The desire for legacy is a mental glitch but we can use it for good

CONSIDER two scenarios. In the first, you have a life filled with love and meaning and enough money to get by comfortably. However, after you die, something terrible is revealed about you – which may not even be true – and people come to despise you. In the second, you have a life of relative hardship and obscurity, but after you die, it is revealed that you were an incredibly talented artist and your reputation is assured forever. Which option would you choose?

If you picked the second, you aren’t alone, as Brett Waggoner at the University of Otago, New Zealand, discovered when he carried out this thought experiment. It may seem like a counterintuitive choice, but it reveals our deep concern for legacy. Across time and cultures, people seem to have acted with a desire to etch their names into the history books, from the pharaoh Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Giza to acts of scientific discovery, works of art, sporting achievements and public philanthropy. Nevertheless, such behaviour is something of a paradox. Why devote so much time and energy to being warmly recalled when you won’t be around to see the benefits?

Researchers trying to answer this question have come up with some surprising answers. Some suggest it gives individuals an evolutionary advantage. Others see it as a sort of glitch in the way we think – a mistake based on various cognitive biases. Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that our desire to be positively remembered is far more than just self-aggrandisement. Nurtured in the correct way, it could be leveraged to tackle long-term, global issues, including climate change, biodiversity loss and inequality.

Humans, along with every other species on Earth, can leave a genetic legacy. If we successfully reproduce, our biological descendants continue our evolutionary journey. They are the physical manifestation of a process that has been unfolding on our planet for more than 3.5 billion years, since the first living organisms emerged. But while we share this evolutionary drive for genetic legacy, humans seem peculiarly concerned about a more symbolic form of legacy – that is, how our peers and strangers will remember us after we die.

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Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that we are more deeply aware of our own mortality than any other animal is. We know that one day we will die. That being the case, say some evolutionary psychologists, there is a good reason to think about legacy. Your posthumous reputation could affect the reproductive success of your direct relatives. If so, then legacy-seeking behaviours might be an adaptation to give our biological kin favourable conditions for finding a mate and reproducing.

This idea is bolstered by yet-to-be-published research by Waggoner and Jesse Bering, also at the University of Otago. They found that people’s hypothetical dating choices were negatively influenced by familial transgressions, such as the knowledge that serious crimes have been committed by a close biological relative of the prospective date, even one not involved in their upbringing. This, they argue, suggests we operate with a type of “folk heritability”, where people carry not only the genetic inheritance of their relatives, but also the social burden of their ill deeds. Other research revealing that people are more motivated to avoid a negative legacy than to pursue a positive one lends more weight to the idea.

Terror management theory

This all sounds very reasonable, but it fails to consider another aspect of mortality awareness: it can make us anxious or even terrified. According to what psychologists call terror management theory, the knowledge that we will die, combined with our survival instinct, creates an inherent tension, and we have developed certain belief systems to cope with this. Religion and the assertion that the soul transcends death are, perhaps, the most obvious. If you believe in the afterlife, a desire for a positive legacy makes some sense because, in a way, your soul will be around to see how your legacy unfolds.

But in many countries, a significant number of people don’t believe there is any existence after death. Here, the puzzle of legacy deepens. What motivates these so-called extinctivists to leave a legacy when they think they won’t be there to enjoy it? Terror management theory might say that, to mitigate their death anxiety, extinctivists cultivate their legacy to create a sort of symbolic immortality. Our identities are intertwined with the narratives we tell about ourselves, and what happens at the end of our life is a major feature in our story. As we get older, we tend to become increasingly concerned with having meaningful interactions with younger generations and passing down values and beliefs that have served us well. We may believe that when we die, the lights go out, but the knowledge of our actions and values rippling through the future gives us at least some psychological respite from the expiration date placed on us. In this view, legacy offers all of us, no matter what our beliefs, a way to make life more meaningful by transcending death.

But there could be a simpler explanation for why extinctivists are motivated to build a legacy: perhaps, deep down, we all entertain some sort of notion of life after death. After all, nobody can consciously experience the absence of consciousness, making it effectively impossible to imagine your own death without being a conscious spectator. Indeed, research by Bering and his colleagues suggests that belief in continued existence of the mind following death is a default state for all of us. In one study, for example, children watched a puppet show where an alligator ate an anthropomorphised mouse. Older children were unlikely to ascribe any psychological functions to the dead mouse. However, the youngest children, who were 3 or 4 years old, took a different view. While they understood that the dead mouse no longer had biological needs, they stated that it still had emotions, contradicting the notion that afterlife belief is something we learn. The findings, which have been replicated across both secular and religious schools, suggest that belief in the continuity of consciousness after death is an intuitive position, with religious belief systems taking advantage of this quirk in our thinking. “I think a lot of [legacy motivation] has to do with these cognitive [processes],” says Bering.

