Cognitive bias in anticipating mortality risk affects the subjective quality of life and consumption-related lifestyle

ABSTRACT

How does attitude to death influence consumption level and profiles and conversely? The database is a representative follow-up of Korean respondents from 2006 to 2016. Satisfaction with quality of life is combined with endogenous consumption level, consumption patterns, deviation from expected mortality—the propensity for dying—, and wealth. Exogenous variables include sex, age, education, children, place of residence, and employment. Satisfaction decreases with age; women are less satisfied and anticipate higher mortality than men. Older people anticipate an age-specific mortality rate that increases only linearly with age, while mortality actually increases exponentially. This cognitive bias, due to the fact that people perceive linear progressions but find it difficult to project themselves over time, leads them to overestimate their satisfaction in terms of quality of life, thus creating a protective effect on well-being, to the detriment of accurate economic visibility of the life cycle.

KEYWORDS:

• Attitude to death
• mortality
• anticipated survival
• survival analysis
• consumption profiles
• satisfaction with quality of life

Authors’ contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by all authors. The first draft of the manuscript was written by all authors and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Consent to participate

The data are provided by the national Korea Employment Information Service (Ministry of Labor). The answers are voluntary, not mandatory (2006 KLoSA user’s guide http://survey.keis.or.kr/eng/index.jsp).

Consent for publication

Yes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Link to the repository: https://survey.keis.or.kr/eng/klosa/klosa01.jsp

Ethics approval

The paper is respectful of all ethical issues.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.