Openness to experience predicts intrinsic value shifts after deliberating one’s own death

ABSTRACT

Individual differences that might moderate processes of value shifting during and after deliberating one’s own death remain largely unexplored. Two studies measured participants’ openness and relative intrinsic-to-extrinsic value orientation (RIEVO) before randomly assigning them to conditions in which they wrote about their own death or dental pain for 6 days, after which RIEVO was assessed again up to 12 days later. When participants confronted thoughts about their own death over a sustained period, high openness to experience helped them shift toward intrinsic values. Implications for understanding openness’ role in value reorientation from existential deliberation processes are discussed.

Notes

¹The experimental condition variable was not recorded into the final data set for participants who dropped out. Thus it was not possible to maintain these participants through modeling procedures that can make use of observations with missing data.

²We verified that this sample’s distribution of scores on openness (n = 30, M = 6.36, SD = 1.02) was comparable to that of American undergraduate (n = 360, M = 6.65, SD = 1.10) and community (n = 11,125, M = 6.55, SD = 1.09) norms (Saucier, 1994).

³Because traditional null hypothesis statistical testing cannot provide information about support for a null hypothesis, we computed the Bayes factor for favoring the null hypothesis of no simple slope of openness in the dental pain condition. Following the recommendations of Rouder, Speckman, Sun, Morey, and Iverson (2009) we used the Jeffrey-Zellner-Siow (JZS) prior for an “objective” assumption about the range of effect size. This analysis revealed a JZS Bayes factor of 29.70 in favor of the null (i.e., the null is more likely than the alternative by about 30:1).

⁴As in Study 1, the present sample’s distribution of scores on the Mini Markers measure (M = 6.68, SD = 0.98) was quite similar to American undergraduate norms (M = 6.55, SD = 1.09; Saucier, 1994).

⁵We computed the likelihood of the null hypothesis in the dental pain condition, following the procedures outlined in endnote 3. This analysis provided a JZS Bayes factor in favor of the null of 9.29 (i.e., the null of no effect is more likely than the alternative by about 9:1).