People who were instructed to think about their own mortality were more receptive to the idea of having cosmetic surgery than those who weren’t (3.57 versus 2.96 on a seven-point scale), suggesting that fear of death is a motivator behind patients’ decisions to have tummy tucks, says Kim-Pong Tam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. When people experience unconscious death terror, they tend to engage in behaviors that maintain their sense of symbolic immortality, even though cosmetic surgery itself can threaten people’s health or even their lives, he writes.
SOURCE: Existential motive underlying cosmetic surgery: A terror management analysis