Individual human beings have long strived to create and curate an enduring post-mortem reputation—their “legacy” (Braudy, 1986). They do this in a variety of ways, such as via sports achievement, creative works, having children, leaving a financial endowment, philanthropy, passing down family heirlooms, or extreme attention-grabbing acts (Hunter, 2008). In lay terms, legacy can be defined as “something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past” or “a gift by will esp. of money or other personal property” (Merriam-Webster, 2014). Some researchers, working in the fields of positive psychology or narratology, have also emphasized the process of legacy, as in “the process of passing oneself through generations, creating continuity from the past through the present to the future” (Hunter, 2008, p. 314).
What is largely missing from these examples is any explicit reference to the fact that legacy centers, rather curiously, on the reputation of the self after death. It is primarily this aspect of legacy (how others will regard the self once that self ceases to exist, and why this is of particular concern to the living) that we examine in the present article. Absent a belief in the continued capacity to know how one is being regarded despite being dead, it is unclear why we should care how others will view us, or our life's work, after our consciousness expires. And yet, the desire and motivation to leave a legacy, even among those who do not believe in an afterlife, is ostensibly a powerful influence on our lives.
Although previous scholars have investigated concepts related to legacy, such as terror management theory (Becker, 1973; Solomon et al., 1991) and generativity (Erikson, 1950, 1968; McAdams et al., 1998), it is a surprisingly understudied research topic (for exceptions, see Aarssen & Altman, 2006; Sligte et al., 2013; Fox et al., 2010; Hunter & Rowles, 2005; Wade-Benzoni & Tost, 2009; Wade-Benzoni et al., 2010). Furthermore, what little work has been done in this area has tended to neglect the most puzzling question of all, which is why people seem so predisposed to ensure their own positive reputations when, at least from a materialistic perspective, they will not be able to experience it. In what follows, therefore, we consider proximate causes of the legacy drive (e.g., pursuing “symbolic immortality” to assuage death anxiety, e.g., Greenberg et al., 1986, creating a satisfying ending to one's “life story”, e.g., McAdams, 1993, etc.), ultimate causes (e.g., the direct or indirect reproductive effects that post-mortem reputations might confer to surviving biological relatives, whether these effects are positive or negative), and possible cognitive factors mediating between these levels of causation, such as a so-called default afterlife stance that – even among afterlife nonbelievers – promotes the representation of the future dead self as a conscious, experiential agent (Bering, 2006).
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