Building a posthumous reputation

And this isn’t the only example that could motivate a desire for legacy. An extremely large body of literature points to the evolutionary benefits that our species gets from living in groups. We have evolved to seek close connections with our peers and admiration from them because our physiological and emotional well-being depends on it. As a result, when something socially gratifying happens, it activates the reward circuits in our brains. For example, you get a buzz when you give money to a charity, even though you are completely disconnected from the material benefits that the donation will provide. Since legacy, as it is most often conceptualised, refers to a person’s posthumous reputation, the drive to leave one could be an artefact of this evolved psychology. It may not be logical to seek to be admired when you are dead, but the act of building a legacy could make you feel good while you are alive.

What all this suggests is that the human desire to be positively remembered beyond the grave is complicated. “There is a juxtaposition between our higher-order cognitive faculties and not being able to properly think about our own deaths, combined with our basic evolved psychology to be concerned about our social status, how other people regard us, feeling valued and having a good reputation,” says Bering. “This spills over into our thinking about the afterlife that propagates the legacy drive.”

Our motivation on this front varies enormously. Among people who feel this drive strongly, though, it can have a big impact on their behaviour. On the surface, seeking a legacy seems quite egotistical – it is about projecting yourself into the future. Nevertheless, some researchers are exploring the idea that the legacy drive could be harnessed for the greater good to help tackle issues such as climate change, the biodiversity crisis and wealth inequality.

“We are looking at how the legacy motive can help attenuate intergenerational discounting or promote beneficence on behalf of future generations,” says Kimberly Wade-Benzoni at Duke University in North Carolina. Intergenerational discounting is a psychological term for how we weigh the benefits of our actions to future generations relative to those to the current generation, favouring the latter. In other words, Wade-Benzoni believes the desire for legacy can help us overcome some psychological biases that undermine our ability to address long-term problems. People generally find it hard to defer rewards in the here and now to the future. The further away in time a problem is, the fewer resources we are willing to devote to solving it. We also struggle to give resources to others, particularly if they aren’t embedded in our social network. However, more than a decade of research has shown that motivations for a positive legacy can enable people to overcome these barriers, leading them to make sacrifices in the present for the benefit of future generations.

Long-term thinking

The context in which we think about death is important when we make intergenerational decisions, says Wade-Benzoni. Being shown images of a car accident, or walking past a cemetery, tends to elicit a death anxiety response. When people become aware of their mortality in this way, it increases their in-group identity – including nationalism and religious affiliation – encouraging them to distance themselves from outside beliefs and cultures. As a result, their legacies become primarily concerned with helping those who belong to their group – their families, for example. But when we reflect on our death in a more contemplative way, this generates a different reaction. Wade-Benzoni and her colleagues asked people to write about their own legacy before doing a task in which they chose to allocate resources to others. Doing this made them more generous with what they were willing to leave to people. It also widened the scope of who they were willing to leave their resources to. “It increases their circle of moral concern, and their intergenerational wealth allocations are shifted from relational to collective,” she says. In other words, they become more mindful of helping the broader community.

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Nevertheless, the legacy-building actions of any single individual can’t solve problems that require social collaboration at large scales. “On top of the intergenerational hurdle, there is also a social dilemma,” says Wade-Benzoni. “It’s not just the trade-off between you and the future other, you also need to get people in your own generation cooperating in order to get the sacrifice to make a difference.”

It seems that thinking about legacy can help us here too. Mark Hurlstone at Lancaster University, UK, and his colleagues found that when the legacy motive was activated by asking a group of participants to read a paragraph about leaving a positive legacy, their investments into a public programme of tree planting increased. Similarly, Lisa Zaval at Columbia University in New York and her colleagues found that priming people to think about their legacy increased their concern for the environment and climate change and led to them donating more money to an environmental charity.

Wade-Benzoni thinks that the symbolic aspect of legacy is what can make it a collective endeavour. It isn’t necessarily the case that everyone is concerned with their own ego being attached to their legacy: just being part of something larger than yourself can be enough. “Some people want to be anonymous,” she says. “They just want to know that, somehow, their existence and life had some kind of meaning and impact. That it wasn’t all for nothing.”

Conor Feehly is a freelance science writer based in Auckland, New Zealand