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Grateful to co-authors David Markowitz, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, Thomas Mazzuchi, and @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social!

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Taken together, obituaries reflect what families choose to highlight in remembrance and, in the aggregate, offer a window into what society values as a life well lived. Empirical article here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

pnas.org

PNAS

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Cultural scripts around gender and age were also reflected in these memorializations. Obituaries for men more often referenced achievement and power, while those for women emphasized benevolence and enjoyment of life; older and younger adults were remembered using different value language as well.

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Across time, obituaries emphasized tradition and benevolence far more than achievement or power. But around major disruptions like 9/11 and COVID-19, families tended to foreground different values when remembering loved ones, reflecting subtle shifts in what it means to have lived well.

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What 38 million obituaries reveal about how Americans define a ‘life well lived’

Our new @theconversation.com piece distills findings from our recent @pnas.org paper analyzing 38m U.S. obituaries (1998-2024). We examine which values families highlight when remembering loved ones and how those values shift over time and major events. theconversation.com/what-38-mill...

theconversation.com

Obituaries reveal shifting cultural values across time and place. Here’s a glimpse into how the moral vocabulary has evolved over several decades.

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Practically, if people expect their own virtue to be judged more favorably, this could (potentially) make them more willing to act publicly, which may support norm setting. Still, the consistent discounting of public relative to private virtue suggests those acts may carry a credibility cost.

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Yet these asymmetries vanish when judgments are made side by side. Moreover, across studies, public virtue was judged as less morally good than private virtue (i.e., virtue discounting), a difference most consistently accounted for by lower attributions of principled motivation for public actions.

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Across 4 preregistered studies (N=2,511), we find self-serving asymmetries. On average, people expect their own public acts of virtue to appear more principled, less reputation driven, and more trustworthy than people tend to rate identical public actions performed by others.

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bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Public displays of virtue like donating or speaking up can set norms, but they’re often met with skepticism (“virtue discounting”). Our new paper asks: do people expect their own public virtue to be judged differently than others’ similar actions? bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

<em>British Journal of Social Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library

Public acts of virtue can promote prosocial norms yet are often met with moral scepticism – a phenomenon known as virtue discounting. What psychological processes might underlie people's propensity t....

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Exactly! Obituaries are usually written positively rather than neutrally. But that’s the point. They reveal what a society values as living well, and how those values differ depending on who is being remembered, and how they shift across time and in response to collectively shared events.

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The (stellar) team behind this work: David Markowitz, Thomas Mazzuchi, @stysyropoulos.bsky.social, me, and @lianeleeyoung.bsky.social

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Taken together, obituaries show how societies remember the dead by encoding values, responding to cultural upheavals, and reinforcing scripts of age and gender. They are cultural time capsules that reveal what we believe makes a life well lived.

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Reflecting cultural scripts: Men’s legacies were more dynamic across the lifespan, often tied to achievement & power. Women’s were steadier, more often tied to benevolence & hedonism. Older people were remembered more for tradition & conformity than younger people.

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Legacies shifted with major events: • Security declined after 9/11 • Achievement fell after the 2008 crash • Benevolence collapsed during COVID and has not recovered four years later

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The most common values across obituaries were tradition and benevolence. Values like power and stimulation appeared less often.

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