Compared to the existing literature, result of the Experiment 1 in this study indicating the number of lying behaviors has become less. However, the proportion of lying behavior, after each scenario, is not significant. Experiment 2, though, shows that behavior changes when adding thoughts of death into the scenarios. The physiological response induced by lying behavior after thoughts of death is greater than it was before such thoughts.
Through simulating competitive scenarios, experiment 3 explores behaviors under a competitive situation. The result shows indicate that behaviors change across the scenarios, and the physiological response induced by telling a lie, changes with scenarios too. For instance, those who were grouped into cognizing death thoughts gave rise to a greater physiological response after telling a lie.
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