Perceived extrinsic mortality risk and reported effort in looking after health: Testing a behavioural ecological prediction
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evolutionary Studies, Psychiatry and Psychology, Public Health
- Keywords
- Extrinsic mortality, health behaviour, behavioural ecology, socioeconomic, model, perceptions
- Copyright
- © 2013 Pepper et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Cite this article
- 2013. Perceived extrinsic mortality risk and reported effort in looking after health: Testing a behavioural ecological prediction. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e29v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.29v2
Abstract
Socioeconomic gradients in health behaviour are pervasive and well documented. Yet, there is little consensus on their causes. Behavioural ecological theory predicts that, if people of lower socioeconomic position (SEP) perceive greater personal extrinsic mortality risk than those of higher SEP, they should disinvest in their future health. We surveyed North American adults for reported effort in looking after health, perceived extrinsic and intrinsic mortality risks, and measures of SEP. We examined the relationships between these variables and found that lower subjective SEP predicted lower reported health effort. Lower subjective SEP was also associated with higher perceived extrinsic mortality risk, which in turn predicted lower reported health effort. The effect of subjective SEP on reported health effort was completely mediated by perceived extrinsic mortality risk. Our findings indicate that perceived extrinsic mortality risk may be a key factor underlying SEP gradients in motivation to invest in future health.