Terror Management Theory in the Consumer Domain: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on Mortality Salience Driven Consumer Responses

A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted to examine terror management theory (TMT) in the consumer behavior domain. TMT postulates that existential anxiety (i.e., mortality salience) drives people to invest in anxiety buffers, affecting many different behaviors, including consumer responses. Due to the broad nature of these responses, we distinguished three categories: “I want more” (e.g., more money, brands, and products), “protect my culture” (e.g., preferring domestic and old products to foreign and new ones), and “pro-social” responses (e.g., donating or sharing money). One hundred and twelve experiments were included in the systematic review, which revealed a large variety in the studied dependent variables, randomly studied moderating variables, and inconsistent outcomes. Seventy studies (with 125 effect sizes) were included in the meta-analysis, which yielded a small but positive overall effect size (g = 0.21) of mortality salience on consumer responses, with similar results across the three categories (g between 0.13 and 0.30). While research in the TMT consumer domain is very dispersed, the analyses provide some support for the mortality salience hypothesis. We recommend researchers to further explore why certain consumer responses are evoked by mortality salience and make use of preregistered and high-powered experiments.